The Berkeley Language Center will be hosting a talk by Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher on November 9th. The talk is open to the public and starts at 3:00pm in Dwinelle Hall B-4.

The Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation is working to build an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup that can last for thousands of years–The Rosetta Disk. In the “long now,” the goal is long-term storage and access to information–on the scale that both supports and transcends individual human societies and civilizations. In the “here and now,” the project serves to support and amplify the importance of the world’s nearly 7,000 human languages, the vast majority of which are endangered and, if current trends continue, likely to go extinct in the next 100 years. I’ll present our current work on the Rosetta Project Collection and Disk as well as some new initiatives including the “Language Commons” where we are working to help build the multilingual Web.

There will be a reception afterwards; come say Hello.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman will be speaking as part of the Bay Area Science Festival presentation “Will We Ever Understand the Brain” on Wednesday, November 2, 02011. Eagleman will discuss with Henry Markram, coordinator of the Human Brain Project, whether the myriad functions of the brain will someday be clear to us, or if they will always be somewhat of a mystery.

The lecture will take place at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco at 7pm. See the California Academy of Sciences’ or the Bay Area Science Festival’s website for details and tickets.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine as well as an author whose works include the fictional Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and most recently, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

With thousands of languages and writing systems used all over the world, making computers and the web widely accessible has taken a herculean effort, with much yet to be done.

One of the main tools used in the expansion of the web’s global reach is Unicode – a database of over 193,000 characters from 93 different writing systems and the standards for using and representing them.

Unicode is maintained by The Unicode Consortium, which sponsors a conference each year to share knowledge and discuss the future of Unicode.

This year the Internationalization and Unicode Conference will be held October 17th – 19th in Santa Clara, CA.

Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher will be delivering a keynote presentation on Tuesday October 18th of her work on The Rosetta Project, a publicly accessible digital library of human languages, and The Language Commons:

The Rosetta Project shares the Unicode vision of a world where people can use communication technology on their own terms – in their own language.

According to World Internet Statistics, over 80% of all web communication is in about ten languages, with over half in either English or Chinese. The remaining 20% represent “everyone else” including about 400 languages with speaker populations above 1 million, which collectively comprise about 95% of everyone on earth.

Because of essential technologies like Unicode, we are poised to see this breadth of human languages flourish online and on mobile devices, providing for these languages a critical new domain of language use in the modern world. I will present several efforts underway at The Rosetta Project including the “Language Commons” that rely on Unicode as an essential technology in building the multilingual Web.

This Saturday September 24th, Long Now brings back Mechanicrawl – a self-guided exploration of the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore. A single ticket – free to members of partner organizations – provides access to all the attractions and special demonstrations going on throughout the event, 10:00am – 5:00pm.

You can get your tickets online, either in advance or on the day of the Crawl.

It’s an increasingly rare opportunity, not to mention an astounding sight, to behold the steam engines of the SS Jeremiah O’Brien running, and they’ll be fired up for the day. You can also geek out with Aaron Washington of the USS Pampanito crew over their Torpedo Data Computer, chat with their HAM radio club, drop by Long Now and meet some of the engineers on the 10,000 Year Clock as they demonstrate some of our prototypes, and catch one of the SF Maritime Park’s guided tours of the Balclutha, a square-rigged sailing ship docked at the Hyde Street Pier… before lunch!

There’s tons to do, check out www.mechanicrawl.org for details and ticket info.

Feel free to wander as you’d like between all the different attractions listed on the site, but take a peek at the Demos tab to see the scheduled activities you may want to join in on as well.

We’ve created a public layer in Google Maps that you can see on your smartphone to have all the locations and details at your fingertips during the event and you can follow Mechanicrawl on Twitter (@Mechanicrawl) for updates and reminders.

Come spend the day in the sun (oh, and below-decks) with us!

The Long Now Foundation presents

Mechanicrawl

explore the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore!

TICKETS

See giant running steam engines, turn-of-the-century automata, mechanical computers, a wave organ, an 8 foot high mechanical planetarium, vintage steam boats and more…

Saturday September 24, 02011 from 10am to 5pm you can start your crawl at any participating location, see the website for more info

Long Now Members get 2 free tickets, join today! General Tickets $15

Members of these participating organizations also get 2 free tickets, Exploratorium, SF Maritime Park Association & the SS Jeremiah O’Brien

About Mechanicrawl:

Spend a delightful day exploring the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore. You’ll be able to map your own route for the event and spend as much time at each location as you’d like. We encourage you to walk, bicycle or use public transport for Mechanicrawl; maps, featured tours and demonstrations and additional info will be listed on the website.

