While the Rosetta stone has saved a key bit of data for about 2000 years, it is not necessarily superior to CD’s, tape, or other modern equipment.
The Stone represents an example of one succesful strategy–a single indestructible copy. But look at the problems. The Stone was lost (to academia) for hundreds and hundreds of years–a problem with limited copies. stone allowed Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs–a written language that itself was “lost” for hundreds of years. Although the examples of the langauge survived in other documents/stones besides Rosetta, it is meaningless to say that the written word by itself is “durable” if no one understands it. There are probably other undiscovered Rosetta Stones and certainly other languages that are lost forever. The single copy and/or written word based strategy is not always succesful.
The other major strategy to preserve data is to produce many copies and store them widely–in libraries, attics, landfills, on a thousand computers, on a million cds. No one need feel deprived of Perry Como’s Greatest Hits, ever. Although Cecil’s point about playing equipment is well-taken, he contradicts himself by noting that he has a record player in his own attic. Just walk into your local Goodwill and pick up a few 8-track players and tell me it’s not a hell of a lot easier than digging for rocks in the Egyptian dessert. Even if all these tons of surplus electronics someday disappear, it won’t be much harder to reverse engineer a player than to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. More importantly, data is continously shifted to new mediums. Yes, some data gets left behind, but that’s always been the case, even with stone tablets.
Finally, consider DVD’s. They’re packed with information–written subtitles in several languages, spoken language track(s), and visuals, all packed in a digital, easily stored, and copied medium. They kick Rosetta’s stony ass. Not only do they store language, they give future people all the tools to decipher it.
Perhaps the best medium would be one that ‘plays’ itself, has durablility built into every copy, and plenty of multi-media interpretive tools.
But imagine if the ancients had pocessed such a technology–we’d be knee-deep in the Egyptian equivalent of ABBA.
Quoth Shifty: "Perhaps the best medium would be one that ‘plays’ itself, has durablility built into every copy, and plenty of multi-media interpretive tools. "
Like, say, oral tradition?
How do you figure DVD’s give future people all the tools needed to decipher them? Without a player they’re kinda worthless.
How do we know they’re still viable after fifty years, let alone hundreds or thousands?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that DVD’s themselves were the best medium. I’m just imagining what the characteristics the medium might have. DVD’s do need a player, but the Rosetta stone would have been easier to decipher if it had a video track of Ptolemaios V.
I remember seeing an old movie version of the Time Machine where the time traveller dude discovers silver discs that produce sound if you simply spin them on a tabletop. Maybe something like that–record and player in one.
Or, oral tradition, like the mnemonic devices used to memorize the Vedas or something.
micro-film is horrible, bound newspapers properly stored last longer.
Article in the New Yorker or Harpers last year, I think, about a man who is preserving American illustrated newspapers, bound editions he bought in England of Hearsts illusrated paper. Apparently lots of holes exsist in the micro-film record of these papers and now the micro-film it self is now breaking down. Also no mention of Bill Gates moving his entire film archive (big Bill owns Hulton Getty I belive, a stock photography company) to a climate controlled abandoned mine (in Washington I believe).
And while some records get rarer and more expensive by the day, quite allot of people still us them, huge numbers of soul and funk fans in England and the rest of the world buy sell and trade these records, some 45’s are worth thousands. I suggest looking at a magazine called Big Daddy, published in England, writes will track down musicians who put out a few copies of a 45 just to record the rest of their output and the history of the music-musicians.
Very popular records are reissued all the time, sure allot of this is a dj driven thing, and dj’s do wreck records sometime but that whole culture is very passionate about music, they put in the work and learn about the records and search and find them.
Check out Funky sixteen corners, a recent funk comp, many others as well.
I am starting to ramble, sorry kinda hung over. I was dissapointed with Cecils answer, to short not very interesting, yo C whats up with that?
If I may be so bold as to distill Shifty’s comments into one sentence, as well as reflect my own thoughts on the article:
We will get by.
Any data that is important enough will somehow find its way down through the ages. How would our lives have been impacted if the 1960 census data was lost? Not much, to be sure.
The Rosetta Stone, although an important key to reconstructing an ancient language, really hasn’t impacted my life.
In Jeff Rothenberg’s PDF article, he has left a clue to his family fortune on a CD-ROM. Would this kind of situation really happen? I doubt it. Anyone concerned about passing on their fortune would likely store the information in some kind of physical document, stored in a safe deposit box.
If we begin to worry about the accuracy of the historical record being impacted, we quickly run into the old axiom that history is created by those who record it. The historical record is a fluid concept anyway. No getting around that.
If something is important enough, it will survive in some way.