tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/digital-preservation-8788/articlesDigital preservation – The Conversation2020-01-06T12:06:54Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1276842020-01-06T12:06:54Z2020-01-06T12:06:54ZBuilding a digital archive for decaying paper documents, preserving centuries of records about enslaved people<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308376/original/file-20200102-11939-1kf1r17.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C30%2C2038%2C1333&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Converting aging paper documents to digital archives can be a painstaking effort.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Slave Societies Digital Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Paper documents are still priceless records of the past, even in a digital world. Primary sources stored in local archives throughout Latin America, for example, describe a centuries-old multiethnic society grappling with questions of race, class and religion. </p>
<p>However, paper archives are vulnerable to flooding, humidity, insects, and rodents, among other threats. Political instability can cut off money used to maintain archives and institutional neglect can transform precious records into moldy rubbish. </p>
<p>Working closely with colleagues from around the world, I build digital archives and specialized tools that help us learn from those records, which trace the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent in the Americas from the 1500s to the 1800s. Our effort, the <a href="https://www.slavesocieties.org/">Slave Societies Digital Archive</a>, is one of many humanities projects that have accumulated substantial collections of digital images of paper documents.</p>
<p>The goal is to ensure this information – including some from documents that no longer exist physically – is accessible to future generations. </p>
<p>But preserving history by taking high-resolution photographs of centuries-old documents is only the beginning. Technological advances help scholars and archivists like me do a better job of preserving these records and learning from them, but don’t always make it easy.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308377/original/file-20200102-11900-1w5q2na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An archive in Cuba contains paper treasures that are hard to use and study – even in person.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Slave Societies Digital Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Collecting documents</h2>
<p>Since 2003, the Slave Societies Digital Archive has collected more than 700,000 digitized images of historical records documenting the lives of millions of Africans and people of African descent in North and South America.</p>
<p>Members of the core team, from universities in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, travel to project sites throughout Latin America, where they train local students and archivists to digitize ecclesiastical and government records from their communities. We give these communities the cameras, computers and other hardware they need to digitally preserve documents piled in the corners of 18th-century church basements, or about to be discarded by space-crunched municipal archives.</p>
<p>We also teach them a crucial skill for archiving and retrieval: how to create <a href="https://www.loc.gov/standards/metadata.html">metadata</a>, the descriptive information to help people find what interests them – like whether a document is a marriage certificate or a baptism record, and what year and town it’s from. Good metadata allows visitors to the project website to, for example, search for all baptism records from 17th-century Colombia.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308379/original/file-20200102-11919-ikrdx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A lot of people get involved, both teaching and learning how to properly photograph documents.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Slave Societies Digital Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<h2>From digitization to preservation</h2>
<p>Over time, we’ve gotten much better at digitizing documents. In older images, it’s not uncommon to see the photographer’s finger straying in from the side of the frame. Some of those older images are stored as relatively low-resolution JPEG files, a format that compresses the image file size by deleting some data when it’s saved. Most of those files are still completely legible even when a viewer zooms in, but some are not and will need to be digitized again in the future.</p>
<p>Our more recent preservation adheres to the rigorous standards of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/">the British Library</a>, which funds much of our work. Those images are taken in very high resolutions and stored in multiple file formats including <a href="https://www.archives.gov/preservation/products/definitions/tif.html">TIFF</a>, which remains the archival standard.</p>
<p>Transforming a collection of digitized images into a true digital archive is a time-consuming and detail-oriented effort. Early in this process, we ran into a curious problem involving photographs taken during our first few digitization efforts. Modern software frequently misinterpreted the orientation of these images, giving us pages rotated 90 degrees to the right or left or even completely upside down. In cases where an entire volume was rotated in the same incorrect way, it could be fixed automatically, but others with a range of errors had to be corrected by hand to let researchers work more easily with the material.</p>
<p>We’ve also found that data file names can cause problems. Many cameras assign images default names – like DSCN9126.jpg – that aren’t useful for figuring out what the pictures are. We have to rename each image in a standard way that indicates how it fits into our collection. </p>
<p>For the time being we’ve chosen simply to number images sequentially within each volume; another reasonable option would be to prefix each of these numbers with an ID referring to the volume the image comes from.</p>
<p>These aren’t major hurdles, but they and others along similar lines take some time to figure out and address properly. But this effort pays off when people hoping to explore the collection have an easier time finding and using our images.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308380/original/file-20200102-11919-1qwimqe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">With care, digital preservation can bring new life to crumbling documents.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Slave Societies Digital Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Where to store them?</h2>
<p>Once we’ve captured the images, we need to save them somewhere. </p>
<p>At present, the Slave Societies Digital Archive collection is close to 20 terabytes – <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20+terabytes">roughly the space needed to store all the text</a> in the Library of Congress.</p>
<p>Few institutions have the resources, personnel or expertise needed to store humanities data at such large scales. Data storage isn’t exorbitantly expensive, but it’s also not cheap – especially when the data needs to be accessed regularly, as opposed to being stored in a static backup or archival copy.</p>
<p>For many years, the Vanderbilt University Library hosted the data, but we outgrew what that organization could afford. We had been backing up many of our most important records on the Digital Preservation Network, a consortium of universities that pooled resources to fund a reliable digital storage system for scholarly production. But that organization <a href="https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-to-cease-operations/">shut down in late 2018</a> after consulting with each member organization to ensure that no data would be lost.</p>
<p>Our path has led to <a href="https://gizmodo.com/what-is-the-cloud-and-where-is-it-1682276210">the cloud</a>, computers in technology companies’ massive server-warehouse buildings that we access remotely to store and retrieve information. At the moment, multiple copies of our entire dataset are stored on servers on opposite sides of North America. As a result, we’re far less likely to lose our data than at any previous point in the project’s history.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306439/original/file-20191211-95130-167zdxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">If you can read this, you’re very highly trained.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://essss.library.vanderbilt.edu/islandora/object/essss%3A6554">The Conversation screenshot of Slave Societies Digital Archive file</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<h2>Opening access</h2>
