Digital Dark Ages Defeated?
Digital Dark Ages Defeated?
February 12, 2009: Researchers from Portsmouth University in the UK working on an innovative plan to protect our rapidly disappearing information from the digital dark ages.
As technology swiftly evolves and older formats and the means to read the data they contain disappear, effectively erasing the acquired knowledge and cultural record of the generation brought up in the digital age.
Exactly how to preserve the world’s aging digital archives is a curly question, but computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve, and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck at the University of Portsmouth believe they have the answer in the world’s first general purpose emulator.
An emulator is a piece of software that mimics different types of hardware to make pieces of proprietary software or data from old formats readable on contemporary computers. Boot camp, which enables Microsoft Windows to run on Apple computers and console game emulators such as Snes9x are examples of this, as they enable software designed to run on one piece of equipment to be fooled into running on another. Normally emulators are programmed with specific purposes in mind, however, the researcher’s project aims to create one that will emulate media from any format.
The EUR4.02 million Europe-wide rescue project, dubbed KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable), is shooting to create methods to keep all digital information alive and safeguarded for future use.
“People don't think twice about saving files digitally - from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives. But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to 'read' it disappearing altogether,” says Dr Delve. “Former generations have left a rich supply of books, letters and documents which tell us who they were, how they lived and what they discovered. There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.”
“We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It's a very real and worrying problem,” Dr Anderson. “Things that were created in the 1970s, 80s and 90s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material.
“Early hardware like games consoles and computers are already found in museums but if you can't show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. For future generations it would be a cultural catastrophe.”
Normally data is migrated to newer formats to save it from becoming obsolete, however, this approach is both time and resources consuming, and it runs the risk of corrupting and otherwise degrading the data. Emulation on the other hand, means the data itself remains untouched as it is only ever read, not copied and converted continuously.
“Every time hardware, software, operating systems or anything else upgrade, the KEEP machine just emulates on this new platform. It means it is as future-proof as these things get,” said Pinchbeck.
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