I once heard someone distinguish between “diploma” work and “toothbrush” work: diploma work is work you do once and then it’s done, whereas toothbrush work is work you have to do continually forever. A lot of information-related things seem like diploma work, because you don’t need to re-discover electromagnetism or re-write libc to be a software engineer, but when you zoom out there’s a lot of toothbrush work needed to maintain them.
This article isn’t wrong but it also doesn’t add much. Digital media degrade, and require complex machines to read back.
Pretty much the best medium has proved to be clay tablets, baked (usually by accident). The next best medium is any medium with people actively copying it (including Hindu scriptures with multiple redundant versions to memorize).
Pretty much the best medium has proved to be clay tablets, baked (usually by accident). The next best medium is any medium with people actively copying it (including Hindu scriptures with multiple redundant versions to memorize).
Future scholars have to decipher the clay tablets, but the work transmitted by the living community can be re-translated as language changes or transmitted with commentary as to how it should be understood. So, arguably, the living community is a better medium for transmitting information and not merely graphemes that once encoded it.
Are there any examples of deciphering an ancient script without linking it to some known language (Coptic to hieroglyphics, contemporary Mayan, Linear B to Greek, etc.)?
Modern computing makes data trivial to produce and reproduce, but it must be reproduced to last, be it by making new tapes, copying to new hard drives, spreading data so other people storage it and back it up, etc. It’s a lot more “biological”, for lack of a better term, than making clay tablets for a few hundred years, If we care about it, we have to make an effort to keep it.
I once heard someone distinguish between “diploma” work and “toothbrush” work: diploma work is work you do once and then it’s done, whereas toothbrush work is work you have to do continually forever. A lot of information-related things seem like diploma work, because you don’t need to re-discover electromagnetism or re-write libc to be a software engineer, but when you zoom out there’s a lot of toothbrush work needed to maintain them.
This article isn’t wrong but it also doesn’t add much. Digital media degrade, and require complex machines to read back.
Pretty much the best medium has proved to be clay tablets, baked (usually by accident). The next best medium is any medium with people actively copying it (including Hindu scriptures with multiple redundant versions to memorize).
Future scholars have to decipher the clay tablets, but the work transmitted by the living community can be re-translated as language changes or transmitted with commentary as to how it should be understood. So, arguably, the living community is a better medium for transmitting information and not merely graphemes that once encoded it.
Are there any examples of deciphering an ancient script without linking it to some known language (Coptic to hieroglyphics, contemporary Mayan, Linear B to Greek, etc.)?
My wife is a medievalist and can examine scrolls and codices over a thousand years old. I have data from grad school trapped on Zip disks.
Obligatory link to David Rosenthal’s work: https://blog.dshr.org/
Modern computing makes data trivial to produce and reproduce, but it must be reproduced to last, be it by making new tapes, copying to new hard drives, spreading data so other people storage it and back it up, etc. It’s a lot more “biological”, for lack of a better term, than making clay tablets for a few hundred years, If we care about it, we have to make an effort to keep it.
I wonder what kind of mechanism do archive.org and others employ to try to mitigate this?