The Rosetta Disk - conservation of literary and art digital materials over millennia

Whole Earth, Winter, 2000 by Kevin Kelly

Another tool project by the Long Now Foundation

PAY IT FORWARD

WHILE IT HAS BECOME trivially easy to duplicate information within time--to make millions of copies of things at once--it is still immensely difficult to duplicate information over time--to make sure a copy of something will last centuries or longer. Paradoxically a digital format decreases the longevity of information because digital platforms obsolete so quickly. All the stuff you stored on floppy disks will be unreadable shortly. In a hundred years from now CDs will almost certainly be unreadable because of the presumed widespread lack of operating CD players (think 78 records and eight-track tapes).

Civilization is a tool for remembering, for bringing what was learned in the past into the future. Civilization was hatched by the technology of writing and its attendant technologies of book, index, and library--alt meant to keep ideas and information alive over time. Books printed on acid-free paper and stored on shelves do this well. However our expectation of what a book can do has not stood still. The full content of a book--not just its title--must be deeply linked with all other texts and supremely searchable. Any book not on the Web almost doesn't exist now. Thus we are on a campaign to digitize books as fast as we can. But with the proliferation of digital media, and their increasingly short life cycles, maintaining a digital book's knowledge over long periods of time is a new, and vital, problem. The Web itself is no solution. Brewster Kahle, a pioneering archivist at the Internet Archive, has been making the sole backup of the Web. If it goes down (and some publishing and broadcast companies would like it to stop because they consider the backup to be a copyright infringement), then there goes contemporary civilization's only archive.

The Long Now Foundation has been exploring solutions to this problem. Together with the Getty Museum it hosted a "Time and Bits" conference, gathering experts in the conservation of literary and art materials along with computer scientists to ponder how to conserve digital material over millennia. From that meeting emerged the idea of a 10,000-year library, an institution dedicated to the care and exercise of materials for the very long term. As a first step toward the goal of developing a millennial library, the Long Now Foundation secured funding from the Lazy Eight Foundation to create a prototype of a very long-term storage device. The aim of the prototype is to take a fixed amount of text and embody it in a device that could reasonably be expected to be readable and understood 10,000 years from now.

A number of immediate challenges surface when the problem is stated in this way. What language should the text be in? What format? What material should be used? And what should the content say? The actual goal was a 10,000-volume library, in fully searchable, indexed, multi-languaged text that would endure a thousand centuries and be readable even if civilization somehow forgot, or gave up, digital technology.

That clearly was too ambitious to start with, so Doug Carlston, cofounder of Broderbund software and Long Now board member, suggested a doable first project as a rehearsal for the grander scheme. His idea: find the most translated texts in the world, gather all the translations and put them all on one super-durable disk. Because all the translations would be parallel the disk could serve as a Rosetta disk. If in the far future a text in a long-forgotten language should be found, there would be at least one source (the 10K Rosetta disk) etched into a noncorroding material that would contain clues to deciphering it. Achieving this modest goal would also teach us a lot about how to do a larger library.

The most translated text in the world at this time is the Bible, in particular the first three chapters of Genesis. The start of Genesis ("In the beginning") is translated into thousands of languages and scripts, and as a bonus, most of these translations were housed in a few institutions. Jim Mason, a young artist with a background in languages and anthropology was hired by Long Now to research and design a 10K Rosetta disk. He imagined a tangible object that would say: read me, keep me forever.

Here is Jim's report on the current status of this project.

We are attempting to create a modern "Rosetta stone" using a new extreme-longevity, high-density analog storage technology. The makers of this storage device, a three-inch micro-etched nickel disk, estimate longevity in the 2,000-10,000-year range. Our goal is to create a functional translation engine for 1,000 world languages as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination--a tool that both enables and inspires communication between distant historical moments and diverse cultural worlds.

The Rosetta disk expands on the parallel text structure of the original Rosetta stone by archiving five distinct linguistic components for each language on the disk. We have selected these five components as the "minimum representation" necessary for a meaningful recovery of a lost language and/or writing system by future linguistic archaeologists. These components are: