Egyptology can help us future-proof our culture – Grayson Clary – Aeon

Rosetta on Vimeo

A beautiful short film about The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.

Memory of Mankind: All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine - The Atlantic

Like cuneiform crossed with the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.

He will laser-print a microscopic font onto 1-mm-thick ceramic sheets, encased in wafer-thin layers of glass. One 20 cm piece of this microfilm can store 5 million characters; whole libraries of information—readable with a 10x-magnifying lens—could be slotted next to each other and hardly take up any space.

Fandom Relics and the Enthusiastic Past - Long Now

Not much stays in one place for one long, especially when it comes to digital artifacts. When the Yahoo Groups archive was summarily deleted by parent company Verizon just a few years ago, fandom suffered massive losses, just as it had during the Livejournal purges of the late 02000s, and during the Tumblr porn ban in 02018. Fandom preservation, then, ties into the larger issue of digital preservation as a whole, and specifically the question of how individual and group emotions and experiences — which make up so much of what it means to be a fan — can be effectively documented, annotated, and saved.

A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now

The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:

On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.

Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard

This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:

This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.

Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).

This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.