For last month’s feature in National Geographic about the ancient Cambodian metropolis of Angkor, a team of Monash University faculty created a detailed digital animation of the city and its surroundings.

Continuing a long running collaboration with the University of Sydney’s Greater Angkor Project, these animations attempt to visualise, and animate, the landscapes and daily life in 13th Angkor, Cambodia. The scenes draw upon a wide range of archaeological and historical data, including bas reliefs (pictorial sculptures), Chinese eye witness accounts, and extensive mapping undertaken by the Greater Angkor Project and the EFEO.

Digital recreations of this kind are becoming more prevalent, as technology enables new tools for humanities research, and new funding programs like NEH’s Digital Humanities make virtualization projects possible. One project funded by this program is Digital Karnak, a project undertaken by a team at UCLA that recreates a religious complex built by Queen Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt.  Their model goes a few steps further than the Angkor project as it documents the physical structure of the temple over two thousand years so that you can see how it was added to and modified by successive pharaohs.

The result of two years of painstaking research by a team of more than 24 scholars and technicians, Digital Karnak explores how scores of existing ruins may have originally looked and demonstrates how they came to be altered over time as generations of pharaohs put their stamp on the site that served as the religious center for Thebes, the Ancient Egyptian capital during the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

If you’re among those concerned with data rot, you might see a glimmer of hope for long-term digital preservation in a recent development from Utah-based startup Millenniata. The company will soon begin manufacturing DVDs capable of protecting data that can be read for 1,000 years, if stored at room temperature.From Slashdot:

“Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it’s special. Layers of hard, ‘persistent’ materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company’s Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer.”

Let’s hope the folks at Millenniata are working to ensure that the necessary data-reading technology will be around for the next 1,000 years. A Millennial DVD player would be a vast departure from the current crop of devices that barely last beyond their one-year warranties.

Lawrence Wilkinson posted a nice piece about infrastructure, software, and thinking long-term, where he pulls from a few sources including Pete Warden and Matt Mullenweg:

What’s true of sewers and software is true of most infrastructure:  finding the balance between lean expediency and investment in future capacity is a real trick.  Quoting his friend Matt Mullenweg, Pete observes,

“When you’re in the red, time is working against you. Once you’re profitable, time is on your side“. Getting to even Ramen profitability changes everything, and gives you the ability to build for the long term.

 

Martin Schoeller’s portraiture reveals an unexpected familiarity with his subjects, who range from the well-known to the anonymous. The photographer’s portraits of Pirahã tribesmen serve as a compelling follow-up to the work of Daniel Everett, who recounted his experience living with the Amazonian community at one of our seminars in March. Schoeller’s portraits appeared in the The New Yorker and later in Everett’s book, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.

The series, Pirahã Grid, is currently on display at Washington, D.C.’s, National Portrait Gallery, alongside other work featuring such familiar faces as President Barack Obama and Angelina Jolie. The subjects were shot close-up against a white background, in the kind of stark and intimate portrayal that academic studies rarely capture. Schoeller’s photographic style exhibits a striking clarity of detail while decontextualizing the subjects in a manner that, according to the Gallery, questions “the very nature of the categories we use to compare and contrast.”

From Schoeller’s artist statement:

“In a close-up, the impact stems solely from the static subject’s expression or apparent lack thereof, so the viewer is challenged to read a face without the benefit of the environmental cues we naturally use to form our interpersonal reactions.”

The series will be on display in the Gallery until September 29th of this year. 

I found this reference (via Engaget) to a nicely executed limited edition articulated hand clock.  I continue to be amazed at the breadth of solutions to showing the time…

Poor NASA always seems to get singled out for these stories of the digital loss.  At least this one has a happier ending…  today Reuters reports that:

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

 I think its worth thinking ourselves hback to this time.  They were engineering the truly impossible, with all minds focused on the future.  There wasnt time to think about archival quality anything, in fact nearly every piece of media technology they used was invented for the effort.  Kudos that a restoration effort is underway.

