refractal

For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples. Satellite photography helps archaeologists survey this land mine laden and largely unexplored site. [via ]

Bit-rot, book worms, city swallowing hurricanes. The archaeologist is firstly set to task in the compilation of archives. Gathering up information in all of its varied forms after it has fallen out of the coherence and illumination of active human knowledge, pulling from the dust stories and dreams that have become untethered from the human network and reintroducing them to the possibility of knowledge and life. The first steps in the process are to index and collate these orphans and then to integrate and connect them into databases and libraries. A cartography of this knowledge, of those languages dead but in writing, those margin notes about household needs in medieval prayer books, represents the frontier of history at this moment. Or, to be more precise, one of the frontiers of history, the frontier of the public domain.

The Kirtas Technologies’ APT Bookscan 1200 can automatically digitize 1200 pages per hour. The machine weights 77kg and is priced at EUR 120,000. [company site]

There are regions even here overgrown with bush and scarcely traveled. Surely the maps have a record of them and lines extend out around them to show that they are claimed within the purview of history, but what are the declinations of the mountains there? Are there caves? Cities? These answers may yet to be discovered, or those dark places on the map may survive the map itself, may never be looked upon by human eyes, and fall into oblivion. However, recent advancements in the methods by which our civilization patrols, explores and defines frontiers will bring lonely wayfarers to these outposts along routes not originally conceived by the cartographers. The pharaonic enterprise of private corporations like Google and public institutions like the Library of Congress are taking point by point measurements of our the vast expanse of history’s frontier that is contained upon the continent of the public archive. The resolution is precise: each pebble a word whose characters are optically recognized and related to all other characters in the realm. This morphology transforms the frontier almost into a vast schizophrenic ocean where point to point geometry does not obtain, where a journal entry from an arctic expedition, a paper on audiology and a facebook profile might by happenstance resolve in the same state before a traveler searching for a friend who exists in midtown Manhattan.

This Pegasus sculpture was micromachined from a particle of diamond dust using a focused ion beam (FIB) microscope. It was produced as a piece of marketing ephemera to showcase Norsam Technologies’ archival etching process which can shrink down and inscribe between 1,000 and 100,000 pages on a 2 inch nickel disc. [company site]

But this frontier is an inherently fragile and fluid one. While some territories are constantly being opened through the labors of scientists probing the heavens and of suburban mothers cataloging their anxieties over which of the many baby carriages on the market they ought to select, others are consigned to an inescapable oblivion. The frontier of history traces out a wholly technological interior. What is knowable historically lives in media. Buildings, infrastructure, inscriptions, papyrus, punch cards, floppy disks, all as physical containers of meaning are intimately tied to the preservation and persistence of history. The contemporary reality of digital representation as the prevailing medium of history presents two radical possibilities for the future frontiers of history. Either on the one hand history will become more monolithic in its shape as all of human activity in the real world recedes not quietly back into time, but rather is inscribed persistently in a record which in turn pushes the frontiers of history further and further outward. However, the consequence of this may be precisely the thing that results in a complete foreclosure of this period of history. What will become of our harddrives, and our PDF file formats hundreds (even dozens) of years hence? Even baring a catastrophic interruption in our civilization, a generation of technological progress and poor preservation could relegate the prior generation to naught.