The idea for the Mechanicrawl event grew out of an appreciation of the mechanical wonders of San Francisco, many of which are neighbors along the touristed north edge of the city. Even though the Bay Area has a passionate culture of making and appreciating these types of mechanical achievements, their locations have kept them from being visited by many residents. Our goal for Mechanicrawl is to put together a special event where Bay Area residents can see all of these wonders in relation to each other and gain a new appreciation for San Francisco’s deep Maker roots.

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Join us for the Record-a-thon this Saturday July 30 at the Internet Archive and help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Lindsey, National Geographic

Updated Schedule of Events!

Plan to attend in-person or remotely?

RSVP here through EventBrite!

Help us record 50 languages in a single day!

Did you know…

• UNESCO considers the use of one’s native language to be a basic human right?
• Half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered and may become extinct this century?
• Over 100 languages are spoken right here in the San Francisco Bay area?

There is something you can do to help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Professional linguists and videographers will be on site to document you and your friends speaking word lists, reading texts, and telling stories. You can also document your language using tools you probably have in your purse or back pocket — a mobile phone, digital camera, or laptop — just bring your device and our team will guide you through the documentation process.

How do your words and stories make a difference? An important part of language documentation is building a corpus — creating collections of vocabulary words, as well as conversations and stories that demonstrate language in use. From a corpus, linguists and speech technologists can build grammars, dictionaries, and tools that enable a language to be used online. The bigger the corpus, the better the tools!

The recordings you make during the event will be added to The Rosetta Project’s open collection of all human language in The Internet Archive. And, you can compete for cool prizes, including an iPad 2 for the participant who records and uploads the most languages during the event!

Please RSVP below and let us know if you plan to attend, and what language or languages you are thinking of recording. Can’t make it to the Record-a-thon? Join us online the day of the event for the virtual Record-a-thon, where you’ll be able to interact with event staff, monitor event progress, listen live to lectures and talks, and submit your own recordings remotely.

We will be in touch soon with more information about the day’s events, and how you can participate! For questions or more information please contact rosetta@longnow.org.

Photo by Pat Tufts

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. Long Now’s own Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project, spoke on March 3rd to a group of Long Now Members about the beauty, variety and value in the almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world. The event was part of our new Salon Series: occasional, intimate talks held in The Long Now Museum & Store for Members of the Foundation.

Laura’s talk was called The Rosetta Project and The Language Commons and in it she discussed several efforts to preserve linguistic diversity around the world. The Long Now Foundation’s role thus far, she explained, has been to develop and manufacture The Rosetta Disk: a durable, nickel archive of linguistic data. Laura also discussed her work with The Language Commons Working Group – a collaboration of linguists, archivists and programmers working to create an open and accessible encyclopedia of languages and linguistic diversity as a tool for teaching, studying, preserving and sharing languages.

The full audio of Laura’s talk can be streamed from the player below or downloaded as an mp3. You can also click through the slides she presented in the window below the audio player.

If you plan to be in San Francisco next week, there is still time to register for the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. The conference is being held at the Internet Archive on February 24 & 25, 2011. The event blurb says it all:

From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. Creation and capture of new digital information has become a part of the daily routine for hundreds of millions of people. But what are the long-term prospects for this data? The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) with the move from older forms of media is reshaping both our personal and collective memories. The size and complexity of personal collections growing, these collections are spread across different media (including film and paper!), and the lines between personal and professional, published and unpublished are being redrawn.

For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, Personal Digital Archiving 2011 will include a variety of examples that may be replicated, and will clarify the technical, social, economic questions around personal archiving.

Long Now’s Laura Welcher will be presenting “An Archive Model with Long Term Benefits” Thursday evening.

Check out the full, provisional schedule HERE. As you will see from this line-up, this is a wonderful opportunity to see and talk to the leading researchers in this area.

You can register HERE. [Deadline: February 24]

Travel and location  information is on the conference website.

Join Long Now’s Rosetta Project on November 6 from 4 – 7 pm at UCLA’s Hammer Museum where we team up with San Francisco-based CRITTER for an Enormous Microscopic Evening.  We’ll put a Rosetta Disk under the microscope, check out the fine (and finer) print, and maybe hunt for Easter eggs…  More information on the evening’s lineup from the Hammer Museum:

Enormous Microscopic Evening examines the museum from a microscopic perspective with CRITTER, a San Francisco-based salon dedicated to expanding the relationships between culture and the environment. The evening will focus on demonstrations and workshops about building and manipulating microscopes. Materials and samples taken from around the museum will be examined. Continuing the theme of microscopy, there will be micro performances (short concerts with tiny instruments) and other related events throughout the museum.