The importance of long-term thinking
Digital devices have permeated our everyday lives. Not only are we creating more devices that connect to the Internet, more devices are becoming part of our everyday lives. We are generating data faster than ever before; every second we create new data. The EMC Digital Universe study, in conjunction with IDC http://www.idc.com/, projects that the amount of data will reach a staggering 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes, by the year 2020.
We now live in a new era inundated with data. We can’t seem to escape big data, invisible force that is shaping every aspect of our lives. At the same time, big data gives us a powerful lens to look at our world and understand ourselves.
On the other hand, an essay by complexity scientist Samuel Arbesman in Wired points out the lack historical context in big data’s sampling bias towards the present. He argues that “no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it, it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time.” He explains that there are patterns in the ways our scientific knowledge changes over time. This understanding of temporality recognizes that scholarship is never truly static.
Along with a similar line of thinking, The Long Now Foundation was co-founded by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis in 1996 to foster responsibility by engendering long-term thinking – really long-term. The central project to this novel idea revolves around the construction of the 10,000 Year Clock, a clock with a 32-bit mechanical processor designed by Hillis that will keep accurate time for ten thousands of year without power and with minimal assistance from humans. It will chime once in a millennium and will ultimately be installed in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. In addition, Long Now is creating a library to go with the clock, which will be a place for storing information that would be useful over long periods of time - for example, extremely long-term scientific studies. Indeed, this monumental timekeeping device represents an attempt to restore human imagination to the very idea of a future.
The Long Now Clock will also accompany a library, which will be a place for storing information that would be useful over long periods of time - for example, extremely long-term scientific studies. Moreover, the library is intended to serve as a collection of human culture, scholarship, and experience that will be stored in a format designed to be retrievable in the distant future. Thereby, along with the library is the ‘Rosetta Disk,’ which serves as a language key so that the library would still be readable in 10,000 years. Like the ancient Rosetta Stone, it contains the same information in many different languages (texts and vocabularies) and could be the key to unlocking any one of them in the future.
In a similar line of long-term thinking that supports data preservation, CyArk is a non-profit organization focusing on the digital preservation of the world's important historical and cultural locations. CyArk converts cultural treasures into digital form; the aim is to take digital backup copies of archaeological sites around the world so that they can be repaired or restored. The vice president of CyArk, Elizabeth Lee, was previously featured on the Data Skeptic podcast to discuss CyArk's origins and their ongoing work using cutting-edge 3D technology to create a robust digital archive cultural heritage sites. According to Lee, CyArk takes very detailed 3D scans of global cultural heritage sites and renders that information into virtual reality through a combination of data points and high-resolution photography. Archivists like Lee understand that, despite their best efforts, there will be issues with the fragility of storage media, file format, and software obsolescence. For these reasons, digital preservation is an ongoing process, which harkens back to our earlier discussion on "long data" and how data must be kept.
Using a long-term approach to data preservation, a compelling aspect of CyArk’s technology is their unique approach to data storage—one that uses active archive software technologies. Active archive technologies allow resident file systems to expand over disk platforms, tape libraries, and different storage technologies, providing a secure, scalable solution to protect the longevity of large digital assets. CyArk's system can also move data off rotating disks, which has a lifespan of 10 years, onto tape media, which has a lifespan of 30 years. In addition, CyArk is collaborating with partners, such as the information management services company, Iron Mountain Incorporated, which is preserving and archiving the digital scans of each site by securing the data in a highly-secure underground storage facility 220 feet underground in a limestone cave in rural Pennsylvania.
However, political and social events can also affect the longevity and availability of data. For example, last week, Data Skeptic interviewed [Margaret Janz from the DataRefuge Project]((https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2017/the-data-refuge-project), a grassroots initiative to preserve climate and environmental data. As mentioned in the show, the new presidential administration has triggered concerns among scientists and researchers that decades of accumulated government datasets will be wiped out from the Internet and permanently lost. To address these growing concerns, DataRefuge Project became a national collaborative effort to capture all the environmental and climate data for preservation.
Another interesting long-term thinking approach comes from Peter Murray-Rust, who is the text-mining pioneer of the ContentMine Project aims to mine the whole scientific literature, extracting hundreds of millions of facts annually. ContentMine is an advocacy and implementation project consisting of a community, framework, and toolset to facilitate the liberation of scientific data for improved open access and communication in science, technology, and medicine. Peter Murray-Rust
What does the Long Now Foundation, CyArk, DataRefuge, and ContentMine have in common? They all hope to contribute to the good of society by fostering and engendering long-term thinking. In addition, they all strive to protect digital and acknowledge that the future of digital preservation involves: increased collaboration; the creation of a single access point for digital collections; education on the value data preservation, especially in the digital age; and ways to improve the usability of digital collections. they hope to contribute to the good of society.