The Doom Of Digital Data

These past couple of days I’ve been at a meeting for this research project I’m involved with that is trying to make the nascent Semantic Web useful to ecologists and environmental managers. So far it has been an exercise in attempting to get the biologists and the computer scientists to speak a common language. We scruffy ecologists and biogeographers hail from Northern California, and the computer scientists are mostly in Maryland. Oddly, both groups have a high fraction of vegetarians.

In an effort to expose the computer scientists to a bit of field science, today we went on a trip to the PRBO bird observatory out on Point Reyes. There we learned about mist netting and field forms, got a good look at a merlin before he flew from the top of a dead pine tree to chase a flock of dunlin on Bolinas Lagoon, and saw a group of harbor seals hauled out on a mudflat a little over a hundred meters off, many of them about to have pups next month.

At the field station we looked at their library of field notes from some thirty years worth of monitoring projects. The computer science students were soaking it all in, but the government agency tech folks, grizzled from a career spent wrestling databases, were aghast at all the paper records. What if there’s a fire? they thought, and started conjuring up ways to directly collect these notes in digital format. Tablet PCs, perhaps?

Our guide explained that such a transition would be a long time in coming. After all, paper is a great technology for notetaking. It doesn’t run out of batteries, you can drop your notebook in the creek without losing all your data, and it’s easy to put side comments and sketches in the margins.

The calligrapher and librarian in me is wary of directly capturing field data digitally for another reason. Bearing in mind that these are long-term ecological records which will be immensely valuable if they survive a century or two, digital records seem much more ephemeral than paper and pencil or ink. Between the certainty over time of data corruption (those pesky cosmic rays), change in hardware technologies for storage, and obsolescence of file formats, I’ll place my bets on acid-free paper and Higgins Eternal ink.