“The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth”

The famous burning of the Library of Alexandria is still considered to be one the greatest losses of ancient culture.  History tells us it was actually several events that eventually destroyed the library. Events similar to the ones we have witnessed over the last few weeks in Egypt. Recent losses at national libraries and museums in Serbia, Iraq, and now Cairo show that in times of upheaval, there is a strong desire to erase the past, and that past often resides in libraries.  One of Long Now’s board members is Mike Keller the head of Stanford libraries who has close ties with the modern Library at Alexanderia.  We have all been waiting to hear how the library fared in the revolution, see the encouraging report below:

Stanford Libraries have a close collegial relationship with the new Library of Alexandria, known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, or BA. We have been anxiously watching the news of turmoil in Egypt with a particular concern about that inspiring institution (to say nothing of other cultural repositories, some of which were damaged in recent weeks). I am truly delighted and relieved to report that the BA is intact as of this writing. Indeed, some 50 volunteers formed a human cordon to protect and support it during mass demonstrations in its vicinity on the Corniche of that historic city. Even when all of Egypt was reportedly cut off from the Internet, the BA retained connectivity through its own international network, and its director, Dr. Ismail Seregeldin, was able to post several assuring messages to the BA’s friends around the world, complete with photographs and video showing how Alexandrians rallied to protect it. Concurrently, several of us at Stanford were exchanging messages with our friends there, which provided solace all around.
None of this predicts how the BA will fare hereafter. During the turmoil on the streets, one of the BA’s senior staff closed a message to me as follows: “Pray for us.” That may still be about all we can do. As momentous events unfold in a post-Mubarak Egypt, we will look for more tangible ways to express our support and solidarity.

As a parting thought: as implausible as mass insurrection seems here, if something somehow comparable were to happen, would we put ourselves on the line to protect our libraries as did the citizens of Alexandria?

Bravi!

Andrew Herkovic

The Computer History Museum’s newly re-designed main exhibition, Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing, is now open to the public. Starting with the abacus and ending with social networking, the exhibit traces our ongoing attempts to mechanically and digitally keep track of our world. In between the two is a history marked by exponential increases in power, performance and ubiquity. Being the largest collection of computers and computer ephemera in the world, that history is documented in extensive, stunning detail in this exhibition with lots of new supporting materials and documentation to tell the story.

Revolution is laid out in a wandering pathway that encourages you to follow along more or less chronologically, but with enough branching and looping back to make you feel like you’re choosing your own adventure and not just moving through a series of individual rooms. During the course of walking through the collection, the space expands along with the growth in applications so that census-tabulators and payroll-calculators dominate the first few areas, giving way to appliance-like mainframes, rocket guidance systems, early storage and software until it explodes into the modern diaspora of music, art, movies, games, robots and artificial intelligence, smartphones and laptops, the web, and social networking. All along the way are original artifacts, recreations, video interviews and documentary clips providing a rich, informed, multimedia story of creative and obsessive geeks’ toys and the myriad ways they’ve changed the world.

The Museum is normally closed on Mondays, but for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Holiday, they’re open from 10am to 5pm.

The slide-show below includes some shots from a visit earlier this week. Don’t miss Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and his Connection Machine.

Google’s new Ngram Viewer is a graphical interface for looking at the frequency of words over time in the several million books scanned into their database.  As a publicly mine-able data set, it’s huge and ripe for exploration with 500 years’ worth of published books spanning several languages.  And while it may seem a simple ‘just so’ kind of information to be able to call up how often a word was used in a particular year, the lives of words can often illuminate historical and cultural trends in surprising ways.

A paper published by researchers who helped develop the project (and summarized by Discover) rounded up a few interesting findings.  One delectably recursive tidbit they mentioned was that a search for years (ie. 1865, 1990) can show the historical efforts focused on particular eras and the extent to which those years remain part of present day discussion.

They found a general trend each individual year follows: a spike just before the year followed by a downward trending long tail as it recedes into history.  They also, however, noticed a trend amongst that pattern: higher peaks with shorter tails.

