Well, here I am, literally one day into my work on my thesis and I’ve hit my first hurdle: The data.
On the positive side of the equation, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of ethics clearance to get access to my data: It’s all been collected and is sitting in a locker waiting for me to use it.
The negative side comes in two parts, the short version and the long version. The short version: Some of it is unreadable.
The long version I’ll leave you to figure out yourselves from this photo I took (I’ll replace it with a scan to better illustrate the problem when I have a scan):
As you can (probably) see, the page is a photocopy of a page of written text – which in itself isn’t great but it’s not the end of the world – what is definitely a problem is the fact that there should be a good deal more text on that page than is actually visible. Back behind the blurry smeared faded areas used to be what I can only assume was legible text, and therefore some of the original data for a language which is very quickly falling out of use is also fading from its written records.
This isn’t (by any means) the condition of the vast majority of the data I have at my disposal – only the earliest data is kept in solely written form, the following data in much better condition and easily decipherable in the form available to me. All the original materials are kept at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), who keep a fairly comprehensive archive of language and other cultural material to save it for later use. I must admit that, given the state of the photocopies taken a number of years ago, I seriously doubt the legibility of the original documents also which have had several more years to deteriorate. For me, this is a hurdle which will relatively easily be overcome – since I’m working on an honours thesis, I can exclude a large amount of the data which is illegible because I need to exclude a lot of data in any case.
The broader issue raised, I think, is about how data is stored, archived, and duplicated. All of the data I’ll be using for my honours thesis is in paper-form, with very little available in the way of digital records on the language. This is a relic of the time in which most of the data was collected, and for that reason isn’t something that could be easily helped.
Given that these records are some of the few true records of a moribund language remaining, however, it seems that preserving such records from loss purely because of the deterioration of the original written records would be a tragedy for anybody wanting to look at the language in any additonal detail and for the Yanyuwa people who may want to work with their language in the future.
I’m not at all saying that anybody has been negligent or lazy or anything else regarding this language data – for all I know, the original transcript pages are kept digitally as images in much better shape than I have access to them in – it’s more a general observation about what could happen and the value that should be placed on these vitally important cultural records before it’s too late.
Completely agree with you there (as usual).
My partner also made a good point the other day being that we are so concerned about being green and eco friendly and sustainable in all ways that, when were long gone, all the buildings we put up now won’t last as long as the roman empire therefore leaving no trace of us having been here at all
It’s kind of interesting that how data and records are recorded and what on makes a huge difference, too. We have access still to a lot of ancient things because the method of recording was on non-perishable or long-wearing materials.
Yet, here we are in the modern era recording things so dependent on electricity and particularly types of technologies that change within a few short years. How long will it be before things recorded on 5 and a half inch floppies are practically irretrievable? Or when CD technology is long since replaced?
Worst part is, for the information age, it’s recorded on stuff that’s not as tangible as clay tablets. Just imagine what happens if we ever have a technological disaster that wipes out the world’s computers and/or electricity. There would go every bit of knowledge recorded on such media.
Tweeting on clay tablets actually does make some sense.
@adam: plenty of plastic will last the distance though. If people disappeared tomorrow, then some archaeologists returned in a few thousand years, the most obvious thing would probably be digging up is ridiculous amounts of plastic crap. Fun thought, eh?
@george: You raise a very valid point. The first edition dictionary of Yanyuwa, which is unpublished but online (http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:11306) is a good example of obsolescence in the digital age. The original files are in an obscure format for the original Mac from back in ‘84, and nobody seems to know what to do with them. Lukily, the dictionary needs to be rewritten, which is underway now.
It does raise interesting questions about the permenance of digital data even if it IS archived properly though. Another example is the fact that some of the field dictionary and notes taken by Jean Kirton in the early 80s are stored on 5.25″ floppy disks once again stored in the AIATSIS database. How useful said disks would be nowadays is good question, before we even approach what to do with the data that’s stored on them.
At the same time, migrating and converting large scale archives of any digital information is a huge undertaking, and usually archives like the ones run by AIATSIS are run by very dedicated people, but they only have a finite amount of funding to put towards those kinds of activities. Most data now is created to conform to the standards of certain archives which then keep the data in formats that are guaranteed to be accessible. Old data doesn’t have this luxury, and there’s a question whether it should be kept in the format it’s in, or converted to a more accessible and permanent format, and if option two is the right one then who’s going to pay?