Slashdot Mirror
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age
al0ha writes to recommend a worthwhile piece up at American Scientist on the problems of archiving and data preservation in an age where all data are stored digitally. "It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the 'digital dark age.' This is the idea — or fear! — that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us. ... Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it."
At how much Farenheit the digital records combust? Wont be so dark that ages, at least while the fire last.
A century later, we will still will find buried snapshots of wikipedia on devices like WikiReader.With paper books making copies is expensive,to one kind of device usually, and takes a lot of space. Digital records,in the other hand,could be put in a lot of ways, but what must be preserved is how to decode or interpret it (using open formats for it could help a bit there).
Well according to that last round of climate data falsification there has already been a digital dark age. The claim is the original source data has already been digitally lost. So no one can prove their numbers wrong, we just have to take their word for it, even though these same people have been caught fudging data that can be proven and not victim of digital dark age. I wonder if the tax man will believe me if I said it was a digital dark age so please take my word for those huge tax deductible donations I made.