Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

It’s a fairly long and comprehensive piece with lots of good advice and a good description of how the Rosetta Disk tries to address some of these problems.

Read the full article at New Scientist.

King’s College London president Rick Trainor announced recently that the university would be closing the chair of paleography, the UK’s only one.  Held by Professor David Ganz, the chair of paleography is the position that overseas a discipline many consider to be a vital component of historical research.  Paleography is the study of ancient manuscripts and has pieced together and deciphered many of the texts that have provided the basis for our knowledge of history.

Budget cuts are the precipitating factor, or rather “strategic disinvestment” as the official announcement goes, but they’re being met with some resistance.

“Palaeography is not simply an arcane auxiliary science,” says Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, chair of medieval studies at Harvard University. “It is as basic to the training and practice of ­historians as mastery of Dos or Unix might be to a computer scientist.”

-from the Guardian

Rosetta Project Director Laura Welcher recently took part in a segment on The History Channel’s Life After People series.

In an episode titled “Crypt of Civilization,” Laura discusses the Rosetta Disk and The 10,000 Year Clock.   

The central question of the series is “How long would it last?” The series explores various materials, systems and structures built by humans to determine their durability sans maintenance as well as natural systems and how they might flourish or decline without human intervention.

“Crypt of Civilization” focuses on time capsules, vaults and other attempts to create long-lasting caches of materials or data.  Laura explores some of the unique challenges in designing artifacts like the Disk and Clock to last thousands of years while the show’s producers vividly illustrate them.

You can watch the series on its website (though the “Crypt of Civilization” episode isn’t available yet).

One thousand years from now, much of what we know will be forgotten. That’s been true in the past. We have only a fragmentary cultural memory of what happened 1,000 years ago. And what we think we know about 1000 may in fact be quite garbled. In a very witty demo of this, this youtube clip, the Beatles 3000, imagines how corrupted our current ideas of “what everone knows” will most likely be in 10 centuries. Ever heard of the Beatles?  (Thanks, Mark)

Long Now friend and supporter Ken Wilson sends in this awesome concept for the Stockholm Library.  This design seems like it would lend itself well to a 10,000 year library…

The image above is a rendering by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. You can see the un-textured model below and read how the design was generated over at CG Society.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material.  Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now.  The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P.  Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA.  In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

What seems to be the first real optical archival digital tech is now shipping. The Millenniata product is a type of DVD storage that uses a mechanical scratching process, instead of a thermal process, making the media vastly more stable.  The disks are in the current DVD standard and the company claims they are therefore backwards compatable to normal players.  To write your own disk however you will need the $1700 writer and one of the special blank disks that range from $16-$25ea depending on qty.

If the companies claims on life-span of the media are true this is a major milestone in commodity level archival media.  I do think however that they really need some sort of marking on the tops of all the blank media that explains what the DVD data stadard is and how to read it.  Otherwise in a 100 years, I cant imagine that many people will remember…

Now with their second installment: Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster. In this episode, Team Digital Preservation takes on the problem of obsolete software by migrating important digital files to the most current formats.

This goes hand-in-hand with Kevin Kelly’s concept of movage. We’ve got to keep our digital information moving; from storage medium to storage medium, from software platform to software platform, and from file format to file format.

A recent article in the New York Times describes the endangered language research of Tucker Childs, a linguist at Portland State University, who is in Sierra Leone studying the nearly extinct Kim language.  The death of the Kim language is attributed to the decision of younger speakers to learn the Mende language, spoken by 1.5 million people in Sierra Leone and Liberia. This pattern of language loss is common, especially in the era of globalization, when the ability to communicate beyond a local village is essential for economic success.

The article suggests that Kim is beyond the point of revitalization, but this makes the effort to document the language even more urgent. By documenting the Kim language, and then depositing the documentation with the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, Childs and his research team are working to make sure that knowledge of the Kim language will remain long after the language is no longer spoken.  This kind of information can contribute a great deal to ongoing linguistic research (such as the study of linguistic typology and what is possible in human language) and in some cases, has even provided enough information to bring languages back into active use after generations have passed.

Technology for gathering language documentation has changed dramatically, just as language documentation efforts have redoubled in the face of rapid and massive language extinction.  Audio and video recorders are all digital, and the work of building dictionaries and translating collected texts is now typically done on a laptop computer.  One of the most moving parts of The Linguists, a documentary chronicling the work of two endangered language researchers (viewable for free on Babelgum), comes when the last speakers of Chulym, a language of Siberia, are able to immediately see a digital video recording of themselves speaking their native language, which was heavily supressed in the Soviet era.

While digital technology provides new tools in the effort to document the world’s endangered languages, it also presents a challenge for archivists trying to preserve data that is “born digital” and only exists in a digital format. The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archive Network (DELAMAN), is a network of digital archives that support endangered language documentation by helping ensure that data remains safe, discoverable, accessible, and usable.  Participating archives like The Rosetta Project are working to develop and promote robust archival practices around the long-term storage of linguistic data.  Similar efforts have produced and promoted ISO 639-3 codes for 6,800 human languages, linguistics-specific metadata (see the Open Language Archives Community), and are promoting open and transparent file format standards for linguistic research (see the NSF-funded EMELD project)

I just came across the World Digital Library site launched in April of this year by the Library of Congress and several other national archives, libraries and other partner institutions.  Most impressive is that the interface to the data is not only spatial – a world map- but also uses a timeline…  a 10,000 year timeline.  The collection currently only has about 1100 items, but each has extensive normalized meta-data in 7 major world languages.  Producing meta-data at this level is quite difficult but will indeed be very valuable over the long haul.  Hopefully it wont provide too large a barrier to getting more data into the repository. They launched the effort with some extremely high value items, and are taking a very top down meta-data approach (as opposed to something like Wikipedia that allows the masses to annotate):

 The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. “There are many one-of-a-kind documents,” Billington said in an interview.

“All of this is dependable, authoritative commentary,” Billington said. – Washington Post

Also very interesting is that the BBC reports that the WDL is one of the first customers for the recently announced Rosetta Stone 1,000 year digital memory product developed in Japan and reported here last month.