<p>Storing these records in secure systems is another part of the equation, but we also need to make sure that they’re accessible to the people who want to see them. </p>
<p>Our documents, typically written in archaic Spanish or Portuguese, are <a href="https://essss.library.vanderbilt.edu/islandora/object/essss%3A6554">very hard to read</a>. Even native speakers need special training to decipher what they say.</p>
<p>For several years, we’ve been producing manual transcriptions of some of our most noteworthy records, such as a volume of baptisms from late 16th-century Havana. But that takes 10 to 15 minutes per page – meaning that transcribing our entire collection would take more than 100,000 hours. </p>
<p>Other projects have <a href="http://www.discoverfreedmen.org">used volunteers to do similar work</a>, but that approach is less likely to be the solution for our archive because of the linguistic skills required to read our documents.</p>
<p>We are exploring automating the transcription process using handwriting recognition technology. Those systems need more work, particularly when dealing with centuries-old handwriting styles, but <a href="https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus">some researchers are already making progress</a>. </p>
<p>We are also looking at ways to identify the people and places mentioned in our records, making them searchable and connecting them to <a href="http://enslaved.org">other similar datasets</a>. </p>
<p>As we and other researchers connect our work, the stories contained in these old documents will come to life and bring new insight to modern scholars.</p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127684/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Genkins has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</span></em></p>Centuries’ worth of important information is stored on paper – which can decay, burn or get eaten by pests. Peek inside the process of making all that data digital.Daniel Genkins, Postdoctoral Fellow in History, Vanderbilt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1162392019-07-25T12:54:46Z2019-07-25T12:54:46ZThe internet is rotting – let’s embrace it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281222/original/file-20190625-81762-17ijgs3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How can you forget when the internet won't let you?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/artificial-intelligence-electronic-circuit-microchip-glowing-658232323?src=nlmB8tvXbP1klxqAQzHpsg-1-24&studio=1">vchal/shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I have just taken an entire website and gigabytes of data offline. It covered a highly successful series of conferences on the data economy. It brought together thought leaders and key decision-makers from around the world for annual retreats – over a decade ago. And now it is gone. </p>
<p>Every year, some thousands of sites – including ones with unique information – <a href="https://firstmonday.org/article/view/5852/4456">go offline</a>. Countless further webpages become inaccessible; instead of information, users encounter error messages. </p>
<p>Where some commentators may lament yet another black hole in the slowly rotting Internet, I actually feel okay. Of course, I, too, dread broken links and dead servers. But I also know: Forgetting is important. </p>
<p>In fact, as I argued in <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9436.html">my book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,”</a> all through human history, humans reserved remembering for the things that really mattered to them and forgot the rest. Now the internet is making forgetting a lot harder.</p>
<h2>Built to forget</h2>
<p>Humans are accustomed to a world in which forgetting is the norm, and remembering is the exception.</p>
<p>This isn’t necessarily a bug in human evolution. The mind forgets what is no longer relevant to our present. <a href="https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Seven-Sins-of-Memory/9780618219193">Human memory is constantly reconstructed</a> – it isn’t preserved in pristine condition, but becomes altered over time, helping people overcome cognitive dissonances. For example, people may see an awful past as rosier than it was, or devalue memories of past conflict with a person with whom they are close in the present. </p>
<p>Forgetting also helps humans to focus on current issues and to plan for the future. Research shows that those who are too tethered to their past <a href="http://doi.org/10.1080/13554790500473680">find it difficult to live and act in the present</a>. Forgetting creates space for something new, enabling people to go beyond what they already know. </p>
<p>Organizations that remember too much ossify in their processes and behavior. Learning something new requires forgetting something old – and that is hard for organizations that remember too much. There’s a <a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/1476127004047620">growing literature</a> on the importance of “unlearning,” or deliberately purging deeply rooted processes or practices from an organization – a fancy way to say that forgetting fulfills a valuable purpose.</p>
<h2>Choosing to remember</h2>
<p>Our human minds developed a rather effective mechanism to balance remembering and forgetting. Humans don’t have to do it consciously. (In fact people very rarely can – or can you forget something I tell you to forget?) The brain does it for us, mainly, <a href="http://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00032.2012">during sleep</a>. </p>
<p>This system is far from perfect – yes, I do forget things I wanted to remember, and recall things like phone numbers I no longer need – but it is working sufficiently well to let us think, decide and act in the present.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284366/original/file-20190716-173338-1ru1rxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Historians have preserved photographs that they deem important – like this shot of Abraham Lincoln in the main eastern theater of the Civil War, Battle of Antietam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/cwp.4a40254/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because humans have always forgotten so much, we learned about the importance of preserving the things that really matter. We have not preserved every commercial invoice from the 1800s, but kept <a href="https://mymodernmet.com/19th-century-america-photographs/">photos of important or illuminating moments</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, people make mistakes, and recorded memory reflects the choices of those with the power and the means to preserve. But even these biased memories are being constructed and reconstructed all the time, amended, augmented, sometimes even disregarded.</p>
<p>This means that humans are <a href="http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/hawlbachsspace.pdf">constantly defining and redefining</a> what for us as individuals and as a society really matters.</p>
<h2>Digital memories</h2>
<p>The internet is threatening this mental balancing. For the first time in human history, remembering is the default –- simple, easy and seemingly free –- <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t09g">and forgetting is hard</a>. </p>
<p>Think about your photos, your tweets, your documents. Our digital systems keep them, and you have to take action to get rid of them. I rarely do. It’s too tempting, too easy to just save everything. </p>
<p>What’s more, powerful, ubiquitous search has made this enormous amount of digital memories easily and swiftly accessible. Far more often than before, people now stumble over our collective past as they travel the net or <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8315897/facebook-on-this-day-nostalgia-app-bringing-back-painful-memories">look at their favorite social media</a>. For example, Facebook’s “On This Day” feature caused distress to some users when it unexpectedly surfaced posts about deceased loved ones.</p>
<p>That would be okay if humans had developed mental mechanisms to discount the past when it no longer tells us something relevant to the present. But humans never had to develop ways to forget deliberately. Because forgetting was automatic, when people remembered things, or were reminded of them, they gave them significance and importance -– why would they otherwise remember? </p>
