This is another reason why the Internet Archive is just incredible. The Great 78 Project is a collection of old recordings that pre-date LPs and it’s amazing:
The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) have been made on 78rpm discs. While the commercially viable recordings will have been restored or remastered onto LP’s or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78rpm discs and recordings. Already, over 20 collections have been selected by the Internet Archive for physical and digital preservation and access. Started by many volunteer collectors, these new collections have been selected, digitized and preserved by the Internet Archive, George Blood LP, and the Archive of Contemporary Music.
Here is one example that I noticed on the front page of the collection. It’s “La Vie En Rose” by Edith Piaf; Louiguy; Edith Piaf Chansons Parisiennes; Guy Luypaerts:
If you love old music then you will enjoy this collection. You can follow the project on Twitter if you are interested in new additions:
Completed virtual unwrapping for the En-Gedi scroll, courtesy of Science Advances. License: CC BY-NC 4.0
Ars Technica has a fascinating report about how an ancient Hebrew texts has been read for the first time in more than 1 700 years despite being almost destroyed by a fire that consumed the ancient synagogue it was discovered in:
When the En-Gedi scrolls were excavated from an ancient synagogue’s Holy Ark in the 1970s, it was a bittersweet discovery for archaeologists. Though the texts provided further evidence for an ancient Jewish community in this oasis near the Dead Sea, the scrolls had been reduced to charred lumps by fire. Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to “unwrap” a parchment that’s more than 1,700 years old.
The charred scroll from En-Gedi. Image courtesy of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, IAA. Photo: S. Halevi.
Computer imaging techniques are commonly used to preserve and share readable manuscripts, but capturing writing locked away in ancient, deteriorated documents poses an entirely different challenge. This software pipeline—referred to as “virtual unwrapping”—allows textual artifacts to be read completely and noninvasively. The systematic digital analysis of the extremely fragile En-Gedi scroll (the oldest Pentateuchal scroll in Hebrew outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls) reveals the writing hidden on its untouchable, disintegrating sheets. Our approach for recovering substantial ink-based text from a damaged object results in readable columns at such high quality that serious critical textual analysis can occur. Hence, this work creates a new pathway for subsequent textual discoveries buried within the confines of damaged materials.
I am utterly fascinated by stories like this, especially when it comes to recoveries of ancient texts and artifacts in Israel. These discoveries paint a rich picture of Jewish life in Israel going back millennia.
An estimated timeline for the En-Gedi scrolls, , courtesy of Science Advances. License: CC BY-NC 4.0
I also love how these modern technologies can be used to reveal these ancient artifacts to the world once again. A great example of this is how the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitised and made publicly available online through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.
This is one of the reasons I am a big fan of work being done by the Google Cultural Institute (which powers the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library). Despite the copyright concerns some copyright owners raise, Google is doing amazing work preserving our collective culture.
These sorts of stories also remind me of the debate about ephemeral digital content that Snapchat popularised. On the one hand, we produce so much content these days and much of that is only really relevant for short time periods. On the other hand, if we don’t capture even the silly things we share in some form, we could be sacrificing an historical archive, the value of which could only be appreciated in centuries to come.
Digital technologies give us the means to store perfect versions of just about everything. The question is more whether we can solve the challenges of format compatibility so that future technologies will be able to access our content?
Everything we share is a thread in the tapestry of our modern culture and small memes can have the tendency to grow into profound cultural transformations. We almost lost the En-Gedi scrolls entirely to a fire. Thankfully we didn’t and the work of these scientists has completed more of the historical tapestry of my ancestors.
The Art Camera is no ordinary DSLR. The images are gigapixel images (gigapixel = 1 billion pixels, DSLRs tend to be in the tens of millions of pixels) and the camera is robotic:
The Art Camera is a robotic camera, custom-built to create gigapixel images faster and more easily. A robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, taking hundreds of high resolution close-ups of the painting. To make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke, it’s equipped with a laser and a sonar that—much like a bat—uses high frequency sound to measure the distance of the artwork. Once each detail is captured, our software takes the thousands of close-up shots and, like a jigsaw, stitches the pieces together into one single image.
You can view images from the Art Camera on the Google Cultural Institute’s website in a specific album. I’m sure all this feeds into Google’s goal of organizing the world’s information but that doesn’t matter. Remember what ISIS did to Palmyra? Even if you take radicals out of the picture, material things wear over time and we have a rich cultural heritage that we should preserve for future generations and this is a great way to do it.
I have stacks of old slide photos of my family when I was a child that I’d love to have digitised. These are photos I haven’t seen for decades and will give my children more insight into my childhood and into my parents (especially my late father who they never met). I also make multiple backups of my RAW and processed photos, locally and in the cloud.
We had maybe a dozen or two images and documents from grandparents and great-grandparents when we were young. Our children will have huge volumes of data and media available to them. Well, if they want it and assuming some cataclysmic event doesn’t send humanity back to the Middle Ages.
Other great examples of local organisations working to preserve our heritage include –
The more we can digitise and preserve, the more our descendants will be able to learn about us and our history. This applies to our shared heritage as well as our personal and family heritages. You simply can’t fully understand who you are and where you are going without understanding where you came from.
