Erasing Women
Several sites report on the fact that the Department of Labor has quietly removed at least 25 factsheets and reports from its
Women's Bureau website since 1999. The National Council for Research on Women today issued a report titled "MISSING: Information About Women's Lives" while Salon has posted a lengthy
article on the topic [req. ad view to access].
Websites, of course, are revised and updated all the time. But the pattern of change here seems politically motivated. And to some extent,
everything is politically motivated: Decisions about what research to fund, who to appoint to committees, etc. What is interesting here is the ways in which the Web, as a public space, provides an opportunity to track revisions to ongoing programs.
As someone said in the
pointer to this issue, it would be useful to have a watchdog group that archived changes in government website data--not really all that technically complex (although the storage issues are something to consider).
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Posted by johndan at April 28, 2004 01:50 PM
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