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: “’1951’ was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years.” But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of ‘1880’ was 32 years, but that of ‘1973’ was a mere 10 years.

So, at a cultural level, we can see a developing ‘presentism’ in which the year we’re currently inhabiting takes on great significance, but is more quickly forgotten once it’s passed.

In the wake of the crumbling Yahoo! behemoth and the clamor of mass Delicious data dumps, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask ourselves just how “archived” is the data that we create and share in these free hosting sites? What kind of promises do these sites make to preserve our information and to care about the hundreds of hours we spend uploading, tagging, and arranging it? In the case of Yahoo! and all of its affiliate sites, none whatsoever.

The funny thing is, we were warned about this over two years ago. In January 2009, the Archive Team said in no uncertain terms, “Please do not use Yahoo or Yahoo-owned sites for any non-retrievable personal data.” You may have heard of the Archive Team when they made their herculean effort to download the Geocities sites before Yahoo! closed them down in October of 2009. And it looks like the Archive Team is on the case again. According to their organizer, Jason Scott’s tweets yesterday, they are looking at ways to archive Delicious. Let’s hope they can.

In the meantime, read their article, “Why Back Up?”

And learn about how you can help.  The Archive Team have some excellent projects going to help mitigate some of the nastier effects of the Digital Dark Age, well worth taking a look at them…

This is an event that we had hoped to host this fall but could not because of our very busy production schedule.  A conversation with (Long Now Seminar speaker) Steven Johnson and (Long Now board member and speaker) Kevin Kelly who both released complimentary books in October – Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. Luckily this excellent event did in fact happen at the New York Public Library and was hosted by NPR’s Robert Krulwich, enjoy

I just received this nice piece on the future of books and libraries from our friends at Stanford Libraries:

Who Needs a Library Anyway?

When then-President Gerhard Casper rhetorically asked this question, 12 October 1999 – as the title of his remarks at the dedication of the Bing Wing – there was much talk in the air about the imminent demise of libraries. Were these not a bunch of dinosaurs about to be smacked by the meteoric impact of the Web? Was the book not rapidly becoming an anachronism, a fetish object of a dying pulp-based culture? Many of us, with President Casper, disagreed with these glib notions then. But that was several generations ago, on the timescale of the information world around us. How have we fared since on the extinction short list?

Last month, forecaster and chair of our Advisory Council Paul Saffo delighted a select group of our donors with a talk about books, revolutions, and timescales. In a dense web of connected thoughts, he tied the great information revolution of the late 15th century to that of the late 20th, likening the titanic publisher-scholar Aldus Manutius to Steve Jobs, linking the once-revolutionary idea that a printed book is what it is (not a cheap knock-off of a proper manuscript) to the emerging identity of digital works as being something other than bad substitutes for physical books. He reminded us of an intrinsic life-cycle law of objects: things fade, or even disappear, after about a half-century, even (or particularly) Aldine editions or 1960s bestsellers. I am reminded that we avidly collect medieval “binding fragments,” i.e., pieces of manuscripts, mostly on vellum, that were cut up and recycled as stiffeners in bindings of later books, a practice we would now consider barbaric and wasteful (and very expensive). Apparently, after a century or so of European printing, manuscripts were considered expendable, rendered technically obsolescent by the printing press (and the scholarly efflorescence it made possible).

Universities and their libraries have been around for a fairly long time, say 700 or 800 years. The great university libraries that we are familiar with – those with millions of volumes addressing myriad subjects and disciplines – evolved through the vast post-war growth of academic research, coincidentally about a half-century ago. Are they – or, should I say, we – suffering decrepitude and irrelevance? I offer as evidence our experience with the New Graduate Student Orientation program last month, detailed later in this issue. It seems that Stanford’s new crop of grad students, arguably the most savvy and motivated class of information users alive, are quite aware they need libraries. Some of them may even need Aldine editions or binding fragments. All of them will use electronic resources on various sorts of devices. Whatever the form, the libraries will stand ready to help them obtain and use the stuff of scholarship.

