On this episode of Spark: Dematerialization, illegal cassette dubs, and intangible cultural heritage. Click below to listen or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Play audio:
- Dan Misener dematerializes his old paperwork and cassette tapes
- Scanner advice from the SparkExchange
- Important scanner considerations: sheet feeder (auto document feeder), duplexing, OCR
- Fujitsu ScanScap scanners
- USB cassette deck and turntables from ION
- Audacity audio recorder and editor
- Michael Geist explains the murky legal waters around dubbing your old cassettes and vinyl
- Meryl Swiatek finds a cassette tape of her mom, and thinks about how technology can preserve a person’s essence
- Nora asks about your most important momento
- Hannah Classen shows Nora a few options for audio recording
- Renee Sampson is learning SENCOTEN
- Chris Harvey builds fonts and keyboard layouts for indigenous languages
- Dale Jarvis is the Intangible Cultural Heritage development officer for Newfoundland and Labrador
- Anand Giriharadas explains how Ushahidi is is changing the notion of how to bear witness in these digital times
Music and sound effects used in this episode:
- Countdown by Corsica_S
- “The Transcendentalist” by Do Kashiteru
- Music from “Music for Walking the Dog” by Podington Bear
- “Rubber Molecules” by Chad Crouch
- “theOtherSide” by airtone
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[Original image by Meryl Swiatek]
Hi Spark crew. Love this week's show as it is very timely with a project I have going on this year called 365Retro. It's a Flickr group I set up late last year in the hopes of using it as an excuse to digitize and share some of my pre-digital camera photo collection. The idea is to post a scanned photo each day for the year, with a bit of a story to add some context. You can read more about the impetus I had to set up this group at my blog http://clintlalonde.net/2010/01/09/365retro-my-20…
There are a couple of us participating (it's open and anyone with a Flickr account can join the group – just search Flickr for the 365retro group), and I have found it is a wonderful way to get the backstory of the people in my virtual network.
Hi Spark crew. Love this week's show as it is very timely with a project I have going on this year called 365Retro. It's a Flickr group I set up late last year in the hopes of using it as an excuse to digitize and share some of my pre-digital camera photo collection. The idea is to post a scanned photo each day for the year, with a bit of a story to add some context. You can read more about the impetus I had to set up this group at my blog http://clintlalonde.net/2010/01/09/365retro-my-20…
There are a couple of us participating (it's open and anyone with a Flickr account can join the group – just search Flickr for the 365retro group), and I have found it is a wonderful way to get the backstory of the people in my virtual network.
That's an awesome motivational tool, Clint.
I am empress from your work and you are beautiful too
Could Dan Misener talk about the best way to dematerialize old colour slides? My mother who is 94 has hundreds of slides that my father took with his Leica camera. I have an Epson scanner but the slide feature scans four at once that need to be edited individually which is a lot of work.
Also what about something like Dragon Naturally speaking to convert digital speech into printed words?
There are several good discussions about slide scanning happening on the SparkExchange: http://www.sparkexchange.ca/search?q=slides
It was a Thai website, in English.
tOM
After the 2005 tsunami, someone immediately setup a website where people could send names of survivors or people missing.
tOM
I have considered the ION Audio tape decks and turntable for audio conversion. Isn't this is a rather expensive way to convert old cassettes and LPs to audio files.
What I have setup in my home is an audio mixer with a tape deck and a turntable connected to the inputs and the audio output connected to the line-in jack on my laptop (when it is docked). I have found this to be a cost effective way to convert old cassettes and LPs to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.
What I would not try, however, is what this gentleman did on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=088AWsTtTFU
Does anyone know if Revenue Canada would accept scanned copies of old tax records and tax documentation? That would aloow me to get rid of 7 year's worth of paper!!
Hi Alvaro – there likely would be an issue if you were ever audited "where are the originals"?
Scanned documents are not considered reliable evidence unless produced through well documented procedures.
See Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence (CAN/CGSB-72.34-2005), a new National Standard of Canada that outlines the main requirements for ensuring that electronic records generated from electronic information systems are reliable, authentic and trustworthy.
Love the show, guys/gals!
On the topic of DAP recording, I just thought I'd remind that Ipods aren't the only players out there. Sony, Sandisk, and Creative all have players with built-in mics (I used a Creative in uni to record lectures with very good results). They also aren't nearly as restrictive with open format or media player support, and tend to have better sound quality. If recording's important, you might consider one of their products.