<p>In the internet age, many things are remembered that have long lost their relevance. This strains people’s mental processes, as recall of something they thought they had forgotten suddenly creates questions about what past information is still relevant and what isn’t. People can’t help asking these questions, much like they can’t consciously forget (or at least not in most cases). This increases the chances for errors.</p>
<p>If someone is reminded of a person’s misdoing decades ago, they often can’t help but be shocked. They judge the misconduct in the context of the present. </p>
<p>For example, a Canadian psychotherapist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/us/14bar.html">was banned from entering the U.S.</a>, because an immigration officer checking his ID was searching his name on the internet and discovered that he confessed in a scholarly article to taking drugs many years earlier. A young woman was <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/Drunken-Pirate-Learns-Costly/38725">refused a teacher’s certificate</a> because she had posted a photo of her online that showed her with a drink in hand and that photo was discovered by her university.</p>
<p>I fear that comprehensive digital memory may push people toward an unforgiving world, in which we deny each other (and ourselves) the capacity to evolve, to grow and to change. </p>
<p>Losing the ability to forget is not simply an unreserved blessing, but a potential curse. As much as many dread the rotting internet, and may rightly want to preserve the parts that people care about, I think that everyone should consider embracing digital rotting as an opportunity, and the empty spaces it creates as lacunae of hope.</p>
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<header>Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is the author of:</header>
<p><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9436.html">Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age</a></p>
<footer>Princeton University Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</footer>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery. Princeton University Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</span></em></p>Forgetting is beneficial for the human brain. But the internet has made it harder to let go of painful or problematic memories.Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1158912019-05-15T10:47:57Z2019-05-15T10:47:57ZYour internet data is rotting<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273366/original/file-20190508-183083-co1y4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The internet is growing, but old information continues to disappear daily.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/personal-computer-burnt-due-electricity-short-276133502?src=AtB4aqoYwgFHf66FlH7ooA-1-22">wk1003mike/shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many MySpace users were dismayed to discover earlier this year that the social media platform <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/704458168/myspace-says-it-lost-years-of-user-uploaded-music">lost 50 million files uploaded between 2003 and 2015</a>. </p>
<p>The failure of MySpace to care for and preserve its users’ content should serve as a reminder that relying on free third-party services can be risky.</p>
<p>MySpace has probably preserved the users’ data; it just lost their content. The data was valuable to MySpace; the users’ content less so.</p>
<h2>What happened to MySpace</h2>
<p>MySpace is a social networking media site where performers could upload music or other content for access and distribution to its user community. It has always been a free site, with revenues coming from ads and programming that targets users for specific products.</p>
<p>Formed in 2003 in imitation of the social gaming site Friendster, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace">MySpace</a> grew rapidly and was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005. By 2008, MySpace was the leading social networking site, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/myspace-sold-35-million-news">valued at one time at US$12 billion</a> But it declined in popularity – thanks to an overprevalence of ads, concerns about exposure of minors to sexual content and other issues. In 2011, News Corporation <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40562668/myspace-which-still-exists-may-be-up-for-sale-again">sold MySpace</a> to Specific Media, who sold it again in 2016 to Time Inc., which was in turn bought by the Meredith Corporation in 2018.</p>
<p>So the company went through three changes in ownership over a 12-year period, and saw revenues and membership drop precipitously over that time. One sale might be fine, but three sales over short term suggests to me a troubled business that was not in a good position to watch over others’ intellectual property.</p>
<p>Anyone using MySpace as a storage service who did not have alternate backup is simply out of luck. You left your intellectual property sitting beside the information superhighway, and when you came back 10 years later it was gone. </p>
<p>MySpace is not alone in encountering problems. Amazon cloud services, for example, also experienced a <a href="https://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Amazon-EC2-Outage.html">a substantial outage in 2011</a> and <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-explains-massive-aws-outage-says-employee-error-took-servers-offline-promises-changes/">another in 2017</a>. Though temporary, and without actual loss of data, these outages left users without access to precious and important files for some time.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273674/original/file-20190509-183093-eez38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">In a statement, Myspace said, ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-uk-april-20th-2017-homepage-625284209?src=UaCSO8O5ckQApQ-UerSS1g-1-6">chrisdorney/shutterstock.com</a></span>
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<h2>A much bigger problem</h2>
<p>Preserving content or intellectual property on the internet presents a conundrum. If it’s accessible, then it isn’t safe; if it’s safe, then it isn’t accessible. </p>
<p>Accessible content is subject to tampering, theft or other sorts of bad actions. Only content that is inaccessible can be locked and protected from hacking.</p>
<p>The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of <a href="https://www.live-counter.com/how-big-is-the-internet/">70 terabytes per second</a>. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever. </p>
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<p>Massive and desperate efforts are underway to preserve whatever is worth preserving, but even sorting out what is and what is not is itself a formidable undertaking. What will be of value in 10 years – or 50 years? And how to preserve it? </p>
<p><a href="https://www.niso.org/publications/z3948-1992-r2009-permanence-paper">Acid-free paper</a> can last 500 years; stone inscriptions even longer. But magnetic media like hard drives have a much shorter life, lasting only three to five years. They also need to be copied and verified on a very short life cycle to avoid data degradation at <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/empirical-measurements-of-disk-failure-rates-and-error-rates/">observed failure rates</a> between 3% and 8% annually. </p>
<p>Then there is also a problem of software preservation: How can people today or in the future interpret those WordPerfect or WordStar files from the 1980s, when the original software companies have stopped supporting them or gone out of business?</p>
<p>A nonprofit startup called <a href="https://archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> is preserving snapshots of the web on an ongoing basis, but mostly this is for top-level public HTML webpages such as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/nyt.com">The New York Times website</a> and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/2017*/www.facebook.com">Facebook</a>, not for underlying content files. As of last fall, its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine">Wayback Machine</a> held over 450 billion pages in 25 petabytes of data. This would represent .0003% of the total internet.</p>
<p>Universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data in a hodgepodge of archives, such as the U.K.’s <a href="https://www.dpconline.org/">Digital Preservation Coalition</a>, <a href="https://metaarchive.org/">MetaArchive</a>, or the <a href="https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-preservation-network-disband/">now-disbanded</a> collaborative Digital Preservation Network.
