5 ms·

Several people have mentioned the Internet Archive. They're doing god's work and you should give them money [0]. But I think that dapper Vint "One is glad to b

Several people have mentioned the Internet Archive. They're doing god's work and you should give them money [0]. But I think that dapper Vint "One is glad to be of service" Cerf is referring to how difficult it will be for far future historians to piece together records of daily life in the 21st century, especially from the view of individuals. Think of Da Vinci's notebooks, the personal journals of artic explorers, correspondence letters from great artists and statesman. Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format. We'd have a hard time viewing that media today. In 1,000 years it might be impossible. A lot more will be lost to history than what the Internet Archive is currently storing. I can't think of a great solution. When I watch some historical documentaries, it seems like every other scene is based on a quotation from a letter or an old photograph. We don't print those things out any more. They'll be lost, completely lost, when email services and social networks finally shut down. And even if people download personal backups, most file and physical storage formats have a shelf life measured in decades at the most. Letters can sit around in attics for lifetimes, undisturbed. A file formatted for a Commodore 64's word processor program might as well be written in a lost language and then one way encrypted. I'm not sure what to do about it, but it seems like a damn shame. [0] https://archive.org/donate/index.php https://archive.org/donate/index.php

theoh 12y ago
Art institutions take these problems seriously. XFR STN at the New Museum is just one example of dozens of projects which attempt to rescue obsolete digital content. I think the problem is less serious than you think where file formats are concerned. It is very severe with a platform like Twitter, though. An informed public would reject the useless level of threading offered by Twitter...
- lifeformed 12y ago
  Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be interesting for future people to listen in. It doesn't seem that important of a thing to preserve though. Sure, if we could hear daily conversations of people from the year 1000 we'd learn a lot. But that's only because we don't have access to much other cultural information from back then, unlike what we'll have now with webpages and news articles.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    99% may just be "noise", but that doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. Excluding an entire medium from preservation would be horrible for future research.
    - lifeformed 12y ago
      I don't see what makes Twitter worth preserving any more than everyday conversation, or packaging labels, or billboards, or whatever other junk information there is. Just because it would be somewhat easier to do preserve a digital thing doesn't make it more important to, does it? I mean I'm sure it'll be helpful to a subset of researchers. But I don't see why it's Twitter's fault for not making it easy to preserve, as much as it is Microsoft's fault for not preserving WordArt bake sale announcements.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Track the evolution of online language as a consequence of Twitter between the years 2001 and 2100. Which tweets are just noise now?
    - gknoy 12y ago
      I'm not sure if you are joking, but I have a linguist friend who mines Twitter for things like evolving language usage. She shares some pretty interesting things that she learns from it, too. I expect that being able to do that with a hundred-year (or multi-decade) corpus could be really interesting.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    The fact that so many people are wasting relatively large amounts of time producing "noise" is historically relevant.
    - lifeformed 12y ago
      But we won't need all the noise itself to learn that fact.
polarix 12y ago
But this is just a property of acceleration. If languages had started to change at the same speed as file formats have, or we had started to miniaturize in other ways, those millenia old letters might no longer have been usable either. It's definitely worth being conscious of the value of interpreted artifacts, but this is a continuation of a very old tension.
xamuel 12y ago
>Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format I really don't think this is a big problem, in the historical context. Sure, the average person won't be able to casually open those files, but neither can the average native English speaker casually read the original Beowulf! If a catastrophe wipes out an ancient civilization and all that survives is one laptop-sized cuneiform tablet, historians don't get much from that. If a catastrophe wipes out modern civilization and all that survives is one laptop, historians get gigabytes, maybe terabytes, from that.
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? Isn't there far more complexity in our current stack than beowulf? Even if data survived, it would take an incredible effort to use.
  - jdminhbg 12y ago
    > Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746
    - abandonliberty 12y ago
      True, but how many people do we have working on that problem? Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science) Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex. I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.
zanny 12y ago
I think it ends up being the responsibility of individual families to preserve their digital history as much as their old physical stuff. For example, I have digitized probably over 5k photographs and several dozen home movies (that I had to record from VHS tapes and even some old film reels), and several thousand pages of documents - report cards, letters, tax forms, etc - of my extend families over the years. That entire archive is now around 20GB big (I have "new" stuff and "old" stuff, pre and post 2000 separate) and I have it backed up in the cloud, on three personal computers, my own external hard drives, and I have it burned in sets of dvds in three places (two homes and one storage unit). I made sure it was all formatted with open standards (extenion-less pdfs, pngs, jpgs, theora, vorbis, odfs, etc). The archives themselves are all UDF formatted. This kind of stuff is not going to magically become unusable. The formats aren't going anyway. The transport interfaces might, but someone will be able to read dvds, plug usb, and plug sata for several decades at least. And I fully intend to update that collection (probably around 2020) and include the next decade in it in whatever formats are most appropriately modern at the time. At least as long as I still have something like gstreamer to pipe all the audio / video through to transcode it from speex / vorbis to opus or whatever else turns up. Most families should do something like that. I doubt many of them are.