Over at The Rosetta Project, we have been busy uploading new materials to our collection at the Internet Archive (which you can also follow by RSS feed). This week, we uploaded this grammar of Esperanto — a language invented by a single man, now used as a means of regular communication by thousands, if not millions of speakers!

The language is the brainchild of Ludwik Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist from the city of Biyalstok (then part of the Russian Empire, now in eastern Poland). In the late 19th century, the city was divided between Germans, Jews, Russians, and Poles, who all spoke their own language. The animosity between these ethnic groups convinced Zamenhof that the key to understanding and harmony would be a common language.

The structure of Esperanto (the name means, in Esperanto, “one who hopes”) reflects this ideal. The vocabulary, grammar, and sound system incorporate elements from all major European languages, and the structure is completely regular, making Esperanto very easy to learn. While the original goal of being a universally adopted language is still a bit far off, the Ethnologue estimates that there are 2 million speakers worldwide, with as many as 2,000 who learned Esperanto as their native language.

That’s right, native Esperanto speakers. Couples who have met at Esperanto conventions will have no common language other than Esperanto, meaning that their children often grow up in an Esperanto-speaking household. The list of native Esperanto speakers includes a Nobel Prize laureate.

Well and good. But why should you learn Esperanto? A whole wealth of culture would be at your fingertips, with over 25,000 books available (original and translated), and a 1965 horror movie starring William Shatner (a familiar presence to speakers of another artificial language, Klingon). Pasporta Servo is an international organization of Esperanto speakers in 92 countries who will give fellow Esperantists a place to stay. Akademio Internacia de Sciencoj (International Academy of Sciences) is an Esperanto-language university. Research has shown that learning Esperanto is a good stepping-stone into learning other languages. A pilot program in the UK teaches Esperanto to schoolchildren before they take on more complex and irregular human languages.

The author of a “Complete Grammar of Esperanto,” Ivy Kellerman Reed, was an influential American Esperantist at the beginning of the 20th century, a time when ekscito was in the air, and the Esperanto revolution was heating up. Her preface to the book states “[This book] is to furnish not merely an introduction to Esperanto, or a superficial acquaintance with it, but a genuine understanding of the language and mastery of its use without recourse to additional textbooks, readers, etc.” All this can be gained in a tidy 345 pages, counting a small Esperanto-English dictionary in the back. The book also reads well using the FlipBook, a slick innovation by the Internet Archive.

To any future Esperantists we may have inspired, we can only say Bonan ŝancon!

The Kindle e-book version of Long Now board member Chris Anderson’s new book Free is available from Amazon for FREE for one week only.

This ultra time-lapse simulation of tectonic drift shows how dynamic our home planet it. The clip portrays the most recent 400 million-year geological history of the continents of Earth, and a prediction of its next 250 million years, all in 70 seconds. I love the way New York comes crashing into London in the far future. (Thanks, Stewart Brand)

Good things can be done over long times. Oxford University, with its multi-century history and perspective, is one of the few institutions to support very long-term projects. Oxford University Press will this year release a book that has taken almost 45 years to finish. It’s the world’s largest thesaurus — and includes almost the entire vocabulary of English.  The project was begun in 1965. (Thanks, Joe Stirt)

According to the BBC report:

The work was nearly destroyed in a fire in 1978, but despite the building being gutted, a metal filing cabinet protected the files. A spokesman said the final tome would contain over 230,000 categories with 800,000 meanings. The thesaurus was nearly completed in 1980, but the team decided to include words from updated versions of the Oxford English Dictionary. This added almost 30 years more work to the project.

One wonders what other kinds of things could we do if we were willing to devote half a century to it?

According to Oxford U Press the book features:

• A unique thesaurus resource – the very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
• The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings from Old English to the present day based on the Oxford English Dictionary
• Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
• Uses a thematic system of classification, with synonyms and related words forming part of a detailed semantic hierarchy
• Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
• Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
• Includes a free fold-out colour chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure

You can preorder the “Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English” at Amazon for $316.