Preservation is hard and expensive in time, money and equipment. To be most useful, it not only has to be stored, but hosted in a form that is accessible and available for future reuse. </p>
<p>Actual storage costs less than $0.05 per gigabyte, but <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs00799-012-0092-1">storage is only a small percentage</a> of the costs of preservation. Acquisition, networking, maintenance and administration all require substantial and costly human labor. </p>
<p>Budgeting models suggest a 10-year preservation expense of around $2.50 per gigabyte, or $2,500 per terabyte, or $625,000 for the files MySpace failed to preserve.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273676/original/file-20190509-183086-1ccfq8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Huge amounts of new content are uploaded to the internet every day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/large-group-utp-cables-ethernet-rack-1081131248?src=Yn6oBBWSpzU8MYxq2Im2zA-1-6">Fingon ss/shutterstock.com</a></span>
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<h2>Considering your own data</h2>
<p>So yes, the internet is rotting, but archivists and digital librarians like myself knew it was rotten already, as did anyone who ever got a “404 File Not Found” error. </p>
<p>Where there is economic incentive to keep and use data – such as user information, profiles or browsing history – it may exist for quite a long time. It has been said by many that <a href="https://medium.com/project-2030/data-is-the-new-oil-a-ludicrous-proposition-1d91bba4f294">data is the new oil</a>, and corporations are anxious to drill and exploit this resource. </p>
<p>However, where content is less valuable to whomever owns the servers, there is less incentive to invest in preserving it. A survey of 10 million hits from 25 random sites in 2004 suggests that <a href="http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/332705.html">404 errors occur at close to 3% of targeted URLs</a>. The internet is growing much faster than it is rotting, but both things are happening at once. No giant internet company has your interests closer to its heart than its own. </p>
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<p>One preservation network is known under the acronym <a href="https://www.lockss.org/">LOCKSS</a> – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe – and that’s a good rule of thumb. Always have a backup, and always have multiple backups. Guard your privacy and guard your content, at least that content you may wish to have preserved, like photos, email, that screenplay or novel, or video and music files. Copyright rules do not prohibit storing content you may have purchased, as long as you don’t put it out for public sharing. </p>
<p>Free storage is a great offer, but sometimes you only get what you pay for. The internet is neither secure nor permanent. It never promised to be, and users should not assume that it will become so. Parts are rotting and corroding and collapsing as I type this. Just hope and plan to not be resting on that platform when it falls.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115891/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Royster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>MySpace users were recently shocked to learn that the company lost 50 million user files. It’s a harsh lesson in not leaving your intellectual property unprotected on the information superhighway.Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-LincolnLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1046742018-10-17T10:27:07Z2018-10-17T10:27:07ZAmerica’s archaeology data keeps disappearing – even though the law says the government is supposed to preserve it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240518/original/file-20181014-109213-x18pdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A fragment of an ancestral Pueblo jar dating to c. A.D. 1150.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keith Kintigh, Arizona State University</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Archaeology – the name conjures up images of someone carefully sifting the sands for traces of the past and then meticulously putting those relics in a museum. But today’s archaeology is not just about retrieving artifacts and drawing maps by hand. It also uses the tools of today: 3D imaging, LiDAR scans, GPS mapping and more.</p>
<p>Today, nearly all archaeological fieldwork in the U.S. is executed by private firms in response to legal mandates for historic preservation, <a href="https://doi.org/10.6067/XCV8446793">at a cost of about a billion dollars annually</a>. However, only a minuscule fraction of the data from these projects is made accessible or preserved for future research, despite agencies’ <a href="https://www.tdar.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CHP-Legal-Analysis.pdf">clear legal obligations to do so</a>. Severe loss of these data is not unusual – it’s the norm.</p>
<h2>Unanswered questions</h2>
<p>Federally mandated projects yield massive amounts of irreplaceable data, particularly on Native American history. Those data are generated <a href="https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/nhpa1966.htm">for the explicit purpose of benefiting the American public</a>. </p>
<p>The primary data include things like counts of different kinds of artifacts; information on fragments of plant and animals found in fire pits; maps and photographs of ruined buildings; dates from charred roof beams; and the chemical composition of paint on pottery. This allows researchers to understand life in the past – inferring, for example, human population size and movement, social organization, trade and diet. </p>
<p>The data further enable archaeologists to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1324000111">study social processes that are important in today’s world</a>, but that operate so slowly that they aren’t perceptible on time scales available in other social sciences. Why does migration occur? Why do migrant groups maintain their identities in some circumstances and adopt new ones in others? What factors have allowed some societies to persist over very long time periods? </p>
<p>However, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715950114">this sort of synthetic research</a> depends upon online access to <a href="https://doi.org/10.7183/2326-3768.3.1.1">a wealth of research data and unpublished technical reports</a>. Access to these data also gives the researchers the ability to replicate the work of or correct errors by the original investigators. </p>
<p>What’s more, for many, ancestral sites are critical to maintaining identity and purpose in an increasing global world. Government agencies are responsible for appropriately managing sites for their scientific, cultural and educational values. But to do so effectively, they must have access to <a href="https://www.tdar.org/news/2018/10/making-data-easier-to-discover-access-and-use-as-part-of-section-106-streamlining/">full documentation of past investigations</a>.</p>
<h2>Preserving the data</h2>
<p>About 30,000 legally mandated <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2017.18">archaeological investigations are conducted each year in the U.S.</a> These projects are usually documented only in so-called “gray literature” reports that, in most cases, are not readily accessible, even to professional archaeologists. </p>
<p>The databases that contain the project data are even less frequently <a href="https://doi.org/10.6067/XCV8446794">adequately documented</a>, made accessible to other researchers or <a href="http://guides.archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/g2gp/CreateData_1-0">preserved in a way that will make them likely to be usable in a few years, much less 20 or 50 years</a>. Data may be stored on media that degrade, like punch cards, floppy disks or magnetic tape. Hard disks on office computers or servers may fail, and database software can become obsolete, making the data unreadable. Data may become a victim to institutional housekeeping if files not used within a certain period of time are automatically deleted.</p>
