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The idea that the digital world is launching us into another "Dark Age" is probably overselling the issue. Let's look at how much actually survives from the pre

The idea that the digital world is launching us into another "Dark Age" is probably overselling the issue. Let's look at how much actually survives from the pre-Dark Ages. The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Which easily fits on a couple of bookshelves in your study (note that the books consist of the original text and a translation on the facing page). With a couple more volumes, of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, we can also add to our collection every single identified piece of inscription, including even an entire volume on mileposts. Similarly thorough works will doubtless exist for all classical languages, even non-European ones like Mayan or Chinese. Now walk into a library, even the tiny library of a small town. You are surrounded by more written text than survives from likely not only Classical Antiquity but all of human history through 1500. Even in the digital age, we are still producing more written text than most of human history. Probably, we are preserving a larger fraction of texts than were preserved from the Classical era. It's telling that the complaints of the loss of preservation are of the kinds of ephemera which don't exist for most periods of history. (Also telling that the person complaining about this loss of preservation is a "senior Research Software Engineer" and not a historian or archivist or similar field that actually deals with preserving or working with preserved data.)

dwheeler 4y ago
> The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Well, no. The complete surviving corpus, sure, but almost all of those works have been lost, never mind those of earlier eras. A short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work For a specific example: I was trying to understand some of the history of logic. I learned that that in ancient Greek times Stoic logic was widely used. What was it? That is hard to answer, because practically everything is lost now. We've had to reconstruct the Stoic logic axioms from fragmentary sources, that's how bad it is. We know there was more, but we don't know exactly what it was.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Yes, the qualifier of "surviving" is very important. Trying to look quickly for a hard number, it seems that the usual estimate (perhaps one study being widely reported rather than hard estimates) is about 5-10% of works surviving. In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times. Take something like Geocities--we had a major archival organization step in to preserve a record of what is effectively non-notable people writing about non-notable things. While I'm unsure if that particular archival record will exist in 2,000 years, I strongly suspect that there will exist some notable archive of non-notable people writing about non-notable things, the kind of record that historians today can only dream of having from those who existed 2,000 years prior to us.
  - dwheeler 4y ago
    > Trying to look quickly for a hard number, it seems that the usual estimate (perhaps one study being widely reported rather than hard estimates) is about 5-10% of works surviving. I suspect the actual value is much smaller, probably less than 0.1%. Those estimates are based on surviving references and indices, and there's no way to know how complete they are. Fundamentally we're all just guessing - if something's completely lost, there's a very good chance that it's impossible to know centuries later. > In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times. I hope so, but I have my doubts. When Sumerian libraries burned, the clay tablets simply hardened. Today, most modern data storage systems only last a decade or two, they require copying for the data to be readable... and we have no idea if future generations will make those copies. Also, increasingly data is stored in dynamically-generated pages on websites and in single page applications (SPAs). If the website goes down, a lot of the data is essentially impossible to get. I really appreciate efforts like the GitHub Arctic Vault: <https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/>. That has a fighting chance to be recoverable in two thousand years. But the Library of Alexandria showed us that if all the archives are in one place, they can all be simultaneously lost. I certainly would like to this we're doing a better job of archiving. I want to be proven wrong :-).
akprasad 4y ago
> even non-European ones like Mayan or Chinese A sad tangent: most of the Mayan literature specifically was deliberately destroyed during the Spanish conquest [1]. > Our knowledge of ancient Maya thought must represent only a tiny fraction of the whole picture, for of the thousands of books in which the full extent of their learning and ritual was recorded, only four have survived to modern times (as though all that posterity knew of ourselves were to be based upon three prayer books and Pilgrim's Progress). And a typical attitude of the times (Bishop Diego de Landa, July 1562): > We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

dwheeler 4y ago

> The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Well, no. The complete surviving corpus, sure, but almost all of those works have been lost, never mind those of earlier eras. A short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work For a specific example: I was trying to understand some of the history of logic. I learned that that in ancient Greek times Stoic logic was widely used. What was it? That is hard to answer, because practically everything is lost now. We've had to reconstruct the Stoic logic axioms from fragmentary sources, that's how bad it is. We know there was more, but we don't know exactly what it was.

jcranmer 4y ago
Yes, the qualifier of "surviving" is very important. Trying to look quickly for a hard number, it seems that the usual estimate (perhaps one study being widely reported rather than hard estimates) is about 5-10% of works surviving. In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times. Take something like Geocities--we had a major archival organization step in to preserve a record of what is effectively non-notable people writing about non-notable things. While I'm unsure if that particular archival record will exist in 2,000 years, I strongly suspect that there will exist some notable archive of non-notable people writing about non-notable things, the kind of record that historians today can only dream of having from those who existed 2,000 years prior to us.
- dwheeler 4y ago
  > Trying to look quickly for a hard number, it seems that the usual estimate (perhaps one study being widely reported rather than hard estimates) is about 5-10% of works surviving. I suspect the actual value is much smaller, probably less than 0.1%. Those estimates are based on surviving references and indices, and there's no way to know how complete they are. Fundamentally we're all just guessing - if something's completely lost, there's a very good chance that it's impossible to know centuries later. > In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times. I hope so, but I have my doubts. When Sumerian libraries burned, the clay tablets simply hardened. Today, most modern data storage systems only last a decade or two, they require copying for the data to be readable... and we have no idea if future generations will make those copies. Also, increasingly data is stored in dynamically-generated pages on websites and in single page applications (SPAs). If the website goes down, a lot of the data is essentially impossible to get. I really appreciate efforts like the GitHub Arctic Vault: <https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/>. That has a fighting chance to be recoverable in two thousand years. But the Library of Alexandria showed us that if all the archives are in one place, they can all be simultaneously lost. I certainly would like to this we're doing a better job of archiving. I want to be proven wrong :-).

akprasad 4y ago

> even non-European ones like Mayan or Chinese A sad tangent: most of the Mayan literature specifically was deliberately destroyed during the Spanish conquest [1]. > Our knowledge of ancient Maya thought must represent only a tiny fraction of the whole picture, for of the thousands of books in which the full extent of their learning and ritual was recorded, only four have survived to modern times (as though all that posterity knew of ourselves were to be based upon three prayer books and Pilgrim's Progress). And a typical attitude of the times (Bishop Diego de Landa, July 1562): > We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices