Will our history be “lost?”

[innonimatu]

"Valuable" is subjective. Take my grandmother's paintings, for example. I happen to find them valuable because of a combination of reasons. Would a museum find them valuable? I have no idea. A local one would find them more valuable than a larger, farther-away one, because the museums around here prefer art pertaining to local(ish) places, pioneer life, local natural history, etc. Most of her paintings are of places in Alberta or British Columbia, some of which I've been to, some of which my father has been to.

Btw, you realize that Highlander is a 1990s science fiction/historical adventure series, right? It's not a documentary.

And a well done one, the kind of which I miss.
Valuation of art is certainly subjective. I was just pointing out that generally speaking (there will always be exception to find) it isn't rarity but workmanship (and conservation) that determines value in the antiques business. "Quality" is much more often a pre-requisite for interest than rarity.

At the "top of teh market" rarity can even work against a body of art being valued commercially - or critically. Make this thought experiment: imagine Tiziano had a twin brother who pained as well as he did but only one work survived. Signed with an otherwise unknown name, and no one knew he was Tiziano's twin. It sits in some museum together with other lose works: "unknown" painter (because he has no body of work to his name), late renaissance north italian. No one wants to study its workmanship but for comparison with the venetian school, some wonder if it's by an an apprentice of Tiziano. It is of the utmost rarity (sole work identified for that painter), of equal craftsmanship to the worlks of a great master... but its uniqueness prevents it from being present in famous museums or private collections. There's only one of it. It misses the opportunity for fame, and is worth less than a Tiziano - because its is rarer.

But I digress, sorry. It's just that I long found the art world, and the way values are attached to stuff (both in the past and now), quite funny in its own and for what it shows of people's behaviour.

 

[innonimatu]

But of course the digital mediums are generally not as long-lasting as quality physical mediums (and the digital mediums that are long-lasting are at this point still theoretically long lasting, rather than proven in the field), and the sense of "it's online, it's always there" can lead to carelessness. When I see news articles that embed Twitter posts, literally embedding Twitter's widget, without replicating the content, I think, "that article's not going to have the full context in 5/10/20 years." Then there's the "can the format be read?" question. If I remember correctly, the BBC ran into this problem with a digital archive they made in the '80s (on the Acorn? Apricot? Archimedes?); by the late 2010s, it was quite difficult to find working machines of that type to read those archives.

On the other hand, are we worse off now than we were in, say, the early 1700s, when surely many publications were ephemeral? Do we have every newspaper or magazine from May, 1702? Almost certainly not. At some point there became a culture of trying to preserve more of the historical record - the Library of Congress keeping a copy of every book published in the U.S., newspapers in the 1800s making a point of keeping their complete archives. But new mediums emerged, without those traditions - silent films, for example. Radio broadcasts. We have less context for 1910s silent film and 1930s radio today than someone who lived through that period (and paid significant attention to them) did.

The possiblity of many copies, and the limitations to preservation even then, started with analog media. Haven't tape recordings of the moon landings been lost? Despite been so widely transmitted and distributed across the world. And a number of early cinema films got lost. It didn't help that cellulose was so flammable. A number of copies has helped, some films are found now and then forgotten somehwere. Ease of copy helps but does not seem to help that much. Then there is the format, as you say: I can have old IBM tapes and not one place in the whole country that can read them. Elsewhere there is still working equipment, and it there isn't it's possible to throw money at the problem and make new equipment to read them. But what if we have another "dark age"? No means to keep copying all the stuff our recent civilizatuoin recorded to digital media, no access to it. Unlike with books, where monks could at least read and preserve what they shoce to preserve, there will be no means to even attempt to preserve those records across some "dark age".

Regarding paper records, do not understimante the depth of national archives. Where the english didn't burn them (thinking of Ireland...) you can, with enough dedicated time, find copies of all newspapers from May 1702. It helps that they wre very few back then not that much had to be preserved. Today we're drowning on data.

 

[Quintillus]

I'll add that the human element is also important. Ultimately, regardless of the format, a human has to decide something is worth preserving and put effort into it, or it will be lost to time.

And that's ultimately a large part of the determining factor. We know about Caesar's invasion of Gaul because first Caesar thought it would be worth writing it down, and in subsequent centuries, other people have deemed it interesting enough to continue copying it. We don't know about Charlemagne's childhood because, according to his official biographer writing shortly after his death in 814, no one had bothered to write anything down about it, and no one alive was old enough to comment on it from first-hand experience.

In other cases, such as lost Greek plays, they may have been copied for several hundred years but eventually been lost as interest in them faded.

And in some cases, luck and the hands of fate also have a role. The downfall of Carthage being an example of this - we know very little of Carthaginian history because their empire fell, and their successors, the Romans, rarely felt that it was worth continuing to preserve Carthaginian history for posterity, particularly in cases where it didn't also heavily involve Rome (i.e. the Punic Wars). Another example is the Assyrians - Xenophon famously traveled by the walls of Nineveh in the 400s BC, wondered who built them, and asked the locals, who erroneously guessed the Medians had built them. Mere two centuries after the fall of perhaps the greatest empire the world had ever seen, the very people who lived by the ruins of one of its most prominent cities didn't know who had built that city.

Some day, much of our literature will be like those lost Greek plays, and we'll know no more about most of today's politicians than Charlemagne's biographer knew about his childhood. The jury's still out on whether we'll leave ruins of our cities that are as mysterious to our successors as Nineveh was to Xenophon's contemporaries, but that's a possibility as well.

