Guest Post: Plus ça change, plus c’est … le same Web, only better?

MicrobiologyBytes is delighted to welcome our first guest blogger:

Ed Rybicki, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

My, how things do change… I found myself reflecting, while I was looking over the detritus on our Web server of some 13 years of posting pages on the Web. “Orphan” pages, unconnected to anything current; pages with a majority of dead links, because they are so old; pages last updated in 2000; pages left behind by the inexorable onward flow of the river that is the www; pages carried forward through several incarnations of the server… And yet, not to be deleted by the careless press of a key, because there is a sort of history there that is very hard to chronicle. A history of how the Kikwit Ebola outbreak unfolded, for example, post by email post. An account of how an Honours student inadvertently became the Web’s only Ebola expert, for a brief while in 1995… ah, what passing pleasures, now mainly gone.

Consider this: a connected set of Web pages is a network, existing as a linked series of snapshots that reflect the current update. Every single change alters the network - yet where is this recorded? If you are lucky and have a hard drive the size of the Empire State Building, or if you are disciplined enough to actually back things up as successive versions, then perhaps you have an accurate historical record of how things changed - but no-one else will. And given the fact that most normal people are not disciplined enough to do the necessary, you probably don’t either…

So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of web-published material? We are confronted with a situation not dissimilar to the one which confronts would-be chroniclers of any ordinary human life: the only material available for research is the latest version (if still extant), and a mess of isolated snapshots and pages, if we are lucky.

I took a look back over my teaching material the other day, which I started formulating back in mid-1994, round about the time the Web came into existence for us non-professionals. I don’t have a single file dating back to that time, not one: the only thing left is a grandfathered filename (virtut1.html) that it would be too complicated to change. The earliest I can get back to - on a dusty CD-ROM backup unearthed from a bottom drawer, from a PC I gave away at least three upgrades ago - is 1998, and then only for some of the files I actually updated at the time. My first web pages are thus irretrievably gone, vanished into entropy - unless they are fossilised on some long-lived legal or illegal mirror server somewhere, like some of my outdated pages I found quite by accident on a computer in Cambridge, and only got removed by threat of copyright infringement action.

So why bother at all? Of what interest is the history of some half-baked, amateurish attempts at porting teaching material from overhead projection transparencies to the web?

Weelll… it’s not really for me to say, is it? I can’t predict who might be interested in the historiography of virology pedagogics - but it’s just a little sad to think that so much work has vanished into free electrons, wandering the universe until the inevitable heat death stills them all. I mean, look at Alan Cann: his Virology textbook is now in a fourth edition, and all three are available to anyone who wishes to compare them. I can’t even find Versions 1 - n-1 of my material, so all you’re left with is Version n, of 2007 (© Ed Rybicki). It’s paradoxical that in this electronic age, it’s still the traditional medium of print that still has the best potential for survival. I may even still have some of my original hand-printed overheads from 1981, if they survived the last office-cleaning purge!

But be that as it may…my continuous rolling upgrade of the Web pages has reached a 2006 version in most cases, and 2007 in a few - with a lot of visual material still stuck in a dark age. There is actually not that much incentive to do too much about that, frankly, given the wealth of graphics now out there in Webspace: Russell Kightley, for example, has a wealth of thoroughly professional-looking pictures of viruses, cells, and virus life cycles; I use movies of the HIV life cycle filched from Boehringer-Ingelheim’s site (as well as from Alan Cann); there are now some truly stunning cryo-EM 3D image reconstructions of virus particles available…and nearly everything is copyrighted, so putting it up on my site could be courting prosecution. Which is why linking to things via the web is the way to go…if I only had time! Aaaaarrrgghhh!!

Which is why I am impressed by this site: unlike some of us early adopters who are now hopelessly behind, he has aggressively taken on the new medium and is making it work. More power to him - this is one of the best sites I know of for current microbiology education, let alone education about viruses, and long may it live. With no orphan pages; no lost links… and a daily backup, so that a complete history is available to some future webnaut, somewhere out there. Rock on.

If you would like to be a guest blogger on MicrobiologyBytes, click the Guests tab above.

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