<p>As a professional archaeologist and former president of the Society for American Archaeology, I believe that archaeologists have an ethical obligation to ensure that the digital records of what is discovered, like the artifacts, remain available for study in the future. </p>
<p>There are digital repositories expressly designed to make archaeological information discoverable, accessible and preserved permanently for future use. At my university, I led the initial development of <a href="http://tdar.org">the Digital Archaeological Record</a> (tDAR), which has been publicly available for eight years. tDAR allows archaeologists to directly upload databases, documents, photographs, GIS files and other necessary data. The cost to upload a document or image is typically US$5, while the cost for a database depends on its size. This includes costs of permanently preserving the file and making it continuously accessible. </p>
<p>A similar service is available through the University of York’s <a href="http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/">Archaeology Data Service</a> in the U.K., which has been around for more than 20 years.</p>
<p>I believe that for all newly authorized projects, agencies must ensure that the full digital record of their archaeological investigations is deposited in a recognized digital repository. That information would then become available not only to researchers and agency personnel, but also to the public. The cost for doing this is about <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/146195702761692347">1 to 3 percent of the archaeological project cost</a>, with lower percentages for larger projects. </p>
<p>Agencies also need to begin properly curating the data from projects that have already been completed. Notably, at tDAR, this process has been started by a number of U.S. agencies, including the <a href="https://core.tdar.org/collection/16304/us-air-force-archaeology-and-cultural-resources-archive">Air Force</a>, <a href="https://core.tdar.org/collection/27916/us-army-corps-of-engineers">the Army Corps of Engineers</a> and a few offices at the <a href="https://core.tdar.org/collection/17756/usdi-bureau-of-reclamation-phoenix-area-office-pxao">Bureau of Reclamation</a> and the <a href="https://core.tdar.org/collection/14640/midwest-archeological-center-publications">National Park Service</a>.</p>
<p>Federal agencies are already legally required to preserve the digital records of publicly funded archaeological investigations. They just aren’t doing it. To avoid this is to ignore not only their legal obligations and their obligations to the American public, it is to consign the data – and all that can be learned from them – to oblivion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104674/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Kintigh serves, uncompensated, on the Board of Directors of the Center for Digital Antiquity.</span></em></p>Only a small fraction of the data from archaeological fieldwork is made accessible to the public or preserved for future research.Keith Kintigh, Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/640892016-10-26T03:23:31Z2016-10-26T03:23:31ZPreserving fright, one haunted house at a time<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135191/original/image-20160823-30238-1vnacs0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A virtual reality scene – one for each eye – of a haunted ride.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Zika</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I vividly remember my first haunted house ride – it was at the local fairgrounds, just a temporary carnival truck, more façade than ride. I must have been about seven or eight, and I insisted on bringing along a flashlight. I was quite a fearful child; in this case I hoped the flashlight would break through the darkened illusion and I might sneak a look at the ride’s inner workings. I failed miserably: As the ride spun and jolted my flashlight was always a second late. The monsters and spooks jumped out before I could anticipate them; the car hit walls of fake spiders. My light was of little use.</p>
<p>For most of the 20th century, dark rides – as these kinds of rides are called – offered thrills and surprises, and no small dose of fear, to riders bumping along in carts passing through animatronic scenes. But they are rapidly disappearing. In the decade of my professional life I have spent experiencing and documenting these rides around the world, I have seen many great haunted attractions and parks close. Of the thousands of rides created between 1900 and 1970, <a href="http://laffinthedark.com/lists/operating.htm">only 18 still exist</a>. </p>
<p>The closure of Williams Grove, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3537025/Seph-Lawless-pictures-Bushkill-Park-abandoned-amusement-park-near-Easton-Pennsylvania-oldest-funhouse-America.html">flooding of Bushkill Park</a>, the <a href="http://www.abandonedfl.com/miracle-strip-amusement-park/">sale of Miracle Strip</a> or the <a href="http://www1.gmnews.com/2013/04/11/superstorm-proves-no-match-for-keansburg-amusement-park-8/">destruction of the Spookhouse by Hurricane Sandy</a> have saddened the thousands of fans of these parks. But they have also laid waste to an important record of our popular culture history that should not be left in the dark. </p>
<p>These rides were the virtual reality experiences of their day. Far surpassing cinema, they had sound effects, atmospheric effects and 360-degree immersive space. To preserve them in a way that does these rides justice, my work, the <a href="http://www.darkrideproject.com/">Dark Ride Project</a>, is capturing and archiving the experience of riding the last remaining ghost trains and haunted house rides using today’s digital virtual reality technology. </p>
<p>Most recently, we’ve been visiting the <a href="http://www.wonderwheel.com/adult-rides.html#verticalTab3">Spook-A-Rama ride</a> at <a href="http://www.wonderwheel.com/">Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park</a> in Coney Island, New York. Built in 1955, this classic ride was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and was painstakingly restored by the family that owns the park. On Halloween, we’ll release <a href="http://www.darkrideproject.com/">new footage preserving the ride in VR</a>, so it will never be under threat again.</p>
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<h2>A history of dark rides</h2>
<p>The earliest dark rides were the “old mill” rides, which started showing up in the 1900s – there’s still one at <a href="http://www.dafe.org/articles/darkrides/darkSideOfKennywood.html">Kennywood Park</a> in Pittsburgh. Participants floated down a tunnel on log rafts, the way logs used to be transported downriver to mills in the 19th century. The buildings were dark inside, mirroring the real-life mills that lay abandoned across the landscape. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135668/original/image-20160826-17845-161d74j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ‘old mill’ ride at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh still operates today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Zika</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These floating dark rides sent participants through a series of choreographed vignettes with electric lighting switching automatically on and off as each raft went by. The winding point of view coupled with the sequence of images from either side of the track created a complex narrative and spatial experience. This new way of telling a story involved all of the audience’s senses, including the smells of the mechanics, the splashes of water and the touch of hanging props in the dark. In these experiences, viewers would engage intimately with animatronic characters and live actors, looking left and right in surprise. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rrynjbWp5t0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Understanding the importance of dark rides.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was truly an immersive mass medium. Back then, a blockbuster book was more likely to be adapted into a dark ride experience than made into a movie. In 1901, for example, Jules Verne’s novel “From The Earth to the Moon” was <a href="https://www.academia.edu/13432353/Journey_to_the_Moon_The_First_Interactive_Narrative">made into a dark ride for the Buffalo World’s Fair</a> – a year before the legendary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNLZntSdyKE">French cinematic version</a> by George Melies. That ride, which was built by Frederick Thompson, would later go on to tour the country and eventually become the namesake of <a href="http://lunaparknyc.com/">Coney Island’s Luna Park</a>.</p>
