3:15pm Feb.98.PST -- Computer technology has already conquered text,=
and
soon it's going to allow us to save nearly everything around us. As our
cultural institutions shift to recording and preserving artifacts in
digital form, it's less and less clear what the future holds for all of
this material. With enough disk space to record whatever we write, talk
about, photograph, and do, how can society plan for its use 10, 500, or
10,000 years from now?
That question is at the heart of a four-day conference starting Sunday in
Los Angeles under the sponsorship of the Getty Conservation Institute
(mission: to aid in preserving the world's cultural heritage), Getty
Information Institute (dedicated to building a global cultural information
infrastructure), and the future-focused Long Now Foundation (which promotes
the notion of long-term responsibility to counteract what it describes as
society's "pathologically short attention span").
"Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity" will bring together a
high-voltage panel of thinkers to discuss preservation models for the=
future.
The conference organizer is Stewart Brand, cofounder of The WELL and
founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Others among the 14 participants
include composer Brian Eno; Danny Hillis, Disney's chief of research and
development; archivists Howard Bresser and Brewster Kahle; futurist Paul
Saffo; computer scientist Jaron Lanier; Wired magazine executive editor
Kevin Kelly; and author Bruce Sterling.
The vulnerability of our cultural data is a problem "much deeper than meets
the eye," says Brand.
"Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10
years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or a
civilization. Yet it's almost an intractable problem," he says. "Our aim is
to help set in motion a long-term strategic path which will solve the
problem, so any digital artifact can be kept alive as long as needed, even
across gaps of decades."
Preservation is not a new concern for libraries and museums, but changing
technology has created new problems and responsibilities for information
safekeepers.
Major institutions are responding with projects like one at the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to digitize the museum's
holdings as part of a public exhibition. Other examples of the phenomenon
include The Names Project's digitization of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the
Yale University-led Cambodian Genocide Project, which aims to digitally
preserve evidence of the 1970s Khmer Rouge reign of terror.
Archivist and "Time and Bits" participant Brewster Kahle says that as
people begin to understand how many cultural artifacts are in digital form,
two things take place.
"The first reaction people seem to have is, 'Oh, shit,' because all the
archiving isn't happening yet," Kahle says. "You may not have liked your
television upbringing, but it's still a pretty important part of us, as a
human species....
"Something else - which is only starting to occur to us - is that you can
do tremendous things when you can take what tens of millions of people are
thinking about - aggregated human thought - and put it in computable form."=
That mass of information is beyond the practical reach of any individual.
So a central question for conference participants - as it is for the many
computer scientists struggling to impose order on the data available on the
Net - is how to develop tools to find and assess the world's cultural
databank.