Re: Video on preservation of cultural material

[Laval Hunsucker <amoinsde@yahoo.com>]

But Plato got off easy, didn't he (and think of Galen!)? What 
about the *other*  90+(?)% of stuff -- in many cases fantastic 
stuff, so much we do know (not that  I've got anything personal 
against Galen, but maybe *he* could serve as an  effective 
sleeping pill :-)) -- which didn't make it through those one or 
two  millennia? Or in some cases only just by the hair of their 
teeth, or by accident  as it were? (And with no possibility for 
comparing even two at best typically  long-after-the-fact 
manuscript witnesses.) In spite of all that 'amazingly 
successful' caring?

Isn't the jury still out on this kind of analog/digital judgment? 
And will be  for much longer than all of us shall live?I hope 
that the (former) classicist in  me is not just too naive in its 
preferred lesser degree of pessimism.

- Laval Hunsucker
Breukelen, Nederland

----- Original Message ----
From: James J. O'Donnell <jod@georgetown.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Tue, February 22, 2011 4:00:42 AM
Subject: Re: Video on preservation of cultural material

The classicist in me rebels -- I just mitigated insomnia by
rereading Plato's Symposium before dawn, a text written 2400
years ago and transmitted to us by handwritten copies for about
1900 of those years, surviving in approximately 99.9% accurate
form.  Yes, ancient history is full of gaps and we make
occasional goofy errors, but it's a constituting fact of our
culture that we've cared about preservation and connection, at
some times more than others, and we've been amazingly successful.
What this charming video assumes is important to underline:  (1)
that digital media are less reliable than analog, less easy to
preserve, and so the likelihood of loss and consequent
propagation of goofy error is much higher; (2) but also that the
scholars pompously orating on the video will exist and will
*care* about popular music of 1000 years earlier.  That seems to
me the real open variable here:  in a waterfall of cultural
products, will we care to preserve *all* the popular music of the
next millennium?  Or much of it?  I can well do without the
Archies and Bobby Goldsboro, to be sure (though I hope some
pedant keeps Napoleon XIV for the ages), but I suspect that even
for the "classics" we will choose to grow more forgetful still --
or rather, just shift our attention away from remembering.  It's
the combination of social inattention *and* media friability that
has the power of great destructiveness in it.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.


On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Joseph Esposito
<espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
[Hide Quoted Text]
> Just stumbled on a hilarious video that makes the case in
> spades for a good preservation policy:
>
> http://bit.ly/g6DAWU
>