[HN Gopher] Blanking Out
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Blanking Out
Author : gruseom
Score : 33 points
Date : 2020-03-23 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sarahwerner.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sarahwerner.substack.com)
| jacobush wrote:
| There is a similar problem with digitized photos, for instance
| from glass plates. Often they had notes in margins or on the
| backside, but many scanning efforts didn't take these into
| account. So a lot is lost forever, either because the originals
| are destroyed, or forgotten in some archive.
| gumby wrote:
| In the precomputing era you could (legitimately!) get a PhD for
| building a table of constants (e.g. log tables early on, later
| CRC data like steam tables and curves). In the humanities you
| could get one for writing a concordance of all the words in
| Shakespear or some other corpus, or all metaphors, and the
| like. It's obvious how computation killed them.
|
| But in a few years some enterprising grad student or post doc
| will earn accolades by re-scanning some old sources, taking
| into account some important metadata which right now is
| irrelevant. Perhaps labeling or annotating the result in some
| novel way.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I've been saying this for years! There's a lot of hype in tech
| around "backing up" physical things with scanning technologies.
| But you simply can't do it perfectly. There's no such thing as
| a perfect "backup" because reality is _aggressively_ analog.
|
| A digital copy of a painting is way better than no copy at all,
| but it's not a replacement. You can't carbon date a digital
| scan, etc.
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(page generated 2020-03-23 23:00 UTC)