Comments on the On-line Discussion following the Time & Bits conference

The discussion following the Time & Bits conference on the long term continuity of digital documents has been great both with visionary insights, technical explanation and website resources. The small participant group is both creative and influential and directly involved with production of major digital works. This core group of conference participants has been augmented in the discussion forum with interested archivists and librarians including Luciana Duranti, Robert Spindler and Peter Graham.

Martin Diekhoff of the Getty Information Institute is the discussion list administrator. He has described the goal of the discussion group "to address a broad range of pressing issues related to long-term digital cultural preservation." The Institute plans to turn these discussions into "practical, browsable sets of questions, issues, and solutions (http://www.gii.getty.edu/timeandbits/)--eventually breaking out significant threads to account work that has already been done to the knowledge of list members, as well as new ideas and substantial solutions that arise in discussion."

Both Robert Spindler and Peter Graham set up scaffolding for a discussion on the continuity of digital works. Robert noted (1.) media-physical degradation, (2.) media-format obsolescence, (3.) software/operating system obsolescence, (4.) backwards compatibility-data corruption during migration, (5.) metadata-essential both for identifying the system and system requirements and for creating emulation programs or migration strategies as components of the discussion. Peter Graham discussed the components as well and pointed out (1.) risks of the holistic approach, (2.) risks of overdependence on market rhetoric and (3.) need for attention to integrity, or authenticity.

Luciana Duranti reminded the discussion group of the structure behind the scaffolding, the operating library and archive, and the important component of the trustworthiness and motivation of the custodian of digital works. Her research has emphasized the important issue of the life cycle of the management activity...how a changing status of a document, from active to inactive, shifts the preservation activity from maintenance of reliability to the maintenance of authenticity. <www.slais.ubc/user/duranti/> One of her pointed comments in the discussion was that "Six thousand years of documentary history have proved (that preservation) cannot be provided by the technology, but by the trustworthiness of the custodian of the documents."

During this circle drawing the core participants, Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Brewster Kahle, Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, Bruce Sterling, Martin Greenberger and others pursued topics from the conference. (The conference proceedings are promised soon at the Time & Bits site). The left-over agenda was to map out action items for the Long Now Foundation, a joint sponsor of the conference <www.longnow.org/> Their conversations were wonderful, wide ranging with some industrial topics including media durability, time stamping web documents and analog to digital conversions of library materials. Of special interest is the Octavo Corporation <www.octavo.com> "committed to conserving books, manuscripts, and antiquarian printed materials via digital tools and formats."

At the end of two weeks of discussion it is interesting that the topic of preservation incites such a mood of centralized control, even when applied to a medium know for its diffuse authority and uncontrollability. Migration strategies require long term curatorial control, media design requires manufacturing standards, intellectual property right requires centralized enforcement, mobilization and funding requires a potent social agenda and coherent policy. Is that all there is to life?

My own impression is that what is most exciting about digital works is their reading mode and the interaction of machine and human consciousness. This reading mode itself is worth preserving. That would be new preservation territory. Perhaps more is required to achieve continuity for digital works.

Perhaps the additional agenda is to diffuse preservation downward and outward using the same bionic behavior that engendered digital communications. This would mean distributing the preservation function to both short term actions and outward to each participant in the network. It is an act of preservation to assure the accurate capture, duplication and transmission of a digital document, though that act begins and ends in seconds. It is also possible for each participant and each terminal to capture, identify and distribute digital works.

Both entrepreneurial and volunteer efforts are springing up in response to the need for continuity in digital works. For example <www.afterlife.org> or <http://security.atbackup.com> or an " On-line Books Page" linking to anyone with a scanned book while archiving the composite library. Strange to say...we may be on the verge of a new hobby, like bowling or macrame, only more widespread to every person intent on creating digital works. This could be the hobby of preserving electronic transmissions.

But back to a higher plane...here are some excerpts to give a flavor of the discussion:

Subject: Natural Selection
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 10:43:06 -0800
From: Martin Greenberger <mg@ucla.edu>
To: Time&Bits <timeandbits@vaneyck.gii.getty.edu>

Danny, Paul, Stewart and company,

If natural selection is indeed an originating source of information (unique for life), as Manfred Eigen contends (see below), what exactly is or could be its role in the preservation of information?

I am struck in the Time&Bits context by Eigen's observation that "Information - unlike energy - is not subject to a conservation law," and am intrigued by the idea Darwinian evolution and the theory of entropy might be useful metaphors for the problem of digital continuity, even at the risk of joining "those whose propositions border on the fanciful."

