This point is true of preservation in general. You can preserve the heavy machinery equipment from a factory, but that won’t tell you much about the lived experience of working there. If you want to know about that, doing an oral history project with the factory workers would likely give you better material to preserve. You can preserve letters and artifacts left at the Vietnam War Memorial. However, photos and videos of people interacting with the memorial and the personal stories they share enable different kinds of understanding of how the monument functions. You can preserve the score of a
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