Also past the half-century mark,
Andrew Herkovic

1958, file photo, Duke Ellington

One of the readers of this blog “Sinking777″ commented on an earlier post and pointed out this digital dark age story on a recent study of sound recordings:

The first comprehensive study of the preservation of sound recordings in the U.S., released by the Library of Congress, also found many historical recordings already have been lost or can’t be accessed by the public. That includes most of radio’s first decade from 1925 to 1935.

Shows by musicians Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby, as well as the earliest sports broadcasts, are already gone. There was little financial incentive for such broadcasters as CBS to save early sound files, Brylawski said.

“Those audio cassettes are just time bombs,” Brylawski said. “They’re just not going to be playable.”

The study also calls for changes in copyright law to help preservation. As it stands now, Brylawski said, copyright restrictions would make most audio preservation initiatives illegal, the authors wrote.

[read complete story]

The last bit in the study is very good to see.  One of the dirtiest secrets of digital preservation is that it often technically illegal, and this will likely have to change if we are going to have anything approaching a representative record of our increasingly digital civilization.

Long Now founding board member Brian Eno has released a new album called Small Craft on a Milk Sea.  Recently he gave two great interviews on his creative process, one you can listen to over at NPR, and the other you can read over at Pitchfork.  I highly recommend listening and reading to both interviews in the their entirety, but I was especially taken with his answer on how to create music that is truly new:

“Imagine it’s the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don’t exist any recordings. We’ve read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–” then you specify a group of instruments– “was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume,” for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it.

Jamie O’Shea is an artist interested in technology, memory and time. In the video below he demonstrates how to create an electrical battery using only stone-age materials.

As Jamie points out, this isn’t just great material for the Manual for Civilization – it’s also a good way to illustrate that the historically observed progression of technology wasn’t the only way it could have happened.

The project is documented on his website:

Some people have viewed this project through the lens of sustainability. While self-sufficiency and locally sourced material would certainly seem to be sustainable, my methods fail quite spectacularly in environmental analysis. For one, I used an estimated 20 kg of charcoal to produce perhaps 20 g of metal…

My project is about the origin of technologies- the ability for them to emerge out of context- but not their ability to sustain themselves.  A sustainable society is not really the most natural option; humans began as a nomads exhausting the resources of places and then moving on.  Maybe people in the future will look back on us just as we can look back on our predecessors, and see the answer to a lasting society lying on the ground all around us, just waiting to be put together with the right information.

(Thanks, Kurt!)

The usual “digital dark age” stories we see are the ones where people lose data because a platform obsolesces.  Business Week is running an interesting story about a computer platform that has refused to obsolesce, and it is the people who are leaving it behind – The Mainframe.  It turns out that there are still over 10,000 Mainframe computers out there churning away at major companies – representing a $3.4 billion dollar market segment.  Who knew right?

One part of the story that is poorly addressed is why these companies have not ported the functionality they are getting out of these mainframes to a more modern computer system.  Wikipedia answers that question this way:

Modern mainframe computers have abilities not so much defined by their single task computational speed (usually defined as MIPS — Millions of Instructions Per Second) as by their redundant internal engineering and resulting high reliability and security, extensive input-output facilities, strict backward compatibility with older software, and high utilization rates to support massive throughput. These machines often run for years without interruption, with repairs and hardware upgrades taking place during normal operation.

…[IBM's modern] mainframe processors such as 2008′s 4.4 GHz quad-core z10 mainframe microprocessor. IBM is rapidly expanding its software business, including its mainframe software portfolio…

So I guess we still need mainframes and they have been modernized somewhat, but it seems to me this would be better handled by cloud or cluster computing that would be more hardware and software agnostic.  My bet is that most of these systems are actually emulating other emulations several layers deep – in some cases all the way back to punch card programming.  I assume no one actually wants to unravel that spaghetti out of fear of losing some critical legacy functionality.  I welcome comments here from anyone who actually uses mainframes (and if that story is to be believed, your skill set is in high demand, congrats!)