5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital

purduephotog writes "In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitized around 60,000 tablets. An overview is available at ABCNews, while the main site can be found at at UCLA." The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.

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The Ironic Part?

[LISNews]

"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."

Uuuh, well, the interesting part will be to see if these digitized images of the actual tablets will be still used in 5/10/100 years, while in another 4,000 years the rocks will most likely still be readable.

Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute says "It's like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets", which I've read alot on these types of projects.

That's like saying if you've seen the Grand Canyon on TV there's no need to go there, or if you've seen pictures of the top of Mt. Everest there's no need to try and climb it.

Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.

Often digital dosen't last.

[sanermind]

Note this link about how an attempt to preserve an ancient book digitally ended in the ironic situation years later where the digital format was obsolete and unreadable after little more than a decade, while the ancient book was still fine.

The real problem with bit entropy can only be solved (if you ask me) by having the information regularly copied and used by at least some people [who will thus bother to migrate it into the new super-dense holographic optical processors all the kids will be using in 2080, who probably wouldn't even recognize the purpose of a shiny little 5cm disk if their lives depended on it].

The continuance of the historical record may well be a victim of excessive IP protection and laws like the DMCA, as much as that sounds like a somewhat far-fetched possibility today. Only info in an open format that is 'mirrored' by many people [and kept freshly copied into modern devices] would likely prevent this.