Rosetta Disk 1.0 Browseable Archive – now available online
March 23rd, 02009 by Laura Welcher
A fully browseable version of the Rosetta Disk is now available online at The Rosetta Project website. Using this link, you can virtually browse and explore the contents of the disk, just as you would if you were looking at the micro-etched Rosetta Disk with a high-powered microscope. The viewer for the digital version of the Rosetta Disk on this DVD was built by Kurt Bollacker, using the OpenLayers 2.5 map visualization framework.
The browseable Rosetta Disk is temporarily replacing the content of the previous Rosetta Archive site, while we build out a new architecture for Rosetta that will make it much easier to access, use and repurpose Rosetta Data. Our new site is still under wraps, but we are very pleased to say that its distributed architecture involves both the Internet Archive — a caretaker for one of the original Rosetta Disks — and the open database site Freebase. Meanwhile all Rosetta data is safe, sound, and continues to be backed up by Stanford University Libraries.
Stay tuned for more on this channel, and meanwhile, happy disk browsing!
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Posted on March 25th, 2009 at 3:29 am
I’ve been thinking about the Rosetta Project this morning, in conjunction with a Futurology/Transhumanism blog which mentioned the future possibility of “mind uploading”.
Mind uploading seems a slightly macarbre sort of prospect, and quite technocratic – I’d been uncomfortable with it ever since, in part because it’s a potentially nasty part of documentation of the past and present, which is something I love.
This morning the thoughts came together around an article from the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7946565.stm This seems to be an excellent long-termist project, uniting a democratic and transparent documentation of dialect with a clear element of storing peoples’ stories, outlooks and the real grit and substance of their lives.
It seems notable, given that so much of our awareness of our past comes not so much for ledgers and financial reports, but from peoples’ diaries. The BBC article could, I think, be taken as a sign of a growing of long-term thinking.
Posted on March 25th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
The StoryCorps project is very cool, I had not looked at it closely. They dont seem to publish what their long term archiving strategy is however…
Posted on March 27th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
[...] Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic [...]