capturepigeons

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Also, previous tag:

fun fact this is a big issue that museums/archives/preservation professionals run into

This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.

All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.

Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.

And then there's the problem of format.

It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.

We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.

This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.

And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.

How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?

So for those of you who don't know yet, this is Colleen Darnell, also known as The Vintage Egyptologist on Instagram where she goes full colonialist in 1920s/1930s clothing complete with pith helmets and using Egyptians both living and dead as props. (Not kidding: she takes Aesthetique™ photos in tombs.) She's married to John Darnell, who was formerly her professor and PhD supervisor at Yale, and it's quite a well-known scandal in Egyptological circles that the two were having an affair before and at the time of her working on that PhD. John, who was married during that affair, eventually divorced his wife and then married Colleen.

In the field, they're considered bad scholars. Beyond the Yale scandal, beyond the fact they're being ridiculously colonialist in the way they present themselves and their "vintage fashion" choices, which they will extend to wearing on actual digs in Egypt itself, their condescending attitudes bleed through in their scholarship. A scholarship that's mediocre at best to begin with, especially John's. However, because they (especially Colleen) have such a strong social media presence, they keep getting asked for docus or to serve as consultants for popular media (e.g. Jodi Picoult heavily consulted them for her novel The Book of Two Ways and whoof it shows), and most people won't question their fashion choices because "ohh aesthetic".

However, by far most Egyptologists severely dislike them for their academic dishonesty and refusal to acknowledge the loaded history behind their chosen mode of dress.

Image description: screenshot of two paragraphs that read, "Afterward I found a chat room thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of the theft no one would look at the footage. He said he tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all.