Subject: Time & Bits meeting
David Green (david@ninch.org)
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 11:06:30 -0500
Message-Id: <v02130507b10f63adb361@[192.100.21.23]> Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 11:06:30 -0500 To: ninch-announce@cni.org From: david@ninch.org (David Green) Subject: Time & Bits meeting
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
February 17, 1998
TIME & BITS CONFERENCE
PRESS CONFERENCE & PROCEEDINGS
<http://www.ahip.getty.edu/timeandbits/intro.html>
Although we trust there will be other community reports from those who
attended the press conference on February 10, concluding the TIME & BITS
conference on digital preservation, I forward here a report from Adina
Lerner, of the Walt Disney Archives, that appeared on the listserv of the
Visual Resources Association.
Proceedings of the conference will shortly be available at:
<http://www.ahip.getty.edu/timeandbits/sched.html>.
David Green
===========
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:55:37 -0800
> Reply-To: Visual Resources Association <VRA-L@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU>
> From: adina_lerner@corp.disney.com
> Subject: Time & Bits meeting
>
> The Digital Gap
>
> Be scared. At present, our digital information is doomed. I attended
> the Press Day at the Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity
> (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/timeandbits/intro.html) conference at the
> Getty Institute on February 10, 1998. The Getty sponsored the
> meeting so that a challenge can be raised to the uncritical acceptance
> of digital technology. There was a screening of Into the Future
> which was followed by a panel discussion with some of the meeting
> attendees.
>
> Into the Future premiered on PBS last month. Its filmmaker, Terry
> Saunders, presented the film. His first film concerning the loss of
> the human record was Slow Fires. When it premiered ten years ago,
> it brought public awareness to the need for microfilming of the
> rapidly decomposing libraries filled with acid-paper. It helped raise
> over $400 million towards book preservation. In making Into the
> Future, he hoped to raise a flag at the dire need to address the
> imminent loss of our digital human record. As he put together the
> film and spoke of its focus to people, the reaction was one of
> puzzlement. This is not an issue which the general population has
> considered. People would think a plan for preservation was built
> into technology, but nobody talks about it in the popular press: e.g.
> Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and Nicholas Negroponte's Being
> Digital. Saunders claims these authors only focus on the information
> age without regard for the past.
>
> The panelists at the discussion:
>
> Steward Brand - Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of
> the Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, and author of
> book on the future
>
> Doug Carlston - Cofounder and CEO of Broderbund Software
>
> Brian Eno - Digital Musician, music producer and artist
>
> Danny Hillis - VP of R & D, the Walt Disney Company, a Disney
> Fellow and cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation
>
> Brewster Kahle - Inventor and found of Wide Area Information
> Servers, Inc. [WAIS} and Founder of the Internet Archive
>
> Kevin Kelly - Executive Editor, Wired and author of Out of Control
>
> Peter Lyman - University Librarian, and professor in the School of
> Information Management & Systems at UCBerkeley
>
> Howard Besser - Digital archiving specialist, Adjunct Associate
> Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management &
> Systems
>
> Margaret MacLean - Special Initiatives, Getty Conservation Institute
>
> Ben Davis - Program Manager, Communications, Getty Information
> Institute
>
> The meeting included other people who were not present at the
> discussion: Jaron Lanier, John Heilemann, Paul Saffo.
>
> The emerging theme of the meeting was that the consciousness of
> the public must be raised. The Digital Gap is here, we have lost and
> are losing much our digital legacy. Where the life of a Web page is
> only 70 days, our constantly evolving technology dooms us to an
> exponentially growing loss. The possibility exists, for the first time
> in recorded history, that no trace of information will be retrievable
> from a segment of our era.
>
> The panel consensus attempted to devise a means and a method for
> digital information preservation. The panel offered a small scale
> solution. Doug Carlston offered the idea of the Rosetta Stone vs. a
> Marathon. Make 1000 great books available for free on the web and
> also, at the same time, etch the same books into a media which will
> suffer little deterioration over time. This serves to counterbalance a
> widely disseminated version against a stable copy of the information
> from which later copies can always be compared.
>
> This is a beginning. Peter Lyman stressed, this is the first time since
> the 18th century new formats of information have emerged. His
> examples included: visualization, medical imaging, the Web and data
> collection. Society as a whole must rethink how we use, retrieve and
> store these new formats. Do you store just the bits? What about the
> relationships, the cultural context which add meaning to
> information? This was not addressed in any real form. The techies
> ruled the meeting, and the voice of cultural information retention
> was only addressed in Brian Eno's comments. The example he gave
> was that of an image of Malevich's White on White (1918)
> (http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Malevik.html) going
> digital. It will just look like a white square projected. It must retain
> its cultural resonance. The really hard thing in digital preservation is
> creating the meta languages/data which can be imbedded in the
> "bits."
>
> Two comments stood out. Danny Hillis' description of technology:
>
> *** "Technology is stuff that doesn't work. Digital is technology - but it
> is so cool that we're using it before it works"
>
> *** Brian Eno's acceptance of our loss of information. The realization
> that throughout history some information is always disappearing.
> "Forgetting," he said, "is as important as remembering"
>
>
> Adina Lerner
> Walt Disney Archives
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