Last Friday evening, Long Now joined the Global Lives Project in celebrating their world premiere opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Through a huge volunteer effort, Global Lives has produced ten films – each 24 hours long – that visually capture the everyday life of ten people around the planet.  And on Friday we could view them all, at the same time, in the same room.  Ten huge screens hung from the ceiling of the Yerba Buena Forum and around a thousand people throughout the evening ambled around and under them, listening as voices emerged — Kai Lu, from Anren China speaking to his wife in a village dialect of Sichuan Yi, young Edith Kaphuka from Ngwale Village, Malawi code-switching with her friends on the playground between Chichewa and Chiyao, James Bullock of San Francisco chatting up the tourists on his cable car in West Coast American English.  Some screens showed people working, others playing, some eating, others sleeping — a glimpse into one human day on planet earth.

Global Lives Opening - Big Screen Installation in the YBCA Forum

A second ongoing installation in the YBCA Room for Big Ideas provides a more intimate viewing space, with ten partitioned rooms and LCD viewing screens.  Each room is furnished with seating for one or two, and with walls and floors embellished with fabrics, colors and textures evocative of the region of the film.  Kiosks and wall graphics give a bit of background about the project, and the ten participants.  And while the installation as a whole gives the sense of a finished, polished project, three computers set up prominently in the room tell a different – and quite wonderful – story.

Global Lives Project - Installation in YBCA Room for Big Ideas

This is not a finished project – in fact, it is very much a work in progress.  One of the greatest ongoing efforts is one that anyone can help with – the subtitling of each film in as many languages as possible (through the crowdsource subtitling site dotSUB).  The first pass was getting all ten films subtitled in English for the opening night, and that effort is still only about 80% done.  It is an enormous effort.  Jason Price, one of the producers of the Malawi shoot, tells the story of being nearly at wits end trying to find anyone to help translate Edith Kaphuka’s Chichewa into English — until someone suggested he set up a Facebook Group, and then 2,500 mostly expatriate Chichewa speakers arrived ready to help (there are, of course, many speakers of Chichewa in Malawi, but the need to access streaming video to do the translations made that nearly impossible).

Through the steadfast effort of about 25 of these people, the full twenty four hours of video has now not only been transcribed and translated, but put thorough about five stages of checking, rechecking and review to ensure its accuracy.  And, it is now the largest corpus of spoken transcribed Chichewa on the web.  (What might this ’seed’ corpus enable down the road?  Chichewa online dictionaries?  Spell checkers?  Natural language processing?  Search? This group of translators may, without realizing it, be forging the way for a real Chichewa language online presence.)

For Global Lives, this set of ten videos is just the beginning of a much larger library of human life experience.  Not grand experiences, not Hollywood, not Bollywood — in the words of David Harris, the project’s director (responding to the umpteenth activist proposal, this one by yours truly) “we want boring!”  Because what we see as the everyday, the mundane, the routine is in fact a picture of our own humanity – and for that each Global Lives shoot is worth a thousand Hollywood productions.

The Global Lives installation in the Room for Big Ideas will be open through June 20, 02010 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  The Long Now Foundation sponsored the world premiere installation in the YBCA Forum through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Long Now has three events coming up over the next 8 days and we wanted to be sure you all had the right info for reserving tickets and making it out to all three.

• Long Now and Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on Friday February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in.  The installation will be up on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend as well.
  
• Beth Noveck on “Transparent Government”  Thursday March 4, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats free, or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

• Alan Weisman on “World Without Us, World With Us.” Wednesday February 24 (Thanks for coming this event went great)

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).

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  This opening is sponsored in part by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm.  There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker.  Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

This week, the New York Times ran an article about a recent scientific discovery in the predator alert calls of Campbell’s monkeys.   Strikingly, they seem to have the ability to create complex calls out of multiple elements – a “morphological” (word building) process previously thought to only take place in human language.

Human languages do this all the time – for example the word ‘walked’ is built of two morphemes, one carrying the main verbal action ‘walk’ and the other marking past tense ‘-ed’.  In the case of the Campbell’s monkey, morphemes are often combined to indicate different types of threats.  Previous observations of monkeys have shown that they sometimes use different types of calls for different types of predators, but what’s unique about these calls is that some of them can be combined with other calls to change their meaning.  So, instead of just having a “jaguar!” call and an “eagle!” call as has been observed in Vervet monkeys, Campbell’s monkeys have a “leopard!” call that can be combined with a suffix that changes its meaning to indicate a less specific threat:

Crucially, “krak” calls were exclusively given after detecting a leopard, suggesting that it functioned as a leopard alarm call, whereas the “krak-oo” was given to almost any disturbance, suggesting it functioned as a general alert call. Similarly, “hok” calls were almost exclusively associated with the presence of a crowned eagle (either a real eagle attack or in response to another monkey’s eagle alarm calls), while “hok-oo” calls were given to a range of disturbances within the canopy, including the presence of an eagle or a neighbouring group (whose presence could sometimes be inferred by the vocal behaviour of the females).