theoh 12y ago

Art institutions take these problems seriously. XFR STN at the New Museum is just one example of dozens of projects which attempt to rescue obsolete digital content. I think the problem is less serious than you think where file formats are concerned. It is very severe with a platform like Twitter, though. An informed public would reject the useless level of threading offered by Twitter...

lifeformed 12y ago
Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be interesting for future people to listen in. It doesn't seem that important of a thing to preserve though. Sure, if we could hear daily conversations of people from the year 1000 we'd learn a lot. But that's only because we don't have access to much other cultural information from back then, unlike what we'll have now with webpages and news articles.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  99% may just be "noise", but that doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. Excluding an entire medium from preservation would be horrible for future research.
  - lifeformed 12y ago
    I don't see what makes Twitter worth preserving any more than everyday conversation, or packaging labels, or billboards, or whatever other junk information there is. Just because it would be somewhat easier to do preserve a digital thing doesn't make it more important to, does it? I mean I'm sure it'll be helpful to a subset of researchers. But I don't see why it's Twitter's fault for not making it easy to preserve, as much as it is Microsoft's fault for not preserving WordArt bake sale announcements.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Track the evolution of online language as a consequence of Twitter between the years 2001 and 2100. Which tweets are just noise now?
  - gknoy 12y ago
    I'm not sure if you are joking, but I have a linguist friend who mines Twitter for things like evolving language usage. She shares some pretty interesting things that she learns from it, too. I expect that being able to do that with a hundred-year (or multi-decade) corpus could be really interesting.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  The fact that so many people are wasting relatively large amounts of time producing "noise" is historically relevant.
  - lifeformed 12y ago
    But we won't need all the noise itself to learn that fact.

polarix 12y ago

But this is just a property of acceleration. If languages had started to change at the same speed as file formats have, or we had started to miniaturize in other ways, those millenia old letters might no longer have been usable either. It's definitely worth being conscious of the value of interpreted artifacts, but this is a continuation of a very old tension.

xamuel 12y ago

>Now imagine that those things are stored on floppy disks in Office95 .doc format I really don't think this is a big problem, in the historical context. Sure, the average person won't be able to casually open those files, but neither can the average native English speaker casually read the original Beowulf! If a catastrophe wipes out an ancient civilization and all that survives is one laptop-sized cuneiform tablet, historians don't get much from that. If a catastrophe wipes out modern civilization and all that survives is one laptop, historians get gigabytes, maybe terabytes, from that.

abandonliberty 12y ago
Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? Isn't there far more complexity in our current stack than beowulf? Even if data survived, it would take an incredible effort to use.
- jdminhbg 12y ago
  > Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language? I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746
  - abandonliberty 12y ago
    True, but how many people do we have working on that problem? Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science) Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex. I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.

zanny 12y ago

I think it ends up being the responsibility of individual families to preserve their digital history as much as their old physical stuff. For example, I have digitized probably over 5k photographs and several dozen home movies (that I had to record from VHS tapes and even some old film reels), and several thousand pages of documents - report cards, letters, tax forms, etc - of my extend families over the years. That entire archive is now around 20GB big (I have "new" stuff and "old" stuff, pre and post 2000 separate) and I have it backed up in the cloud, on three personal computers, my own external hard drives, and I have it burned in sets of dvds in three places (two homes and one storage unit). I made sure it was all formatted with open standards (extenion-less pdfs, pngs, jpgs, theora, vorbis, odfs, etc). The archives themselves are all UDF formatted. This kind of stuff is not going to magically become unusable. The formats aren't going anyway. The transport interfaces might, but someone will be able to read dvds, plug usb, and plug sata for several decades at least. And I fully intend to update that collection (probably around 2020) and include the next decade in it in whatever formats are most appropriately modern at the time. At least as long as I still have something like gstreamer to pipe all the audio / video through to transcode it from speex / vorbis to opus or whatever else turns up. Most families should do something like that. I doubt many of them are.