Heritage Lists for the Internet Age?

This week celebrated the 42nd anniversary of the first ARPANET message (which was 'the birth of the internet', depending on how you keep score). UCLA is planning to restore the room where it happened - 3420 Boelter Hall - to its 1969 vintage appearance and open the space to the public as the Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive. Leonard Kleinrock was the guy that pressed 'send' on that first message (though he himself is humble enough to acknowledge that the net has many fathers and mothers). It's a cool idea. Or is it? I'm not sure yet.

Anytime there's a big historical transformation, our culture has to pick which events to remember as milestone, and figure out how to turn it into 'heritage' (by which I mean the 'official selection' of historically important places and things). The internet generation saw nerd culture rise to dominate and transform our world, which poses some odd problems for making a list of 'heritage' that needs 'protection'.

First of all, nerd spaces look like crap! They're not monumental or even especially pretty. I mean, any third-rate European castle with absolutely no historical relevance looks way better than any of the places from where the nerds have unleashed a new civilization. To demonstrate, a tour of some potential 'heritage sites' for the digital age:

Steve Jobs' garage in Los Altos, California, where he and Wozniak built the Apple I in 1976:

Photo Cicorp

And the garage in Menlo Park, California, where Google was founded:

Here's Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, surrounded by garbage and flipping the bird in his squalid Harvard dorm room:

 Here's the cubicle at PayPal where YouTube got started after hours:

I want to puke just looking at these pictures. Ranch houses, dorm rooms, and cubicles: these are the paragons of American architectural mediocrity that launched a billion facebook stalkers, iphone obsessives, and cute kitten videos. But places are important, so I'm gonna calm the gag reflex and think about them. They're all modest, closed in, unremarkable, normal spaces. No surprises. Almost every American has been to one of these.

These 'heritage' places of the internet age say nothing, not power, not wealth, not authority. They were the nondescript vessels of something transformative, mute witnesses of events that their architectural surroundings were never intended to facilitate - events that their architects could not even have comprehended. Even the lamest, most irrelevant medieval castle in Europe has these places beat hands down for architectural drama.

But something different is going down here, too - the difference between the cubicle and the castle is that it's a moment of invention that's being fetishized, rather than an aesthetic system or social class. Most monuments on the World Heritage List were built to sustain these kind of ideas, in an effort to make power grabs seem like something permanent. Here's where the 'heritage' model gets kind of warped and twisted:  the moments and places where something new is launched are usually pretty run down and uninspiring compared to the events that take place there. Finding a fit setting for the great stories of history is something else entirely.
 
UNESCO, in fact, has some ideas about preserving Internet Heritage, though a lot of it involved vapid comments like "digital heritage is likely to become more important and more widespread over time". Duh. But they're mostly talking about media, the portable stuff - not the monuments. When will the great centers of computer innovation get on the World Heritage List? Or is the strangeness of that question are an argument that the monument is dead as a cultural form?

Regulatin' Google Latin

It must be a slow Monday night, I just spent 10 minutes chortling over Dr. Octagon lyrics in bad Latin. I was inspired to this diversion by Mary Beard's review of Google's new Latin-English translator (unenthused):

...the verdict is -- dont touch it with a barge pole.

My first shot was actually quite encouraging. I typed in "arma virumque cano" and "I sing of arms and the man" came out. I have come to suspect that someone had actually specially entered a range of obvious quotes people might search for, with a correct translation -- because Google was unexpectedly good at these ("per ardua ad astra" = "up the steep slope to the stars" etc). Now that may be useful enough in its was, but it isnt what I call "translation"; it's a database of quotes.

Things started to go wrong pretty quickly when I typed in some baby Latin. "Servus est in villa" (and you couldnt get much simpler than that) comes out as "In the town is the servant of" (how come villa = town? and where has the "of" appeared from?).

Agreed, this translator sucks completely. It just transliterates the English without changing the word order, and is full of inexplicable mistakes (due to a small working vocabulary? I wonder).

However, let's not overlook the entertainment value. The English to Latin is a GREAT procrastination tool, even if you don't know any Latin. For instance, an excerpt from a famous recent epic poem, 'Ordinatores':

Eastside iustus ledo de LBC
Legati quaeruntur Mr Warren G.
Vidit currum plena puellis non tweak non necesse
Omnes sciunt quid pedibus sursum CCXIII

(You might know this one as 'Regulators'). The original looks like this:

Just hit the Eastside of the LBC
On a mission trying to find Mr. Warren G.
Seen a car full of girls ain't no need to tweak
All you skirts know what's up with 213

This translation is whack! How does 'skirts' turn into 'pedibus'?! 'Vidit currum plena puellis' is vaguely right (a chariot full of girls! Woot!), but currus is masculine so it's gotta be plenum. 'Non tweak non necesse' has a ring to it though, I'm gonna start saying that to people when they need to chill out.

Anyway, this thing is a total train wreck. And like trainwrecks, it's irresistable.

Here's the video if you feel like watching it. I do.

Google to put Dead Sea Scrolls online

Google is getting into the conservation business, as the AP reports:

JERUSALEM — Israel's Antiquities Authority and Google announced Tuesday that they are joining forces to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls online, allowing both scholars and the general public widespread access to the ancient manuscripts for the first time.

The project will grant free, global access to the 2,000-year-old text — considered one of the greatest archaeological finds of the last century — by uploading high-resolution images that are exact copies of the originals. The first photographs are slated to be online within months.

The scrolls will be available in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and at first an English translation. Eventually other translations will be added, and Google's translation feature may also be incorporated. They will also be searchable.

This is the future of epigraphy and papyrology: open-source texts, available to the world, worked on collaboratively online. Heck, it's been the future: the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) was already going 10 years ago. I was lucky to know one of the pioneers in digitizing papyri at Michigan, Traianos Gagos†, who is sorely missed. Traianos understood that being open with data and kind to colleagues would produce more and better scholarly results.

It sounds obvious, but mentality that archaeological data is a private stash 'owned' by one scholar has not totally faded away. Even I'm old enough to remember the early 1990s controversy over 'freeing' the Dead Sea Scrolls from a cartel of scholars who had exclusive publishing rights (see this book, or this old chestnut from William Safire on the case).

Archaeologists and allied trades need to learn that this mentality is counterproductive: instead of being afraid of the non-expert, we need to recruit them and figure out to put their enthusiasm to work! Keeping data private only fuels the ravings of the ancient astronaut theorists.

These Dead Sea Scrolls conspiracy videos sure are fun though.

Much more fun than the stupid action movie soundtrack and fuzzy-light 'reenactments' that Nat Geo is pushing anyway...