« Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music | Main | Text encoding in the era of mass digitization, TEI conference 2009, Ann Arbor, MI »
August 11, 2009
3D Holograms
Recently, a programmer friend of mine sent me a link to an article and video on 'touchable' holograms. While these technologies continue to amaze and advance at a rapid pace, I can't help but think of one of the issues that was consistently brought up in my digital preservation course last fall- which was, who saves this stuff, and to what extent do we save?
Our classroom example was to look at web content. Do we just save the code? Or should there be a more comprehensive capture? The Internet Archive has been thinking about this problem since 1996. I looked up the main URL for Case Western Reserve, and found the first capture in 2000. For web pages, there are so many levels to worry about- the code, the content, the countless buried pages. In a way, it would be an endless job to try to save it all. In our classroom exercise, we were asked to focus on mainly on the content. Looking back to that Case page, the design seems clunky compared to the current design, but would there really be a need to keep all the formatting exactly how it appeared in 2000?
This issue also reminded me of a problem that many galleries and museums have been dealing with in multi-media works, such as Nam June Paik. His work has been especially troublesome, since he loves to use outdated equipment and media components that quickly go out of modern use. Some of his works entail looped film clips on small television sets (seen here). One of the conservators from the Smithsonian who spoke at a conference I attended last summer, talked about the conservation challenges of Paik's work. The video clips were transferred to digital media, but the constant repair of the television sets have become cumbersome work as time goes on and the sets and parts become obsolete. This conservator posed the question of if the television sets become nonfunctional, how does the museum faithfully replicate Paik's artwork? The digital files of the video clips can be stored or transferred, but the original installation is lost without the television set-up. Where do we lose the original meaning?
One solution is emulation. This can be a simulation of hardware or software, but always with the idea of retaining the original look and feel. For example, someone has taken the time to emulate the game Chuckie Egg from 1983, keeping the exact same font and formatting of the original. Does the old version flicker more?
Related article: Digital Preservation from the User's Perspective, American Archivist, Summer 2006
Posted by vad17 at August 11, 2009 12:31 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.case.edu/digitallibrary/mt-tb.cgi/20976
Comments
If you use cwru.edu at archive.org you get archived versions of the Case website back to 1997.
http://web.archive.org/web/19970226180341/http://www.cwru.edu/
Posted by: dave at August 12, 2009 11:51 AM