<p>In the 1920s, the Depression, the rise of the motor car and the advent of cinema meant that the traditional fairground had a less captive audience. Cities grew but the fairgrounds that were home to these dark rides struggled and began to fall into disrepair. The 1930s saw the rise of the dark ride that we know today, a pragmatic, inexpensive and often ad-hoc form of entertainment. Parks could buy ride carts and build their own sets and scenes. The <a href="http://www.laffinthedark.com/articles/pretzelride/pretzelride1.htm">Pretzel Amusement Ride Company</a> was the most prolific of the time, producing more than 1,400 rides that found homes across America and the world.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135661/original/image-20160826-17876-vwpu03.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leon Cassidy’s patent for the ride that would later be known as ‘The Pretzel.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.com/patents/USRE18544">U.S. Patent Office</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The company got its name from the patented ride design that saw the track bend in on itself, like a pretzel. Pretzel rides were cheap to build and maximized the length of the ride – and thereby the experience – given a particular amount of space. The patent drawings show a scripted set of trigger points for sound effects and lighting and could easily be the level maps for a computer game.</p>
<p>Leon Cassidy and Marvin Rempfer started building Pretzel rides in 1928, but even with Cassidy’s son making them until the late 1970s, there are now only four <a href="http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2003/07/at_sylvan_beach_classic_low-tech_laffland_dark_ride_offers_high_excitement.html">left in operation</a>. My documentary journey began at <a href="http://lunapark.com.au/attractions/ghost-train/">Luna Park’s Ghost Train</a>, built by the Pretzel company in 1936, and where I tested the system throughout 2015-16 before taking it on the road.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CpceUfM87lE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">How the setup travels.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Planning the preservation</h2>
<p>Until now there has been no attempt to make a comprehensive archive of this enormous piece of American popular history. Doing so involves some difficult technical challenges, the solutions to which are evolving as the project goes on. The chief aim is ensuring that there is a clear record of what was in the ride and how it felt. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.darkrideproject.com">Dark Ride Project</a> records a VR experience by sending ultra-low-light cameras on multiple passes of the ride. Then we use computer software to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEz45GNN5Vw">stitch the resulting video</a> into a seamless 360-degree video.</p>
<p>In this way, the rides are captured as they are to be experienced – the footage captures the bumps and shakes of the cart, and doesn’t shy away from moments of total darkness. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135665/original/image-20160826-17887-1xtkoq3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Accelerometer data allows computerized rendering of a ride’s path.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Zika</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unlike my childhood attempt with the flashlight, we don’t want to break the illusion, so we use a <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-77557-4">process called photogrammetry</a> to create complex digital 3D models with the photo data. It allows us to record more about the physical space that lies behind the ride. </p>
<p>We capture these data in conjunction with accelerometer data, which gives us metric information on the speed, direction and location of the cart. This extra information helps build a true academic archive to support the two-dimensional media, recording more about what the ride is doing. The captured jolts and bumps can be recreated using Deakin University’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3453196.htm">universal motion simulator</a> in conjunction with VR optics.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135667/original/image-20160826-17847-1dw61vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The universal motion simulator allows a full-body VR experience.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Zika</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The result is an experience that is confusing and disorienting but uniquely accurate. It has brought tears to the eyes of nostalgic fans.</p>
<p>So far our work has documented six rides across five parks, from the standalone Haunted House in Oxford, Alabama, to the gravity-propelled classic at Camden Park, West Virginia. Visitors can see <a href="http://www.darkrideproject.com/">previews of all the parks online</a>. We’ve just <a href="http://igg.me/at/darkrideproject">raised nearly US$14,000 to digitally preserve</a> the remaining eight rides left in the U.S. – including Coney Island’s Spook-A-Rama. We’ll need more funding to capture other sites around the world.</p>
<p>Once that is achieved, we hope to expand our work beyond preserving and presenting the dynamic VR content. That includes studying and filming the parks that house these rides, the people who build and maintain them and the communities that love and cherish them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64089/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joel Zika is the founder of the Dark Ride Project a not for profit initiative</span></em></p>The virtual reality rides of the early 20th century are now being documented in digital VR.Joel Zika, Lecturer In Visual Communication Design, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/377232015-02-23T12:41:00Z2015-02-23T12:41:00ZThere need not be a digital dark age – how to save our data for the future<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72774/original/image-20150223-32232-1o2h8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C104%2C2048%2C1143&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Floppies: storage that's about as reliable as a CD used as a frisbee.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/orangejack/2225888887">orangejack</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“The internet is forever.” So goes a saying regarding the impossibility of removing material – <a href="https://theconversation.com/misogyny-wins-with-hacking-of-intimate-celebrity-pictures-but-you-can-choose-not-to-look-31210">such as stolen photographs</a> – permanently from the web. Yet paradoxically the vast and growing digital sphere faces enormous losses. Google has been criticised for failing to ensure access to its archive of Usenet newsgroup postings that stretch back to the early 1980s. And now internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned of a “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf">digital dark age</a>” that would result if decades of data – emails, photographs, website postings – becoming lost or un-readable.</p>
