Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 465.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:24:18 +0000
From: Spencer Tasker <spencer@tasker.info>
Subject: Re: 17.444 digital preservation
Maurizio Lana correctly identified some of the false assumptions
of the Garfinkel article, however, there are a couple of points
which I should like to add. The first of these is the potential
for preservation of documents "in the cloud" - not quite Julian
of Norwich's "Cloud of Unknowing", but not too far off. Given an
informational environment characterised by pervasive internetworking,
the global distribution and caching of data and the abstraction of
the hardware from the services which rely upon it (servers are
upgraded and hardware changes transparently as far as we mere users
are concerned) it is not difficult to imagine that data can persist
in a state of abstraction from any underlying mechanism. On the other
hand, as Maurizio also pointed out, 20 years are a but a drop in the
bucket and it does take faith of Kierkegaardian proportions to assume
that any particular datum which we now possess in electronic will
still be available in 500 years.
- Spencer Tasker
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Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth,
more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is
subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible,
thought is merciless to privilege, established
institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks
into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is
great and swift and free, the light of the world,
and the chief glory of man.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
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