This (and my previous post) is largely a more verbose way of saying that I agree with what Tee Kay has said. Items with consistent intergenerational appeal are most likely to survive, but luck has a factor as well.

 

[Snowygerry]

(...) But what if we have another "dark age"? No means to keep copying all the stuff our recent civilizatuoin recorded to digital media, no access to it. Unlike with books, where monks could at least read and preserve what they shoce to preserve, there will be no means to even attempt to preserve those records across some "dark age".

That is not very likely is it, the last events I can immediately recall that involved a large scale destruction of original historical records was the burning down of the library in Leuven in 1914, and Leopold II burning his colonial records.

"Dark ages" came about because the locals did not have a written history (mostly couldn't even read or write), these days even the smallest village anywhere has a written history, and certainly our abilities to collect, store and preserve information have improved.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'll add that the human element is also important. Ultimately, regardless of the format, a human has to decide something is worth preserving and put effort into it, or it will be lost to time.

And that's ultimately a large part of the determining factor. We know about Caesar's invasion of Gaul because first Caesar thought it would be worth writing it down, and in subsequent centuries, other people have deemed it interesting enough to continue copying it. We don't know about Charlemagne's childhood because, according to his official biographer writing shortly after his death in 814, no one had bothered to write anything down about it, and no one alive was old enough to comment on it from first-hand experience.

In other cases, such as lost Greek plays, they may have been copied for several hundred years but eventually been lost as interest in them faded.

And in some cases, luck and the hands of fate also have a role. The downfall of Carthage being an example of this - we know very little of Carthaginian history because their empire fell, and their successors, the Romans, rarely felt that it was worth continuing to preserve Carthaginian history for posterity, particularly in cases where it didn't also heavily involve Rome (i.e. the Punic Wars). Another example is the Assyrians - Xenophon famously traveled by the walls of Nineveh in the 400s BC, wondered who built them, and asked the locals, who erroneously guessed the Medians had built them. Mere two centuries after the fall of perhaps the greatest empire the world had ever seen, the very people who lived by the ruins of one of its most prominent cities didn't know who had built that city.

Some day, much of our literature will be like those lost Greek plays, and we'll know no more about most of today's politicians than Charlemagne's biographer knew about his childhood. The jury's still out on whether we'll leave ruins of our cities that are as mysterious to our successors as Nineveh was to Xenophon's contemporaries, but that's a possibility as well.

This (and my previous post) is largely a more verbose way of saying that I agree with what Tee Kay has said. Items with consistent intergenerational appeal are most likely to survive, but luck has a factor as well.

I've just done a re-watch of the "Library of Alexandria" scenes in the original version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Yes, I'm aware that later on, inaccuracies in some of what Sagan said were pointed out.

However, one thing Sagan pointed out is something I didn't pick up on when I first watched this over 40 years ago: Not one of the scientists or other scholars who studied there ever questioned the justice of slavery. They researched, studied, wrote, their books were copied and archived... but they were apparently unconcerned with how their discoveries would, or could, impact society at large, including regular people. They had science, but the ethics of science wasn't yet a thing (and there are all too many cases where it's still not a thing).

Anyway, here's one of the things that influenced my teenage self in high school:

That is not very likely is it, the last events I can immediately recall that involved a large scale destruction of original historical records was the burning down of the library in Leuven in 1914, and Leopold II burning his colonial records.

"Dark ages" came about because the locals did not have a written history (mostly couldn't even read or write), these days even the smallest village anywhere has a written history, and certainly our abilities to collect, store and preserve information have improved.

The thing about the "Dark Ages" is that the state of knowledge wasn't 'dark' everywhere. While Europe was trying to recover from the fall of Rome and the subsequent chaos in which new kingdoms and empires came and went and not many people had the time and resources to devote to acquiring knowledge, the same was not true of other parts of the world. There is so much we owe to the efforts of Arab scholars of that time, for instance.

But you don't need a lack of literacy to have a 'dark age.' In Canada the time when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister is often referred to as the Dark Decade - and that ended in 2015. Harper was obsessed with the idea that environmentalists are 'terrorists' and whole collections of data going back decades were literally burned. An environmentalist can't take the government to court over the destruction of an ecosystem if the data they rely on to prove their case no longer exists, right? Harper claimed the knowledge was digitized before the books and reports were burned. I have a very hard time believing this, especially when you consider that right-wing governments have a habit of 'disappearing' certain webpages online. You'd swear that you read something online a month ago but oops, it's gone.

Oh, and the idea that even the smallest village has a written history? That's not always true. If nobody bothers to write it down and the government cancels the program that would have seen information gathering going on, as far as the government is concerned, that village no longer exists. Thanks, Harper - because he canceled the long form census that gathers much more information than the regular census. Some villages were no longer receiving some federal services, because as far as the federal government knew, they didn't exist. Nobody there had been tabbed to do the long form census that would have at least told them that somebody was there.

 

[Snowygerry]

(...)
But you don't need a lack of literacy to have a 'dark age.' In Canada the time when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister is often referred to as the Dark Decade - and that ended in 2015. Harper was obsessed with the idea that environmentalists are 'terrorists' and whole collections of data going back decades were literally burned. An environmentalist can't take the government to court over the destruction of an ecosystem if the data they rely on to prove their case no longer exists, right?

That was the idea of Leopold II also, yes. No records, no legal culpability, for me or my heirs.

That does not stop the writing of history though.