ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Author Archive

The First GET LAMP Interview Experiment —

During the shooting of the GET LAMP documentary, I generated what appears to be my stylistic mass of footage – over 120 hours of people talking about text adventures, early home computer software industry, inter-company politics, and a range of things about writing interactively. It was a huge range of subjects and of course only […]

The Hardcore Computist Collection —

If it’s not obvious already, one of the major parts of my work with the Internet Archive involves going after those very subjects, items and collections that would fit perfectly within its hallowed walls but which nobody with the items, or archive.org, has made the connection. I’m the connection. And I’m connecting. A lot of […]

Q&A: The Long Term Prospects —

As someone who is a computer historian and is into the whole data archival and preservation area, I thought you might be able to answer this question. We have some data, including precious family audio recordings from years ago, which we are currently keeping on several hard drives. If all copies were lost, this data […]

All Hands on the Two Hands Project —

A while ago, I mentioned that I had taken over editing of the Two Hands Project, a documentary about Hackerspaces that had been filmed in September of 2009. This was met with excitement from all sides, both the original filmmakers and from myself, because editing is lots of fun. I dumped all the tapes from […]

A Reader Service —

Life working as an archivist for The Internet Archive has been going fantabulous, thanks for asking.  I start to feel like one of those individuals tweeting or writing about “being in an amazing environment working with great people on world-changing projects”, except in fact I am not working in some primary-color-and-convenient-free-coffee cube farm that is […]

An Audio Message to Salon.Com —

Somehow, a post just seemed like it would be drowned in a sea of other posts and the usual sad debates about the mass deletion of information. So, I recorded an mp3. A Message to Salon.Com (3 minutes) If you’d like to help, please visit the Tabletalk.Salon.Com project page on the Archive Team website.

Archive Team! With Friends Like These… —

Archive Team, that ruthless band of site-saving scalliwags, has been working like crazy on a new downloading project, and we really, really need your help. Friendster, one of the first social sites that took off in a big way until being overtaken by other services, has been bought out by a company that intends to […]

FaceFacts —

Hello Jason, I’ve recently learned of your amazing archiving efforts and I wanted to thank you for all that you have done for the internet community. You’ve really got me thinking more than I had before about the fragile nature of personal data and indeed so much of the personal expression ordinary people output every […]

The Case for Manuals —

It has been quite a great time at my new position within archive.org, working as I am from a remote location. Forget hitting the ground running – I’m trying to make the ground have no idea what hit it. I already just mentioned the MUD archiving work I’m calling out for, but there’s lots more […]

Jason at Internet Archive Party, June 5 —

OK, do NOT wear the same dress as me – this is my big coming out party, after all. Well, more specifically, on June 5th, 2011, the Internet Archive ( my new employers) are having a reception and ceremony and open house around their newest building, the Internet Archive Physical Archive in Richmond, CA. Here […]