Wave, Current, Cascade 2.0 beta

Behold, the Rosetta disk, a product of an ambitious multi-year project to record examples of over 1,500 extant human languages for long, long-term preservation, courtesy of Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream:

The issue of durability has long plagued archivists, and has often been used as a convenient means for Earth’s 207 remaining holdouts to disparage electronic media – it’s a bit too delicate. (As vellum manuscript aficionados said of wood pulp, as stone scribes said of parchment, as tribal storytellers said of weathered rock.)

Now, hopefully you’ve already started to figure out that the entire history of media is implicated in each new inscription technology and the information coded into it. So I really think it’s funny when the post suddenly reads “the Rosetta disk is not digital.”

Of course, when the information is encoded by means of analog imagery requiring only magnification to apprehend the data (if not interpret it), that’s an easy claim to make. OTOH: could this object ever existed without electronic technologies of inscription? Decoding isn’t the problem: 1000x is fairly within range for optical microscopes. But who has the patience to work out that massive writer’s cramp after spending hours at a time with a hair’s-width stylus to mark up all that nickel?

… oh, they got a machine to do all that work?

Taking instructions from a computer?

… Huh.

Not to belittle the effort. Especially in a world that places increasing pressure on finding ways to preserve electronic works built on platforms with short shelf lives, the first step begins necessarily with accepting the limitations of the original medium of production. What’s needed, perhaps, is a simple change in perspective: the best archives (of which the Rosetta disk is a strong contender) go beyond the simple dualities of “delicate medium” and “durable medium” and take that LOCKS principle one step further: Lots Of Copies in several distinct media Keeps ‘em Safe.

And far more available to far more people now for making the world a better place. Or whatever else we’re making the world ;-)

!: Unless someone really did confiscate all the Bibles, Torahs, religious-text software and Good Books on Tape…. well, I can account for my copies, anyway.