I'm really struggling with how to balance archiving and preserving the history and history in the making with ASLWrite, especially so its accessible, and protecting the IP and personal rights of those who made the content.
Its so difficult to find information on early si5 and probably the biggest direct source is the way back machine - a service that specifically makes other people's material available for free. It tracks the history of the internet and we recognize it as crucial.
But the founder also took down his websites and retired his stuff from the web for choices of his own.
I've been writing a lot of drafts that sit in the back ground because figuring out how to cite fully, how to capture fully, how to set it up so that is preserved down the line (my laptop where a lot of it is stored is going to end up crunched in a landfill some day) while still not hijacking other people's creations, work, images, videos, and direction of their own materials is confusing.
What would it be like had someone captured and posted all of the work that Adrean Clark put in to responding to people's posts and making updated suggestions that everyone worked off of? How much was lost and now has to be recreated? And still, as a creator in general, much less a Deaf creator, who often are underfunded and under supported in their work, who has that right?
And yes, Adrean is around and if you were able you could go ask, but she is busy. The level of cognitive and time burden to check each of these posts and comments going back years is unrealistic.
And people have reached out to todd, and Bee, and JE etc. I don't think they're still on fb, so how do you find them? And what about when people pass away because after ten years, where it hasn't happened yet, it will. Will they have estates to ask? Will they care?
Emily Dickenson put her poetry in the bottom of a drawer because it was for her and who shared it, and that was respected until it was found and shared after she was dead. Same with Gentleman jack, who went to lengths to encode it.
But these are people who hid their work away from the world in a time where it was easy to do.
If people have put it out freely in a platform whose work is designed to share at the speed of light...wouldn't they want their contributions to live on? Except these platforms are for personal interaction. Who has a right to spread them elsewhere? Except if its not chronicled, it will disappear, and without a mass of materials so will eventually ASLWrite.
There are so many people whose work is up for posterity, but it really for posterity if the service its on eats it?
I genuinely don't know, so my drafts folder is full and what I share is fragmented and ephemeral as long as it relies on links back to a service that already decimated at least a third of critical materials rather than saving and posting the materials directly themselves.