The Digital Humanities \u2014 and they are not alone \u2014 do not only document their research data and results in the form of texts and \u2014 recently \u2014 databases using digital tools and formats, they also create new forms of cultural heritage in genuine digital formats. While the advantages of these tools and formats are obvious and help researchers to communicate faster, access more sources and research results and any kind of information faster than ever before, their future usability and availability are far from certain: During the last c. 30 years, and especially with the advancement of the World Wide Web, hundreds of research projects have been started using digital means \u2014 and many of those have disappeared in the meantime, destroying the results of scholarly work and, by doing so, working and life time in unimaginable magnitudes. Now, for the last 5 years or so, funding institutions are demanding more and more that researchers present \u2018data management plans\u2019 describing how their data will be created, stored and \u2018securely\u2019 safed for the future. And by \u2018future\u2019, they mean 15\u201320 years. This demand does not only come some 25 years (too) late, it is also ridiculous in several aspects: First, while research in the humanities usually deals with artifacts dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years old, the results of the new digitally enriched research shall be lost after 20, at least 50 years? Because there is NO data format, let alone: software, that can be guaranteed to work for more than 50 years. (And this is only expected to be true for simple text formats like TXT, i. e. without any enhancement in comparison to printed texts.) In addition, computer sciences themselves have no means and even no ideas what such means could be or look like to preserve data, software and the necessary hardware to use both for more than 20\u201330 years. Vint(on) Cerf, as the main developer of the TCP\/IP in the early 1970s, one of the \u2018fathers of the internet\u2019, has warned since 2015 that our times will be seen as the \u00abdigital dark age\u00bb in the future. But his suggestion for a solution, a sort of a meta-emulation for hard- and software called the \u00abdigital vellum\u00bb is not working yet and will encounter grave problems once it would be working and available for everyone. Alan Kay, one of the fathers of object-oriented programming and the graphical user interfaces developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, proposed another medium to preserve at least \u2018snapshots\u2019 of data on discs containing self-explaining descriptions decipherable and readable by rational beings even in thousands of years. He calls them the digital \u00abcuneiform tablets\u00bb. But these do not address our immediate problem, and they may also not overcome the same problems with proprietary software, licences, \u2018activation keys\u2019 that have to be exchanged over the internet and, finally, data and software heavily (and more and more) relying on other data accessible via networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before we introduce more and more new, shiny digital products, tools and formats into research, documentation and usages like education, we should step back for a moment and try to answer the question: How long will these be available? Is it really worth to invest time and (lots of) money into projects whose results we ourselves may not be able to use in 20 years anymore? Based on this situation, the paper will sketch a proposal for another solution that may look ridiculously expansive at first sight, but \u2014 as far as I can see \u2014 cannot be avoided in the long run. It will only get more and more expansive the longer we wait, and more and more research data will be lost in the meantime. We should teach (and learn ourselves) that digital tools and formats bear this immense problem, and that without any solution we are throwing our data into a big \u00abinformation black hole\u00bb (Cerf).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Cultural Heritage of Our \u2018Digital Dark Age\u2019 Thrown into the \u2018Information Black Hole\u2019: What Can It Teach Us and Our Students in the Near Future and \u2018in the Long Run\u2019? The Digital Humanities \u2014 and they are not alone \u2014 do not only document their research data and results in the form of texts … <\/p>\n