Eigen will speak at the UCLA Marschak colloquium this Friday. Danny knows the event.

Martin Greenberger

======================================

February 27: MANFRED EIGEN, Professor and Chairman, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1967 will be making a presentation to the Marschak Colloquium on Friday, February 27, from 1 to 3 in room C-301 in the Anderson School Building on the topic:

DARWINIAN EVOLUTION AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL FITNESS LANDSCAPES

This presentation is cosponsored by the Department of Life Sciences, Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His abstract and biography follow.

ABSTRACT:

What is the distinguishing feature of a living system that singularizes it from every non-living chemical ensemble, regardless of the extent of the complexity. The differentiable characteristic of the living system is information. Information assures the controlled reproduction of all the constituents, thereby ensuring the conservation of viability. Information - unlike energy - is not subject to a conservation law. Hence the fundamental question behind the origin of life is: How can information originate?

Information theory, which was pioneered by Claude Shannon, cannot answer this question: this theory is most successful in dealing with problems of coding and transmission. In principle, the answer was formulated 130 years ago by Charles Darwin: The information that is unique for life evolves by virtue of natural selection. Today we can be more specific: Natural selection is a non-equilibrium process. It is an inherent consequence of mutagenous self-replication at several levels of organization; for instance it is evident in molecules such as nucleic acids, in molecular complexes such as viruses and in autonomous forms of life such as micro or higher organisms. New physical concepts have been introduced in order to deal quantitatively with the dynamics of the molecular generation of genetic information. They provide a physical foundation for Darwinian behaviour, yet they introduce major modifications in its classical interpretation. The lecture will deal with these physical concepts, such as sequence space, quasi-species and hypercycles and will scrutinize their adequacy for rationalizing experimental results obtained with molecular model systems and with viruses under natural conditions. Elucidating the principles of molecular self-organization has made possible to construct automated machines that make it possible for genetic information to evolve under controlled conditions in an abridged time scale.

Subject: Re: Aspects of digital preservation
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 98 07:46:48 PST
From: Tom Ditto<ditto@taconic.net>
To: timeandbits@vaneyck.gii.getty.edu

Peter of RUL cites Michael Lesk:

in the future
preservation will mean copying,
not maintenance of an artifact

On this basis, Peter places the medium of preservation on a lower priority than his other concerns, particularly his very insightful concern that authenticity can be lost in digital documents.

Peter, there is a connection between copying and this dangerous erosion of the record, don't you think? After all, the alteration takes place during a copying process. So we should be addressing how the copying process is done with an eye toward preserving the exact record. Hence, the medium may be important, if it is one designed to preserve the record, rather than one that can easily be altered.

This may sound far fetched, but indulge me in a sci-fi mind game. Suppose the medium for duplication was self- duplicating, something like DNA but designed for exact copies not combinations of pairs like our genes. I'm not really sure what form this might take. We tend to think in terms of solid materials: paper, tape, discs, etc. It does seem a more than a little far fetched to have our history duplicating itself in some kind of chemical soup. Yet, since you've raised the question about preservation by duplication and in the same voice expressed fears about authenticity, I think a little work ought to be done to combine the two topics and make their weaknesses into a unified strength. We might consider that media ought to be tested by a criterion that weighs the ability to self-regulate the accuracy of the reproduction. One way to insure this might be to have the document self-reproduce.

BTW, I did propose in another equally speculative submission to this group, that we transmit data by radio wave to be captured on its return through the space/time continuum. I mention this, because it posits one way that theoretically we could preserve data without duplication. I know it's only a theory, but what I have done is ask that question: does everything have to be a noun? What about verbs? In other words, can energy be used to preserve information? We are simply used to the idea that the information is preserved on a physical medium and experienced through a transducer in the form of energy. That is a bias that might blinker our perception of the deep future. We have learned a great deal about the origin of the universe by looking at the energy expelled at its birth. I don't think anything or anyone has been tampering with that record!

However, it is not lost on me that Peter is calling upon the "energies" of the conservators to keep copying the data record. The underlying assumption that librarians will go on in perpetuity knocking off copies is a librarian's natural perception of the future, and I certainly hope that this proves to be the case. However, since conservation is the goal, not the conservation of conservationists, we can also entertain means and methods of duplication that maintain themselves without our intervention. This will answer to some extent Peter's fear that the duplications will be tampered with.

Tom

This is the end of the excerpts. Doesn't the issue of the continuity of digital works lead in different directions?! Isn't preservation loaded with adventures?!