<p>Millions of paper records more than 500 years old exist today. But your entire family photo collection could be lost forever with just a single hard drive failure. Stone tablets, parchment, paper, printed photographs have all lasted through the centuries. But some of our data may not. What do we do about preserving the digital deluge? </p>
<h2>Cost v value</h2>
<p>Technical solutions already exist, but they’re not well known and relatively expensive. How much are we prepared to pay to ensure that digital stuff today is usable in the future? Because if there’s cost involved, inevitably we have to think about what has value that makes it worth keeping.</p>
<p>How can we calculate that value? As an example, the holdings of the <a href="http://data-archive.ac.uk/">UK Data Archive</a> include machine-readable versions of all of the <a href="http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=4518.">General Household Surveys</a> (GHS) carried out between 1971 and 2011. This was a continuous national survey of people living in private households conducted on an annual basis. The cost of the GHS in 2001 was <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200001/ldhansrd/vo010503/text/10503w01.htm">reported</a> as £1.43m, making the value of the survey and its data at least that. As it was the thirtieth year of this survey the value could be said to be higher as it was part of a series, so we could say they survey was worth more than it cost.</p>
<p>The Office for National Statistics transferred the 2001 data to the UK Data Archive in 2002, where we prepared them for preservation and access and published them. Up until today this survey data has been downloaded by 426 people working in government departments, 759 staff working in education, 1,331 students and 109 others for various uses. So benefits accrue from making the data available even after its creators have exhausted their primary value – re-use is a significant benefit from preserving data and adds value.</p>
<p>But there are also cultural and intellectual and not just economic arguments for preserving data. Survey data like these and their supplementary materials provide a window to the concerns of survey designers and, by extension, society at the time. True, cultural arguments for preservation can be expressed more forcefully for artefacts such as images, films, or written works than survey data. But these data stand a good chance of being included within Britain’s cultural and intellectual heritage precisely because they have been carefully managed and preserved.</p>
<h2>Making digital as long-lasting as paper</h2>
<p>How can we improve the chances of something being preserved? Professor <a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/about/michael-clanchy">Michael Clanchy</a>, writing in his seminal <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Memory-Written-Record-England-1066-1307/dp/0631168575">From Memory to Written Record</a>, discusses how the concept of records developed. Owing to the media available to scribes in the Middle Ages they made conscious choices between creating an ephemeral document (on a wax tablet) or a permanent record (on parchment). Today digital media proliferates mainly because it provides the easiest means to transmit a work, and so that distinction has to a point disappeared. </p>
<p>Documents and records are now both digital, but the question remains as to what should be kept for posterity and why. These are hard questions which lead to hard choices, because by their nature the cost of preserving digital materials can be much more expensive than their analogue counterparts. You can’t just put them in a box and walk away – the effort and tools required to read a 100-year-old letter is considerably less than the effort required to read a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2008/dec/11/locoscript">30-year-old LocoScript</a> popular on Amstrad computers in the 1980s-90s.</p>
<p>Most born-digital material is, with the right resources, recoverable. However, the chances of born-digital material being usable in, say, 100 years is considerably improved by actively taking steps to ensure that it will – just as medieval scribes made similar decisions in centuries past. Effective digital preservation relies, to some extent, on the activities of the creator as well as the archivist. Today those decisions include providing context, using standard and <a href="http://opendatahandbook.org/en/appendices/file-formats.html">open file formats,</a> organising material sensibly, and making provision for rights issues to avoid the problem of <a href="http://copyrightuser.org/topics/orphan-works/">orphan works</a>.</p>
<h2>The future starts now</h2>
<p>Organisations can do a better job than individuals, but require a business model and a mandate to do so. Asking someone to pay for something a long time before its value can be realised (if at all) is not an attractive business proposition. What we can do, at a minimum, is <a href="http://www.dpconline.org">try and convince people that it is possible</a>. </p>
<p>Of course neither creator nor archivist can fully understand how future users may approach digital information preserved over time. Social and cultural historians have, by necessity, used records for purposes for which they were not created and often in inventive and interesting ways. Historians are often helped by context, and the digital material we’re creating today needs the same contextual information to ensure its usefulness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37723/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Woollard receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.</span></em></p>“The internet is forever.” So goes a saying regarding the impossibility of removing material – such as stolen photographs – permanently from the web. Yet paradoxically the vast and growing digital sphere…Matthew Woollard, Professor and Director, UK Data Archive and UK Data Service, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221602014-02-12T04:42:37Z2014-02-12T04:42:37ZScan, save, and archive: how to protect our digital cultural heritage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/40273/original/2hkqd96f-1391140574.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sungnyumen Gate, pictured here in the 1890s, was destroyed by fire in 2008. Digital documentation can help preserve such cultural heritage.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Yonhap News Agency</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last month a fire destroyed 23 timber buildings in the the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25799491">Norwegian heritage town of</a> <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25799491">Laerdalsoyri</a>.</p>
<p>Another fire ripped through the important <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/world/asia/12korea.html?_r=0">Korean gate of</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/world/asia/12korea.html?_r=0">Sungnyemun in 2008</a>. This one was the result of an arson attack. </p>
<p>Both incidents highlight the fragility of heritage places. </p>
<p>Fortunately in the case of Sungnyemun the building had been meticulously documented in 3D with laser scanners. That work was commissioned by the South Korean Cultural Heritage Administration, and the data has since been archived with <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/">CyArk</a>. </p>
<h2>An archive that saves buildings and monuments</h2>
<p>CyArk is the world’s leading, and non-profit, digital cultural heritage archive. It has been archiving some of the planet’s most important heritage places since 2003. Using the 3D scans of both the original building and post-fire rubble and remains, the timber pagoda atop the gate in Sungnyemun has been meticulously reconstructed. </p>
<p>No, the reconstruction is not the same as an undamaged building, and “authenticity” is itself a debated subject in heritage preservation. But faster, more accurate and more affordable techniques in digital 3D documentation are helping create more digital records of our cultural heritage.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Grm73BRRfgc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The CyArk archaeological documentation project at Pompei.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many heritage sites are remote or under threat and access is restricted. The hazards facing heritage places are numerous: not only fire, but the wear of time and limited conservation funding. Sites are also threatened by human conflict or activity, and broader natural disasters. </p>
