Communications of the ACM
'We're Going Backward!'
In caves in Lascaux, France, magnificent artworks were discovered from 17,300 years ago. Cuneiform clay tablets written over 5,000 years ago are still readable today (if you happen to know Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Sumerian, Urartian, or Old Persian). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was more or less contemporary with cuneiform and papyrus manuscripts dating from about 4,600 years ago have survived. The Greeks and the Romans carved letters in stone and these are still eminently readable over 2,000 years later.
Vellum and parchment manuscripts dating to 4,400 years ago still exist, albeit in fragmentary form. On the other hand, illuminated manuscripts on parchment or vellum dating from 1000 A.D. are still magnificent in appearance and eminently readable if one is familiar with the Latin or Greek of the period and the stylized penmanship of the age.
Comments
P J Narayanan
This is indeed an important issue. However, the volumes make everything difficult.
In the old times, production in contemporary media was expensive, difficult, and hence the volume was low. This also translated to only truly valuable information being stored in the media. Conversely, everything put into the media became valuable. The digital media today is cheap, indiscriminate, and voluminous. This automatically reduces its value!
We can only create alternate (and perhaps expensive) channels to preserve information and artifacts that are truly valuable. The medium of choice may well be stones, baked clay, or copper plates!
P J Narayanan
IIIT, Hyderabad
Bill Curtis
A very important issue. The motion picture and television industries have lost untold numbers of movies and shows due to the decay or loss of old film. There are efforts to preserve the content of old films, but they struggle to keep up with rate at which this visual trove is decaying. It's the essence of preserving our art, culture, and history. While there are gaziggabytes of electronic information to preserve, advancing text and pictographic analysis technologies will make them accessible to future genmerations.
Richard Gabriel
Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay had a paper in Onward! 2015 about an approach to this problem - The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015. It is in the Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2814250) and a preprint is on the Viewpoints Research Institute site (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf).
Richard P. Gabriel
IBM Research
Warren Scheinin
Like the White Album, as noted in Men in Black, if its important, it will be transcribed to the next generation of popular media. Do we really need Napiers Bones or a working slide rule? Have you seen a copy of the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae recently, much less used one?
Yes, I have containers full of 8 floppies and towers of 3 diskettes I can no longer access (as is the case with most 8 track tape owners), but then there is nothing on them I dont have on my current terabyte drive. And yet, we are currently reading the contents of charred manuscripts without opening them.
So not to worry just yet. My 60 year old copy of Robert Heinlein's Double Star, albeit a bit brown around the edges, using my newly installed cataract lens, is still readable. Youre welcome to borrow it.
Joshua Muskovitz
While my instinct is to share in the lament that much of our modern media has a much shorter expected lifespan than the examples from antiquity, I must point out the obvious observer bias present. How many other types of media have been created during those ancient times that have since turned to dust? By definition, we can never know. We have no basis to assume that those forms which have survived constitute any significant portion of all media from the past.
One must wonder just how much loss has occurred since the dawn of time. We generate content at an alarmingly increasing rate. Are we losing content at an increasing rate? And is this measured in raw loss, or as a percentage?
That having been said, there are projects that exist today which at a minimum attempt to raise the level of discussion. One such example is The Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org/). They write: "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." Whether they can succeed, only time will tell. Or not.
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