ADRIENNE LAFRANCE OCT
14, 2015 theatlantic.com
The web, as it appears at any one
moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the
word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing
patchwork of perpetual nowness.
You can't count on the web, okay? It’s
unstable. You have to know this.
Digital information itself has all
kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive
quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really
goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive.
“It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still
kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone,
there is just zero recourse.”
There are exceptions. The Internet Archive’s
Wayback Machine has a trove of cached web pages going back to 1996. Scott and
his colleagues are saving tens of petabytes of data, chasing an ideal that
doubles as their motto: Universal Access to All Knowledge. The trove they’ve
built is extraordinary, but it’s far from comprehensive. Today’s web is more
dynamic than ever and therefore more at-risk than it sometimes seems.
It is not just access to knowledge,
but the knowledge itself that’s at stake. Thousands of years ago, the Library
of Alexandria was, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote, “the brain and heart
of the ancient world.” For seven centuries, it housed hundreds of thousands of
scrolls; great works of philosophy, literature, technology, math, and medicine.
It took as many centuries for most of its collections to be destroyed.
The promise of the web is that
Alexandria’s library might be resurrected for the modern world. But today’s
great library is being destroyed even as it is being built. Until you lose
something big on the Internet, something truly valuable, this paradox can be
difficult to understand.
*
* *
Before the Internet, if you wanted
to look up an old newspaper article, you usually had to find it in an archive.
Which was how, one day in 1985, Kevin Vaughan found himself hunched over a
microfilm reader, scanning Denver Post headlines from the
winter of 1961. Vaughan, then a journalism student at Metropolitan State
College, wanted to read an account of Skid Row on Christmas by one of his
favorite professors.
“I was spinning my way through
December,” Vaughan said, “and I stopped and I saw this headline that said 20
children had been killed in bus-train collision. I can remember just staring at
the screen and thinking, ‘I’ve lived almost all my life in Colorado: How have I
never heard of this?’”
After college, Vaughan became a
reporter himself. When he covered a particularly gruesome train-crossing
accident for the Fort Collins Coloradoan, his mind returned to the
collision of 1961.
By this time it was 1992. One of the
web’s first browsers, Netscape Navigator, was still two years away from being
introduced. The New York Times wouldn’t launch its website for
four more years. Google wouldn’t be founded for another six. So Vaughan did
what investigative reporters have done for years. He asked a police officer he
knew if there was any way to find a man who didn’t want to be found—the driver
of the school bus from all those years ago. “He had some computer system right
in the front seat of the squad car,” Vaughan said. “He looked up the bus driver
in the system and he jotted down his date of birth and his address and handed
it to me. I carried around that scrap of paper for years.”
Fifteen years, to be exact. Then, in
2006, as a reporter with The Rocky Mountain News, Vaughan’s editors
agreed to let him explore what had happened to the families affected by the
1961 tragedy in a series they would call “The Crossing.”
The collision had new resonance for
a community still aching from the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, a
shooting in which 12 students and 1 teacher were murdered. “‘The Crossing’ grew
out of Columbine,” said John Temple, who was the editor and publisher of the Rocky at
the time. “We realized that, as a newspaper, we would not be able to tell the
community what the lifetime ramifications—on all the people who were in that
school and were connected to that school—would be. Because it needed time to
unfold. But this event gave us the ability to show how a single moment in time
affects people for a lifetime."
Vaughan spent the better part of a
year reporting the story. And in that time, a team of web designers,
photographers, videographers, and engineers worked with him to build a web
experience around the series—the first time the Rocky had
built something digital of this scope. “From a production perspective, it was a
logistical monster,” said Mike Noe, the interactive editor for the series.
It was worth the effort. Vaughan’s
story about the 1961 crash, a 34-part series that spanned more than a month in
early 2007, was a sensation. “I don’t want to overstate it,” Vaughan said. “But
I feel like it was transformative for the people who went through that tragedy.
I’ve had people tell me, for instance, that the series cut loose all this
emotion that they had bottled up inside, most of them for their entire lives.”
Readers wrote in to say they’d sit at their computers at midnight, refreshing
their browsers until the next installment appeared. “It had tremendous impact,”
Temple said, recalling a community meeting that drew 800 people in response to
the series. “It was a big deal.”
“We did a couple of those public
forums,” Vaughan said. “In one of them, somebody asked John Temple how long the
series was going to be on the Internet, and John said, ‘Forever.’”
In 2008, Vaughan was named a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize in feature writing for the series. The next year, the Rocky folded.
And in the months that followed, the website slowly broke apart. One day,
without warning, “The Crossing” evaporated from the Internet.
*
* *
What happened to the people of
Greeley, Colorado, on December 14, 1961, was twice lost to time. To tell the
story of “The Crossing” in the first place, Vaughan excavated a meaningful
event—only to have the story he told require its own excavation. Before “The
Crossing” was lost, before Vaughan could even tell it, he had to outline the
filigree of events that traced back to a terrible and distant winter morning.
The accident had been largely forgotten.
“It seems weird to think about
something that killed 20 people having a very short period of time in the
public consciousness,” Vaughan said. There were newspaper accounts of the crash
from 1961, but they raised as many questions as they answered. There were
allusions to public documents Vaughan would need to review—records that, for
all he knew, could have been destroyed decades ago. In some cases, he got
lucky. Like the time he was searching for a transcript from the trial of the
bus driver, a 23-year-old man with a newborn daughter at the time of the crash.
Vaughan wanted to read the man’s statement, which was referenced in old
newspaper clippings as having been long and dramatic, but never reprinted in
full. A court clerk from the small county where the accident had happened
agreed to accompany Vaughan outside town to an abandoned missile silo that had
been converted into an archive of public records.
In 1994, there were fewer than 3,000
websites online. By 2014, there were more than 1 billion.
“I still think about it. It’s almost
dreamlike, surreal in my mind,” Vaughan said. “You go in this door on the side
of a hill and all of the sudden we arrive at this whole underground complex,
which was built to withstand nuclear war.” The room was the size of a
basketball gym, and flooded with row after row of boxes, stacked up 20 feet or
higher. It was, for the most part, a mess. There was no clear organizational
system. So it was by chance that Vaughan caught a glimpse of a box, on a tall
shelf far out of reach, with the last name of the prosecutor from the trial
scratched onto the side. The clerk climbed a ladder to retrieve the box.
“First of all, the room looked like
this scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Vaughan said. “I swear to
God, I lifted the lid off this box and I felt like a shaft of light came down
from heaven. I could see these big manila envelopes with the bus driver’s name
on them... Several dozen black-and-white photos taken over the course of the
investigation that I had never seen before, a transcript of the court hearing
held the day of the accident, all the letters the prosecutors got from across
the country. It was just amazing.”
Later, after Vaughan had a chance to
sift through the materials and make copies for the series, the clerk phoned the
district attorney’s office to ask what should be done with the box. “They told
her throw it away,” Vaughan said. “She hung up and she looked at me and said,
‘We are not throwing this away.’”
Many of the never-before-published
documents and photographs Vaughan unearthed became key components of the web
series, appearing only online and not in printed versions of the series. These
weren’t just extras, but key chapters of the story, told digitally. And when
the website disintegrated after the Rocky’s closure, these stories
weren’t relegated to an old box on an unreachable shelf; they were gone.
“The day-in, day-out maintenance [of
the site] just stopped happening, and so pretty quickly, some stuff didn’t
work,” Vaughan said.
Vaughan began to think about how he
might save the series. Was it even possible? “I wanted it up for a lot of
reasons, but mostly I kept hearing in my head John saying, ‘It’ll be up
forever.’”
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