Dead and dying media

Speaking chipmunk, at Unreal Nature, referenced among many other things an article about the Incan knotted-string data storage medium, the khipu: Conversations: String Theorist (Gary Urton interviewed, Archaeology, Volume 58 Number 6, November/December 2005). This is as good a cue as any to recommend The Dead Media Project, set up by the SF author and journalist Bruce Sterling to research and document obsolete forms of data storage (see the Manifesto). Probably the best way into this is the archive of working notes, categorised into areas such as Pre-industrial-age communication, telegraphy, magic lantern systems and writing systems.

While it's easy to marvel at the eccentricity of dead media such as the Flame Organ and "Sound Bites" musical candy, the historical and technological drift in media is a matter for intense practical concern. At this very instant, the VHS videocassette is making a rapid jump toward obsolescence with digital TV transmission; and in the computing field, there are already major difficulties in accessing records stored as little as a decade ago (read A fistful of Rosetta stones, in which Felix Grant tells of the complicated rigmarole necessary to recover 20-year-old epidemiological data backed up on VHS tape).  Looking at Dead Media, nothing much has changed; in fact the majority of now-weird storage and recording methods made perfect technological and practical sense at the time, only to go rapidly out of date.

Languagehat cited another example: shorthand (aka stenography), as described in a Leah Price London Review of Books piece, Diary, 4th December 2008.  It's quite surprising to read that the use of shorthand in secretarial and reportage situations, for which it's best known, was preceded by a rather different early history in a male subculture that used it for writing diaries, communicating with pen-friends, and other uses

clergymen (who used it to rip off each other’s sermons) and theatregoers (who used it the way some filmgoers use a handicam).

It's not generally remembered that Bram Stoker's Dracula (Gutenberg EText-No. 345) makes frequent references to Jonathan Harker's journal and letters to Mina being written in shorthand, partly to conceal their content from the Count.

The variety of competing forms (see The Shorthand Place for a history, list and chronology of such systems as tachygraphy, tachography, zeitography, zeiglography, semigraphy, semography, etc) eventually collapsed into a duopoly of Pitman and Gregg systems, and even these have withered with the introduction of audio-typing and voice recognition, except in areas such as British courtroom reportage, where even official audio recording is still forbidden under the same legal archaicisms that require the bizarre convention of court art.

Nevertheless, there are still fossils of shorthand's geeky heyday to be found on the book circuit.  At Joel Segal Books, we occasionally see the curiosity of Victorian novels in shorthand, like this imprint of Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four - "engraved in the advanced style of Pitman's shorthand" - at the Internet Archive (ID signoffour00doyliala).  Looking at Dead Media and repeated speculations about The Death of the Book, I wonder if a hardcopy book is likely to become a similar curiosity.  Personally I find it unlikely; it might happen with ephemera, but the short lifespan of electronic storage formats would make this a deeply shortsighted move for texts where long-term recovery is needed. But stranger things have happened, and very fast, in media.
- Ray

Addendum (upgraded from Comments as significantly interesting):

Julie Heyward wrote:

Very interesting that you've posted this topic just now. I've been monitoring (and trying to decide whether to post about) a thread, The future of archives over at The American Scene. In particular, the comments which are still (slowly) being added to. This bit in comments, for example:

"There are two tracks to follow here- the value of Information and the intrinsic value of “things” (artifacts is a fancier word, but it used by so many in so many ways, it does not suit here) To be able to see the development of a literary work, if possible, by forensic computing to pull out previous versions is measurable value to patrons and researchers. To have the item used by the literary great is of interest and value as well."

Do we need to save the thing itself (zip disk, CD, tape)? Does that matter when the information in question was generated? electronically?

I'm all for saving the things, for exactly that reason ("forensic computing to pull out previous versions "). You never know what unexpected insights/techniques might come along to extract novel historical material.  Examples: the Archimedes Palimpsest (lost work of ancient Greek maths proto-calculus recovered by multispectral imaging from under the prayer book overwritten on the same vellum); and the various video/photographic recovery projects I mentioned a while back in Re-colouring the past, all of which were dependent on access to the original media.

- Ray