Domesday book: Technology fails, tradition succeeds

Bard

From: http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,661093,00.html

It was meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess - a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book. But 16 years after it was created, the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status: it is now unreadable.

The special computers developed to play the 12in video discs of text, photographs, maps and archive footage of British life are - quite simply - obsolete.

As a result, no one can access the reams of project information - equivalent to several sets of encyclopaedias - that were assembled about the state of the nation in 1986. By contrast, the original Domesday Book - an inventory of eleventh-century England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks - is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew, and can be accessed by anyone who can read and has the right credentials. 'It is ironic, but the 15-year-old version is unreadable, while the ancient one is still perfectly usable,' said computer expert Paul Wheatley. 'We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC.'
[ ... read more here ... ]

Inspector Gadget

...for everything that can't be seen with the most basic data input/output devices we have; namely, our eyes, limbs, and mouths. The reason that the original Domesday book is still readable, of course, is that you didn't require any special disc drives or other equipment in order to read it; it was obvious to the naked eye that it contained data, and there were only a relatively small (but, more importantly, finite) number of ways in which it could be interpreted; various combinations of language, orientation, text flow, etc.

(Another point of reference is that laserdiscs, as used by the 1986 Domesday book, have a very short shelf life - less (sometimes much less) than 30 years - due to a poor choice of adhesive used to bind the layers together. They could have at least chosen a non-proprietary format!)

However, it's kinda tricky to store sound or moving video by writing stuff on paper or carving a hunk of stone. Sure, there's the technology used for vinyl records, but they don't store particularly well either, and it would require quite a leap of intuition on the part of someone unfamiliar with the idea unearthing it after god-knows-how-many years.

From what I can see, the only way for anything like this to work is to make the data and the playback device one; incorporate everything necessary to view the data in whatever is used to store it. All you have to do then is to hope that the "best before" date on your batteries can't be taken too literally... :rolleyes:

Gadget

cerebus

Gregory Benford (mild-mannered physicist by day, SF writer by night) brings up something sort of similar in a book called "Deep Time".

He discusses the problem of trying to mark/signpost hazardous waste disposal sites in a way that will be interpreted correctly millenia later. No guarantee that language and symbolism will be interpreted the same way 10,000 years from now.

There's an extract here (kind of garbled towards the end - the text seems to be repeated?):

http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html

Fascinating problem - some of the solutions/scenarios that were proposed are really interesting.