Just like to commend SPARK for bringing up this very important issue of preservation of irecordings in electronic and magnetic media formats. Preserving these materials is of great concern to Canada's many archivists and conservation specialists. There needs to be increased government investment and resources for institutions and the public to enable us to save these recordings . . . such recordings are a part of national and personal history.
digital life and hard drive crashes and viruses ….
i have a friend who lost his whole daughters wedding to a virus
my hard drive just went down with 57 gig of photos on it
lucky i had backed it up to another drive the month before
57 gig / 4.3 gig DVD's = 13 dvds and thats just 1 folder …. to backup
people who digitize there life some times LOOSE it ALL ,
photos last for hundreds of years jpg the worst file type to save a photo
will die in a hart beat .
i missed most of your show today i would hope there would be a bit on BACKUP
The ACT of Copying …
The Act of copying such as life
As in a photo
Or sound as in a cd or record or tape
You lose something of the original
The AURA … the life force
When 44 k /sec was used
As a sampling rate for the first digital cd’s
What a bad name for such a careless idea
Its was determined that they would not sample
The higher tones, over tones and harmonics
It is now known that this is were all the real data lies
As in the character of a sound
The essence of the tree
By arbitrarily deleting of known sounds
From a live band
And then taking that 44/k/sec sampled signal
And sampling and compressing it to mp3’s
Does it even more damage by design
The act of taking a photo of a tree
At say 3.2 Meg pixels
Then saving that as a Jpeg file
Instead of RAW or TIFF
Destroys it even more needlessly
People go out and buy large mega pixel cameras
And then save there family photos as Jpegs
Not knowing what they have and what they are doing to it
I fear for a generation of family photos
Stored on a hard drive with a 5 year max life
Or cd’s that can get scratched or corroded by cd rot
Sound or a tree, life it self
Cannot be sampled at the lowest acceptable rate
And compressed for file space
And deleted because of a full arbitrary storage size device
You are fooling your self
And needlessly killing what photos you do take
By arbitrary settings and sample rates
By compressing for file space
Deleting when full
And using the worst type Jpeg
So as you take those new family photos
And think how they are stored on the camera
And transferred to your computer
And saved as a print size file TIFF
And then saved as a smaller jpeg for email
What did you lose in that process and could you have prevented it
not too mention hard drive crashes and theft and fire
John Kearns
I'd like to echo Bonfire_canada's comment. I enjoyed this program and in general I think Spark is excellent, but I do think there are occasions when some important angles to your stories are overlooked. And sometimes I don't think you'd have had to go very far to find those angles.
In this episode, for example, I enjoyed hearing about the potential benefits of 'dematerialization' and how much space you might be able to save by storing things digitially … but I seem to recall hearing somewhere that digital preservation might be a lot more ephemeral than we'd like, and comes with its own set of perils. Where oh where did I hear about that? Hmmm …
Oh yeah … on Spark! (May 27, 2009 episode)
Fair comment, ballgame. The challenges with digitization include things like data rot, and keeping pace with format changes, which we didn't go into in this episode, so yes, both storage systems have down sides.
I would say, though, per Bonfire_canada's comment, that Dan specifically mentioned the importance of having backups and having them in more than one place.
I would never ever tell some one to get ride of a original piece of family history for a COPY , NEVER , copy's are always not as good , and you can never get that photo back , and if you digitize your life and that crashes were do you go , take for example the on line photo site Flicker , it went from free to pay , anyone who did not pay lost all there photos but a small amount , anyone who thinks your facebook account is for ever is fooling them self , one hack and your account is gone , and with people using soft passwords i can see a huge problem , i see a whole generation of family photos gone , nobody prints there photos any more , and if they do print at home on a INKJET well that has a life span in sunlight of almost zero , as you can see i am passionate about people loosing there life to lost data . keep up the good work Nora , but digitizing your life without bigger thoughts is very dangerous , we will see in 25 years when there are no more cd players and MY Real photos will still be here and so will my parents that are now over 50 years old
john
Hi all, I just thought I'd post a link to one of the pieces of hardware we are using for digitizing audio tapes, the plusdeck2c. You can check it out here: http://plusdeck.co.kr/eng/2c.html
Concerning Meryl Swiatek's story about her "Mama Reads" tape, NEVER THROW AWAY VALUABLE ORIGINAL MEDIA!!!! I'm digital archivist (that's my job) and while Meryl's story was lovely, her decision that digitizing the tape she found was terrifying.
1) There is no guarantee that the digital technology onto which you convert the recording will be used in the future. She that mp3 might not take up any space, but what if you forget about it until a time when mp3s are no longer used and cannot be read or converted by most computers.
2) The sound quality of an mp3 sucks. Sure an audio tape also has terrible sound quality, but that tape recording of mum is the best version you're going to find. If you convert it into an mp3 you are going to loose data or introduce data that wasn't there to begin with. Do you want the original, best version of the recording, or one which is altered. And if you convert that recording into another format, guess what, you will loose even more data and introduce additional data that wasn't originally there. Enough conversions and the recording will sound awful.
3) Ok, so you've for a digital recording on your computer…and then your computer crashes. Audio tapes don't crash. Yes, the tape can get caught in the machine and get messed up, but with a pen and a little bit of winding you can fix that. If your computer crashes, it's gone (usually). If you put something on YouTube so that it is saved somewhere else, you don't know whether Google will decide to purge its servers of recording which have not been listened to in a while. When you then go to find that recording you uploaded to some audio service because you lost the recording on your computer, it could be gone too.
So, go ahead and digitize the recording so that you can copy it, transfer it, etc. But PLEASE don't throw away the original. The best way to ensure the survival of any recording is to make sure there are lots of copies. By getting rid of the original, you are not only reducing the number of copies, but getting rid of a copy in a different format, which also happens to be the best copy.
I would like to echo this sentiment. It is easy to gain access to the analog audio media I had from the 1980's, but it is very hard to gain access to the digital media. I have floppies from the 80's and early 1990's that I'm having a hard time finding the equipment to access now. At the time I had drunk the cool-aid and actually believed that Commodore would be around forever.
Now I have a few boxes of 1541 and Amiga floppies I would love to copy to a new medium (many boxes likely fitting on a single USB stick these days). Some of this is restricted by copyright (and thus will likely be lost, as the copyright holders no longer exist — and yet archiving is considered illegal), and some was authored by me. It is the stuff that I authored that I would love to dedicate to the public domain and publish to archive.org that bothers me the most.
I'm glad that I didn't take the advice of some people in my Amiga days that I digitize everything and throw away the originals. Digitization that isn't constantly migrated to new technology is effectively throwing it away, while originals tends to last longer without constant maintenance.
i totally agree with both Russel and Duncan
my old box of my Mothers and Aunts photos of life in the 40's and 50 's
are still there , my digital copies are not going to last near that long without a lot of work and moving to what ever format is after cd's and JPG , and JPG sucks …. john
I also have to agree with the commenters on not destroying the original analogue form of data. I am a forensic document examiner and I have to deal with original vs. copy issues every day. The original is always the best quality, it's not debatable. The REAL value is that the analogue form can be accessed years in the future. Forget about not having the software to read the file in the future, that's a big enough worry. But the big problem with a digital file is that when you lose a crucial bit, the tiniest part of the file, the file is generally inaccessible for eternity, especially if that bit is in the table of contents telling the software where on the medium to access all the other bits. With analogue, you can cut out a significant portion of the medium and still be able to access the rest of the material. Tear off a corner of a page, you can still read the page. Kill that digital bit and you've lost the file. Digital files are great to use as working copies, but if the information is valuable to you, keep the analogue original.
This is a great comment from Timothy. We have a platform where we help people preserve and share their memories and stories in a private secure environment and coach people on how to best do this. I would site the above post from Timothy during our coaching and training sessions.
Thanks for a great blog community and the dedication to a topic of great value.
Are you sure your links to the CC music is correct? I'm looking for one of the songs used in the story about Meryl, but can't get to the same song.
I just wanted to make a small point, during the Anand Giriharadas interview about Ushahidi he stated that "snowmageddon" was a term coined by Barack Obama. I believe the term was first made popular in Canada in 2008 by Environment Canada to describe a storm.
While this post has an earlier use:
http://thelousylinguist.blogspot.com/2010/02/brie…
Both of these examples are a full 2 years before Obama's use.
Great show! Regarding dematerialization – The first level of analysis is appraisal. That is, before I think of scanning/digitizing I must think about the value of the document. One needs to ask, "Before I spend time, money and energy on scanning/digitizing, I need to understand the document's value as an artifact." One of the quickest ways to dematerialize is simply to toss it away and move on! Digitizing is easy, but breaking up is hard to do.
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Thanks a lot, it is really useful to me.
Are you sure your links to the CC music is correct? I'm looking for one of the songs used in the story about Meryl, but can't get to the same song.
The REAL value is that the analogue form can be accessed years in the future. Forget about not having the software to read the file in the future, that's a big enough worry. But the big problem with a digital file is that when you lose a crucial bit, the tiniest part of the file
I have recently started a site, the information you offer on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.The first level of analysis is appraisal. That is, before I think of scanning/digitizing I must think about the value of the document.
Then there is the question of whether the destination medium matters when making of private copies of audio. It is interesting how we were far more certain in the past than we are now.I will visit your site often to keep updated.Some interesting and well researched information on cameras.
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The first level of analysis is appraisal. That is, before I think of scanning/digitizing I must think about the value of the document. One needs to ask, "Before I spend time, money and energy on scanning/digitizing, I need to understand the document's value as an artifact." One of the quickest ways to dematerialize is simply to toss it away and move on! Digitizing is easy, but breaking up is hard to do.
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Could Dan Misener talk about the best way to dematerialize old colour slides? My mother who is 94 has hundreds of slides that my father took with his Leica camera. I have an Epson scanner but the slide feature scans four at once that need to be edited individually which is a lot of work. Decorative concrete Melbourne
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Are you sure your links to the CC music is correct? I'm looking for one of the songs used in the story about Meryl, but can't get to the same song.
Are you sure your links to the CC music is correct? I'm looking for one of the songs used in the story about Meryl, but can't get to the same song.
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Hmm, perhaps the song has been pulled down by the creator since we first podcast this, since this post is 2 years old. Sorry!
I enjoyed hearing about the potential benefits of 'dematerialization' and how much space you might be able to save by storing things digitially … but I seem to recall hearing somewhere that digital preservation might be a lot more ephemeral than we'd like, and comes with its own set of perils.
Are you sure your links to the CC music is correct? I'm looking for one of the songs used in the story about Meryl, but can't get to the same song.
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