Posts Tagged ‘archive’
“All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”*…
… But books (and their predecessors) are fragile, and need special archival care if they are to survive. That’s even truer, as Adrienne Bernhard explains in The Long Now Foundation‘s newsletter, of digital data and documents…
The Dead Sea scrolls, made of parchment and papyrus, are still readable nearly two millennia after their creation — yet the expected shelf life of a DVD is about 100 years. Several of Andy Warhol’s doodles, created and stored on a Commodore Amiga computer in the 01980s, were forever stranded there in an obsolete format. During a data-migration in 02019, millions of songs, videos and photos were lost when MySpace — once the Internet’s leading social network — fell prey to an irreversible data loss.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Obstacles to data preservation are generally divided into three broad categories: hardware longevity (e.g., a hard drive that degrades and eventually fails); format accessibility (a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk formatted with a filesystem that can’t be read by a new laptop); and comprehensibility (a document with a long-abandoned file type that can’t be interpreted by any modern machine). The problem is compounded by encryption (data designed to be inaccessible) and abundance (deciding what among the vast human archive of stored data is actually worth preserving).
The looming threat of the so-called “Digital Dark Age”, accelerated by the extraordinary growth of an invisible commodity — data — suggests we have fallen from a golden age of preservation in which everything of value was saved. In fact, countless records of previous historical eras have all but disappeared. The first Dark Ages, shorthand for the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and stretching into the Middle Ages (00500-01000 CE), weren’t actually characterized by intellectual and cultural emptiness but rather by a dearth of historical documentation produced during that era.
Even institutions built for the express purpose of information preservation have succumbed to the ravages of time, natural disaster or human conquest. The famous library of Alexandria, one of the most important repositories of knowledge in the ancient world, eventually faded into obscurity. Built in the fourth century B.C., the library flourished for some six centuries, an unparalleled center of intellectual pursuit. Alexandria’s archive was said to contain half a million papyrus scrolls — the largest collection of manuscripts in the ancient world — including works by Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Herodotus. By the fifth century A.D., however, the majority of its collections had been stolen or destroyed, and the library fell into disrepair.
Digital archives are no different. The durability of the web is far from guaranteed. Link rot, in which outdated links lead readers to dead content (or a cheeky dinosaur icon), sets in like a pestilence. Corporate data sets are often abandoned when a company folds, left to sit in proprietary formats that no one without the right combination of hardware, software, and encryption keys can access. Scientific data is a particularly thorny problem: unless it’s saved to a public repository accessible to other researchers, technical information essentially becomes unusable or lost. Beyond switching to analog alternatives, which have their own drawbacks, how might we secure our digital information so that it survives for generations? How can individuals, private corporations and public entities coordinate efforts to ensure that their data is saved in more resilient formats?…
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations? “Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age,” from @AdrienneEve and @longnow. Eminently worth reading in full.
C.F. also: “Very Long-Term Backup” by Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly).
* Thomas Carlyle
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As we ponder preservation, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S. and the U.K. (among other territories) was the Beatles’ “Help!” (their fourth of six #1 singles in a row on the American charts).
“The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out”*…
Political and government bans and censorship, publishers attacking digital access/ lending— there’s a growing struggle underway (in the U.S. and abroad) that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared, and preserved — or lost forever. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on why we must care…
… The fact that crucial decisions about whether to keep or destroy data are kept in the hands of actors with profit motives, autocratic aspirations or other self-serving ends has a huge implication not only for individuals but also for the culture at large.
Many instances of data loss have ramifications for cultural production, the writing of history and, ultimately, the practice of democracy…
Alongside the need to maintain public trust in democratic institutions, we must consider how we ought to preserve our collective cultural memory. Institutions like museums, libraries and archives must play a more proactive role while creating stronger institutional safeguards — including rules mandating secure transport of public sector data and professional management of archives, in addition to requirements for public accessibility — on their own conduct. These organizations, whether they are upstart archival initiatives or established public institutions, require stable financial and institutional support to flourish…
The history of knowledge is not one of simple progress or accumulation. Knowledge production in the digital era, like the creation and storage of knowledge across the centuries, is unfolding as a continual oscillation between gains and losses.
Data loss on a small scale — missing phone contacts, digital files lost to a glitch — is the occupational hazard of existing in a digitally reliant world. But data erasure at scale is always political. Responses to erasure and loss must exceed technical fixes and knee-jerk reactions; instead, governments and organizations must constantly reassess the ethical and regulatory frameworks that govern our relationship with data. The mainstream narrative that we are living through an era of exponential, near-infinite knowledge accumulation no longer fits a society in which we lose our collective record of ourselves day in and day out…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The World’s Digital Memory Is at Risk” (gift link)
Pair with the Internet Archive‘s Brewster Kahle‘s “Our Digital History Is at Risk” and Richard Ovenden‘s important (and engrossing) Burning the Books.
* Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
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As we prioritize preservation and open access, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that the Rainbow Flag was flown for the first time during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Created by Gilbert Baker, it has become a sign of LGBTQ pride worldwide.
“The sound must seem an echo to the sense”*…
As devices once common fall out of use, we stop hearing the sounds that they made…
“Conserve the sound” is an online archive for disappearing sounds. The sounds of a rotary dial phone, a Walkman, an analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a mobile phone keyboard have partly disappeared or are just disappearing from everyday life. In addition, people have their say in text and video interviews and deepen their view into the world of disappearing sounds…”
The signature sounds of the items above and so many more: “Conserve the sound,” a project of CHUNDERKSEN.
Apposite: “Google Translate for the zoo? How humans might talk to animals,” a review of Karen Bakker‘s The Sounds of Life.
And. of course, 32 Sounds.
* Alexander Pope
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As we listen in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986, in Cleveland, that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted it’s first class of members: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Alan Freed, John Hammond, Buddy Holly, Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, San Phillips, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jimmy Yancey. The I. M. Pei designed museum opened on June 7, 1993.
“I get slightly obsessive about working in archives because you don’t know what you’re going to find. In fact, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.”*…
An update on that remarkable treasure, The Internet Archive…
Within the walls of a beautiful former church in San Francisco’s Richmond district [the facade of which is pictured above], racks of computer servers hum and blink with activity. They contain the internet. Well, a very large amount of it.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit, has been collecting web pages since 1996 for its famed and beloved Wayback Machine. In 1997, the collection amounted to 2 terabytes of data. Colossal back then, you could fit it on a $50 thumb drive now.
Today, the archive’s founder Brewster Kahle tells me, the project is on the brink of surpassing 100 petabytes – approximately 50,000 times larger than in 1997. It contains more than 700bn web pages.
The work isn’t getting any easier. Websites today are highly dynamic, changing with every refresh. Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult. News organisations’ paywalls (such as the FT’s) are also “problematic”, Kahle says. News archiving used to be taken extremely seriously, but changes in ownership or even just a site redesign can mean disappearing content. The technology journalist Kara Swisher recently lamented that some of her early work at The Wall Street Journal has “gone poof”, after the paper declined to sell the material to her several years ago…
A quarter of a century after it began collecting web pages, the Internet Archive is adapting to new challenges: “The ever-expanding job of preserving the internet’s backpages” (gift article) from @DaveLeeFT in the @FinancialTimes.
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As we celebrate collection, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that the Polaroid Corporation– best known for its instant film and cameras– filed for bankruptcy. Its employment had peaked in 1978 at 21,000; it revenues, in 1991 at $3 Billion.
“Living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive… archives are a kind of site in the sense of an archaeological site”*…
Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas? D.T. Max dives into what is, arguably, America’s “hottest” literary archive, and chronicles the acquisition strategy of its director…
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
The current director of the center is Thomas Staley. Seventy-one, and a modernist scholar by training, he is mercurial and hard-driving. Amid the silence of the center’s Reading Room, he often greets visiting scholars with a resonant slap on the back. In college, at a Jesuit school in Colorado, Staley pitched in a summer baseball league, specializing in a slow, sinking curve. His “crafty pitch,” as he calls it, was good enough to attract the attention of professional scouts. The Ransom Center, under Staley’s leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library. It operates more like a college sports team, with Staley as the coach—an approach that fits the temperament of Texas. “People take a special pride here in winners,” Staley says. “They like success.” (After the Ransom bought its Gutenberg Bible, the center sent the Bible on a victory lap, displaying it at libraries, museums, and universities around the state.)…
A fascinating look into the (surprisingly competitive) world of literary archives: “Final Destination,” from @dtmax in @NewYorker.
(One archive that is not at the Ransom Center is that of Lou Reed. His widow and executor Laurie Anderson had originally intended to house the papers, tapes, and memorabilia there, but changed her mind when the Texas legislature passed a law allowing the open carry of hand guns on state college campuses. They are now at the New York Public Library– and the subject of an exhibit at The Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.)
* John Berger
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As we turn every page, we might send archival birthday greetings to Henry Clay Folger; he was born on this date in 1857. A businessman and philanthropist, he founded (with with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger) the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., an independent research library (and archive) that houses the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750) in Britain and Europe. The library is privately endowed, and is administered by the trustees of Folger’s alma mater, Amherst College.
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