By “your” here I mean data you yourself produce, not the data about you governments and businesses will keep so long as they exist.
What happens to Chad’s notes when he encounters a grumpy asp while digging in the sands of Egypt looking for scraps of papyrus? What happens to Greek Geek if Paul takes holy orders? I can’t contemplate Jeff’s health without anxiety.
In my work we’ve reached a point where a researcher might any day come to us and say, “I need 10 more computers and I think about a terabyte more space — maybe two.” So data curation has been on my mind a lot recently for work. But I also worry about how the Humanities are going to fare in this field. Perseus was hacked more than 11 days ago and is still not available. They, in theory, have some sort of institutional support, though I recently heard someone from a massive government granting body tell a classicist that the best way the Humanities can get computing funding is to parasitize the hard sciences — find a computer science person who’s interested in some problem in computing in the Humanities.
Aoidoi.org exists only because I’m a unix sysadmin and I pay a networking bill every month. I very much hope that eventually someone somewhere will come along and produce a Greek poetry website that blows Aoidoi.org out of the water. But if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, I have no idea what would happen to the work there, the most significant parts of which, at least, aren’t mine alone.
Do the autodidacts of the world need their own LOCKSS network?
I don’t have the slightest idea how the internet works, so my reply to the question is “I don’t have a clue.” Actually, that is pretty much my response to how everything in the world works, including gravity. I HAVE been wanting to tell Annis though, that I love Aoidoi-I check it regularly & I think i’ve printed out everything on it. Thank you for doing it-it’s a real public service! Regards, Paige.
If I would die now, much of it would be lost, because I have no one with the same keys I do. But they’ll get there soon enough so that the projects become separated from me myself. Have you thought about joining with other like-minded projects to secure the stability of your data in case of your death?
Well I haven’t done anything like Jeff, Annis, Paul, and Chad have done to promote classicist autodidacts, so what I usually wonder about is “If I suddenly died, how would anybody at Textkit even know what happened?” The conclusion I usually reach is, nobody would ever find out what happened.
I did take extensive vocabulary notes when I was doing my grand reading of the Iliad, and maybe someday (in that mythical era When I Have More Free Time - not anytime soon, seeing the regularity with which I am submitting excess units petitions. Maybe when I’m out of college and unemployed) I’ll type those notes up. However, at least they are in a bound notebook where somebody has a remote chance of finding them - if they can read my handwriting, which is doubtful, since the size of my letters in those notes rarely exceeded 2.5 mm.
I like that idea even less and the current state of Perseus is a demonstration of why. I have a great fear of the single point of failure. Classicists of all people should realize how easy it is for once widespread works to disappear entirely. Arrangements for lots of copies seems safest both for near-term security and reliability and long-term survival, and this might be a good place to start such collaborations. Academics and some businesses have started to think about these questions seriously, but amateur (in the best sense of that word) digital publication has been a lot more ephemeral to date.
Of course there are rafts of other questions that follow from any scheme for digital data preservation. For example, I can probably read the hieroglyphs in the Hypostyle Hall of Karnak more readily than I could read a floppy from my first computer (a Commodore 64).
The vast collections of digital data available to us now are very shallow in time. How will we find anything in 50 years? And a lot of that current data is textual — intended to be read directly by people — but the last few years has seen a deluge of sound and video data. And who knows what’s next? Is there value in preserving things like zones in Second Life? (SL users may find Roma interesting). Now, Second Life is basically a company town, so I hope other tools like Croquet with the Arts Metaverse project, Uni-Verse, Ogoglio, or something more open and less centralized than SL takes over this area. Some of these 3d environments will eventually have worlds of value to autodidact philologists (if I could work Blender, I’d already have a Croquet island up with some Greek architecture models at Aoidoi). Is it worth preserving data that’s so restricted to a particular piece of software?
Hmm. This has turned into a brain-dump of more questions.
This is a little off topic, but I thought I’d share this story. I work in a hospital and about 9 years ago we started switching from sheets of film for medical images (CT, MRI, Ultrasound, x-rays, etc.) to digital images. The film was incredibly expensive (around $4 per sheet, which adds up when you think that a CT or MRI could be 10 or more sheets and that we were doing in excess of 100 of each of those studies per day, and that doesn’t include the cost of storing, cataloging and managing all of those films).
Anyway, for almost 2 years after the switch we were still filming all of the images. The problem was that, despite the cost, the administration wouldn’t allow us to rely solely on the digital copies of the images until there was a robust, off-site backup storage system in place. About a year into all of this there was a huge flood in the basement where all the films were stored, and thousands of those film jackets were destroyed. Of course, we still had all the digital data, but I thought it was very ironic that it was the good-old “safe” system that failed and the digital one that saved the day.
Well, just making the switch from mostly HTML content to a lot more PDF content on Aoidoi will probably help preserve its contents. Few people download HTML files to store of their computers, but (at least on many of the computers I have) HAVE to download PDFs in order to read them because my web brower and my PDF viewer do not know how to talk to each other. In case of a disaster, it might be difficult to collect the people will all the Aoidoi PDFs and pool them together, but it could be done.
Likewise, the site on Greek Metrics is so apt to fail and/or move addresses that I have all of the pages which I find most important saved off on my computer in HTML.
Perseus was not what I had in mind. But it’s also a great idea. Perseus is still alive, just temporarily down. That’s a huge difference. A site like Perseus will probably stay alive for a long time due to their ability to routinely archive material. If one sysadmin dies, there’s still an institution to keep it alive. But if you die, whither does Aoidoi go? I don’t mean consolidation of the sites into one place, but consolidation of people who can, together, keep the sites, plural, alive.
Ouch, now I see why Perseus was not responding when I tried to check out the URL I included in the Euclid’s Elements, which I recently updated. Perseus might rise again from back-up data. I have the Perseus CD I purchased years ago, and if there’s no back-up data for the resurrection of Perseus at all, at least I could share it. So there’s the key, share it to save it, as GGG and Chris say.
Oh, I’m sure it will be back eventually. But it doesn’t instill confidence in their institutional support that it has been offline for so long (two weeks tomorrow). More mirrors might be in order, too.
If one sysadmin dies, there’s still an institution to keep it alive.
Really? Who owns Perseus? How would ownership be transfered? The dot-bomb resulted in a lot of software being locked away effectively forever, so I worry about single-institution projects.
And these days I would be very hesitant to rely on educational institutions as a body to preserve the classics. I’m guessing in 50 years as many universities as have departments teaching Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian will be teaching classical Greek and Latin. How often do we see panicked email come to classics-l about some univeristy about to close down a classics department? At my local university, a major institution, every other retirement in the classics results in one fewer position in the department. Yet some departments in biotech fields are hiring a half-dozen faculty — this year. Ancient Greek doesn’t bring in grants, genetics does. Administrators can make all the soothing noises they want, but their actions make the reality of the situation clear.
I don’t mean consolidation of the sites into one place, but consolidation of people who can, together, keep the sites, plural, alive.
That’s a good idea. But I’m not yet able to envision how it would work in practice.