{"id":22112,"date":"2019-11-04T14:36:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T19:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/?p=22112"},"modified":"2019-11-06T09:56:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T14:56:39","slug":"whats-old-is-new-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/blog\/whats-old-is-new-again\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Old is New Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portion of Plate b41215 from the DASCH collection of Halley's comet taken on April 21, 1910 from Arequipa, Peru with the 8-inch Bache Doublet, Voigtlander. Courtesy of the DASCH project.<\/p><\/div>\n

by Paul Edmon<\/a>, November 4, 2019<\/em><\/p>\n

As Solomon said<\/a> \"there is nothing new under the sun\", and so it is with archival technology.\u00a0 Hollywood<\/a> it seems has stumbled on the trick of etching glass to store data for long term (i.e. centuries).\u00a0 Fun thing is this is a return to previous methods of storage.<\/p>\n

A general rule about data, the more useable data is the higher probability it can be destroyed or corrupted.\u00a0 As such archiving data for the future has become a bit of a headache for librarians, data scientists, and research computing staff.\u00a0 After all digital data is by far the most useful type of data, at least in our modern epoch.\u00a0 It can be read and manipulated by computers.\u00a0 It can be shared across the globe easily, and has an almost universal language to it.\u00a0 However with that fungibility, comes problems of durability and longevity.\u00a0 Digital data can be corrupted by a bad disk, electrical short, or even cosmic rays.\u00a0 Those producing the data usually do not have data provenance and archive in mind so the data is stored in non-ideal ways and is commonly lost.\u00a0 Beyond that since the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics still applies you have to contend with the fact that everything eventually decays and dies.\u00a0 The enemy of entropy is the final end for all meaningful data.<\/p>\n

So given all this what formats have stood the test of time?\u00a0 How can we ensure that data will outlive us and be useful?\u00a0 Clearly just running spinning disks, tape, or solid state devices will be insufficient.\u00a0 After all the materials that make up tapes decay over time, hard drives get corrupted, and even solid state devices suffer the death of entropy.\u00a0 Not to mention the fact that as formats change the previous format may be unreadable except to the select few who have that legacy machine and format knowledge.\u00a0 How much data has already be lost on cassette tapes, 8 tracks, and ancient diskettes (ancient being 40 years old)?\u00a0 Beyond that what about all the crazy amounts of emails that people send that one day will go into the great digital trash bin, historians would love to have those and who knows how long any given company who hosts the email or email format will last for.<\/p>\n

The answer is, of course, in our past.\u00a0 Over the past several thousand years of history, humanity has inadvertently or purposefully managed to construct means to store information for millennia.\u00a0 For instance think about the cuneiform tablets<\/a> that encode the earliest written languages of man.\u00a0 They have lasted for nigh on 5000 years and, assuming you know Sumerian, are readable.\u00a0 As it turns out ceramic is pretty durable stuff so these tablets have survived the test of time.<\/p>\n

Naturally though cuneiform tablets are highly useful long term storage devices but not very fungible.\u00a0 Thus humanity developed paper, scrolls, and books.\u00a0 These can last for thousands of years, as shown by the numerous ancient texts<\/a> (ancient here being thousands of years old) that we still have access to.\u00a0 They are also more fungible as one can easily write comments in the margins, correct errors made by copyists.\u00a0 Heck if you can figure out how to build a machine<\/a> to make text production efficient, you could even start a Reformation<\/a>!\u00a0 Sadly though their durability does not hold a candle to ceramic tablets.<\/p>\n

Even closer to our own day, one can encode data on glass plates.\u00a0 Not movies like Hollywood wishes to do but photographs of the stars.\u00a0 These pictures can be very useful for enterprising young women<\/a> who<\/a> want to better understand how stars work.\u00a0 Even better they hold up great over time, lasting hundreds of years (at least that's as long of a baseline as we have thus far).\u00a0 Sadly inspecting plates is rough business, even for graduate students.\u00a0 Thus projects like DASCH<\/a> want to do the reverse of what Hollywood is doing and moving the massive collection of data on plates to a digital format for easy of use.\u00a0 But again, now the data has become fungible and more liable to destruction.\u00a0 For long term the plates are actually a better means of storage.<\/p>\n

So what to do?\u00a0 Do you print out all your correspondence on dot-matrix thermal paper?\u00a0 Do you try to inscribe it all on a golden plate<\/a> and send it into deep space?\u00a0 Do you get yourself a kiln, grab a stylus, and go old school?\u00a0 Frankly nobody really knows but it is one of the major concerns with modern data: just how do you store all that information for posterity and yet keep it useful for modernity?\u00a0 Perhaps the old maxim will turn out true once again, that perhaps the old ways can tell us something about how to live in the bright data rich future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Paul Edmon, November 4, 2019 As Solomon said \"there is nothing new under the sun\", and so it is with archival technology.\u00a0 Hollywood it seems has stumbled on the trick of etching glass to store data for long term (i.e. centuries).\u00a0 Fun thing is this is a return to previous methods of storage. A general rule about data, the…<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":22113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[178,61],"class_list":["post-22112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-archive","tag-storage"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YvN-5KE","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/b41215.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22112"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22182,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22112\/revisions\/22182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}