- Ouattara, Lemasson & Zuberbühler

Just as artificial intelligence researchers have been busy over the last several decades celebrating each previously-unique human capacity achieved by computers, biologists have been finding behaviors once thought to mark the uniqueness of humans in other animals.  Neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolski recently gave a lecture at Stanford about the uniqueness of humans, which provides a great overview of what we share and don’t share with other animals (as is currently understood).

Similarly, primatologist Frans de Waal has made a career of describing the political, cultural, emotional and moral lives of primates.  His work has illustrated the evolutionary breadth and depth of many human characteristics previously thought to be recent behavioral innovations without precedent and unique to our species.

As artificial intelligence research looks forward to recreating human capabilities it focuses our efforts to understand those capabilities.  Similarly, in identifying in other animals capacities like syntax once thought to be unique to humans, we are afforded a clearer look back on the deep history and development of those capacities.  Looked at this way, it actually did take millions of years to produce the works of Shakespeare.

Earlier this month, a small group of World War II Navajo Code Talkers – who are today in their eighties and nineties – marched as a group for the first time in the New York City Veteran’s Day Parade as a way to raise awareness in the US about their wartime contribution. The Code Talkers were Navajo speakers recruited by the U.S Military for sending coded verbal messages by radio in World War II – an effort legendary today as producing “the only unbroken code in modern military history.”

This caught my attention partly because Navajo is a threatened language – while there are 150,000 speakers at last count and several thousand monolinguals, the word on the wire is that Navajo is losing ground to English among the youngest in the Navajo community – and children are, after all, the ones who decide a language’s fate.

I also had this question in the back of my mind – could a human language be used in such a way today?   Granted, we have sophisticated computer encryption that pretty much renders any human generated code obsolete.  But say for a moment that we didn’t, or couldn’t use digital technology…  do we simply know too much about what is possible in human language?  And failing that, is there any language out there esoteric and isolated enough that it could be put to such use?

First, to clarify, there is nothing inherent about the Navajo language that made the code uncrackable – a quick perusal of the recent press turns up descriptors like “ancient language” and “complex grammar” which could apply to any human language.  The phrase “near isolate” also doesn’t make sense because Navajo is a language with many linguistic relatives in the Athabaskan group throughout the Southwestern US, Canada, and Alaska.

What made the code uncrackable at the time was a combination of factors – physical and social isolation of the Navajo speech community certainly did, as few non-Navajos spoke the language.  Also, little was known linguistically about the language at the time, and linguistics outside of philology was itself a fledgling field of study. Most importantly, the code wasn’t just everyday Navajo, but a cipher based on Navajo with word-replacements like “tortoise” for tank or “iron fish” for submarine as well as Navajo substitutions for English military acronyms. A Navajo speaker was in fact captured and tortured for his knowledge at Bataan, but since he didn’t know the cipher, he was just as befuddled as everyone else.

I wonder though whether a linguist today with a basic knowledge of the language, and/or access to basic tools like a grammar and dictionary, transported back to that time might have figured it out, given enough data and the context in which the messages were delivered.   A relatively few cracked messages could render the essential cryptographic key. Do all human languages have such basic description?  Far from it.  My best guess based on what we’ve been able to find for The Rosetta Project is maybe one half of all human languages?  A third? Without this, the decryption task would have to encompass basic linguistic analysis as well.

So is it possible that a human language in this day and age could serve the purpose?  Maybe, maybe not — I welcome discussion.  But if not – and here’s the real question on my mind – are we linguists done?  Can we pack up our bags and go home? Although I think we understand something about human language – maybe a lot more than we did 70 years ago, it would be extreme hubris to say we really get all there is to human language at this point.  I expect there are plenty of surprises in store even as far as grammatical structure is concerned – and at every level of structure.  Many of the more interesting questions are likely to relate to how language is used in its cultural context — like the Pirahã avoiding speaking about the remote past because it is inaccessible to eyewitness verification.

That many lifetimes could be spent puzzling it all out is one of the great joys of linguistic discovery.  And to my way of thinking, the surprises about our human selves that lie in store is a primary reason to pursue language documentation as one of the great scientific and intellectual enterprises of our era.

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.

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.