<p>Many heritage places cannot be expected to last into the coming centuries, but it is not impossible to give them a digital legacy.</p>
<h2>Australian CyArk heritage</h2>
<p><a href="http://archive.cyark.org/fort-lytton-intro">Australia’s first CyArk site</a> is Queensland’s relatively little known <a href="http://www.reuters.com/video/2013/04/30/reuters-tv-laser-powered-zebedee-springs-into-actio?videoId=242557454&videoChannel=118065">Fort Lytton</a>. The Fort was built in the 1880s to defend against a presumed threat by the Russians and is perched at the mouth of the Brisbane River. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/40376/original/hxmqkpsm-1391386313.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Fort Lytton, one of the sites mapped for CyArk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">CSIRO</span></span>
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<p>In 2013 the fort was captured by CSIRO and The University of Queensland’s School of Architecture, using CSIRO’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24179644">Zebedee handheld 3D laser scanner</a>. </p>
<p>The new <a href="https://theconversation.com/lean-on-me-australian-inventors-help-map-pisa-tower-18229">Zebedee</a> is a <a href="http://australianmuseum.net.au/2013-eureka-technology">Eureka Prize-winning</a> piece of technology. </p>
<p>Closely following Fort Lytton, <a href="http://www.scottishten.org/property9">The Scottish Ten’s</a> detailed scanning of the Sydney Opera House become the second Australian data set archived by CyArk. The Scottish Ten is a joint collaboration between CyArk, Historic Scotland, and The Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio to digitise Scotland’s five UNESCO World Heritage Sites and five internationally prominent heritage properties. </p>
<p>3D data of Sydney’s Pyrmont Bridge and rock art in Kakadu National Park have also since been added to CyArk’s growing Australian collection.</p>
<h2>Keeping up with technology</h2>
<p>Digital cultural heritage practises are advancing at a rapid rate globally. Archaeological and scanning teams are traversing our planet. </p>
<p>CyArk now has 3D data representing heritage places from all seven continents. From the <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/chichen-itza-intro">pyramids of Mexico</a>, to <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/cathedral-of-beauvais-intro">gothic cathedrals in France</a>, to <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/drakensberg-rock-art-intro">San rock art in Africa</a>, to <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/antarctic-expedition-huts-intro">Shackelton’s Antarctic</a> exploration huts, the archive continues to grow. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Documenting Mt Rushmore.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Yet the problem of digital data’s longevity is well known. The possibility exists for precious and costly data sets to be lost on failed hard-drives, destroyed in floods or fires, or simply thrown out. </p>
<p>Data access also falls victim to technology obsolescence far too often. </p>
<p>CyArk’s mission is to safely store heritage data, and it has partnered with <a href="http://www.ironmountain.com/Knowledge-Center/Reference-Library/View-by-Document-Type/Case-Studies/C/CyArk.aspx">Iron Mountain</a> to provide a “gold standard” solution for their archive. Final archival copies are housed deep in the belly of Iron Mountain’s facility in Pennsylvania, USA. CyArk also shares permissible data with the public on a web platform that gives visitors the chance to explore these places.</p>
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<span class="caption">Beauvais Cathedral in France, scanned for CyArk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">CyArk, Columbia University's Media Center for Art History and the Robotics Lab, World Monuments Fund, Kress Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.</span></span>
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<p>The scanning of heritage places also allows scholars to study these places in ways that have been very difficult in the past. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.architecture.uq.edu.au/">UQ School of Architecture</a>’s analysis of the <a href="http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/536254/S12_02_Juckes-Greenop-Jarzab_Isolation-and-Segregation.pdf">racial segregation of Peel Island</a>’s Lazaret (Leper Colony), for example, was informed by empirical data and accurate 3D mapping of the buildings. </p>
<p>The Peel Island site was <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/science/article/pii/S1296207413002185">captured in just a few hours using CSIRO’s Zebedee laser scanning technology</a>. Previously, scholars had taken weeks to painstakingly measure the dilapidated buildings by hand, and had only fully recorded a fraction of the total buildings. </p>
<p>Further scans of Peel Island will help us complete an intercultural analysis of the island’s use over time, including uses of the <a href="http://qyac.com.au/">Quandamooka traditional owners</a>. The island’s digital preservation will make it accessible for future generations of Quandamooka people and the broader community.</p>
<h2>The CyArk 500 project</h2>
<p>Last October CyArk launched its most ambitious project yet: a call to action for the global community to scan and archive 500 of the world’s most endangered or significant heritage places in the next five years. </p>
<p>Scans are supplemented with historical information, photographs, architectural data, archaeological data, and whatever is available, to create a comprehensive narrative. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The CyArk 500 project.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The first round of nominations for the <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/c500">CyArk 500</a> closed in December with the second round open until March 31 this year. Heritage professionals and the public alike are encouraged to nominate sites for inclusion, especially those in danger of destruction. The first step in the nomination process is a <a href="http://archive.cyark.org/submit-site">letter to CyArk</a> outlining the qualities of the place and why it should be digitally preserved.</p>
<p>What about the cost, you ask? CyArk is establishing a 500 Fund to support this process. Money will be raised from individual donors, heritage groups or agencies and the private sector.</p>
<p>As we recognise the threats to heritage places and lament the loss of some physical sites, the scanning of heritage sites means we can preserve physical places better with more complete records. We will also enjoy virtually visiting digital heritage areas that we might never have been able to access in person. </p>
<p>The data captured, combined with the histories of the places, will help tell the story of each site and create a lasting digital legacy for the story of humanity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/22160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kelly Greenop received funding from the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand for research on Peel Island.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin R. Barton works for CyArk. </span></em></p>Last month a fire destroyed 23 timber buildings in the the Norwegian heritage town of Laerdalsoyri. Another fire ripped through the important Korean gate of Sungnyemun in 2008. This one was the result…Kelly Greenop, Lecturer in Architecture, The University of QueenslandJustin R. Barton, Chief Technology Advocate, University of California, BerkeleyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.