{"id":4126,"date":"2024-10-05T10:43:25","date_gmt":"2024-10-05T14:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/?p=4126"},"modified":"2024-10-05T10:43:25","modified_gmt":"2024-10-05T14:43:25","slug":"survival-of-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/2024\/10\/05\/survival-of-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Survival of Records"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I have written about this a bit in my \u201cSymbolic Algebra Timelines\u201d post<\/a> as part of the discussion of how Greek mathematics got transmitted to the present.<\/p>\n

I had read an article by the renowned literary historian Gilbert Highet some sixty years ago which I never forgot.\u00a0 It discussed in some detail the miracle of the survival of records from the past.\u00a0 I tried to find a copy online, but in vain.\u00a0 So I purchased a used 1962 copy of the now extinct Horizons<\/em> that contained the article and proceeded to digitize it.\u00a0 Since the subject of the article is about disappearing writings of the past and how some managed to survive through reproduction, I feel it somewhat apropos that I allow it to see the light of day again.\u00a0 He is a marvelous writer and covers the subject with fascinating detail.<\/p>\n

Even with all the losses Highet records, writings still survived because they were in some sort of hard copy form. By 1962 fragile documents such as newspapers were being moved to microfilm.\u00a0 But microfilm was often replaced by magnetic tape, which was in turn replaced by a succession of digital media: floppy discs, CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, and so on. Finally, local media is being replaced by files in the \u201ccloud\u201d. All these media are subject to deterioration and loss, or the whims of the custodians. And of course, they all need machines and software to retrieve their information\u2014technology which may no longer exist. Terabytes of moon data are lost on Ampex magnetic tapes for which there are no analog tape readers or even records of the data formats. Even now, some books are being published electronically and not in hard copy.\u00a0 Some people have referred to this ephemeral situation as the \u201cdigital Dark Age\u201d where everything<\/em> can be lost\u2014often in an instant.\u00a0 So perhaps we are lucky that records from the past were not digital.<\/p>\n

My copy of Highet\u2019s article appears in two forms: a full, but very large, version with all the color figures, Survival of Records<\/a> (58 MB), and a text-only smaller version, Survival of Records wo figs<\/a> (700 KB).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have written about this a bit in my \u201cSymbolic Algebra Timelines\u201d post as part of the discussion of how Greek mathematics got transmitted to the present. I had read an article by the renowned literary historian Gilbert Highet some sixty years ago which I never forgot.\u00a0 It discussed in some detail the miracle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[272,271],"class_list":["post-4126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-voices","tag-gilbert-highet","tag-survival-of-records"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4127,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions\/4127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}