Just a follow up on how big the Silchester data set is, from Mike
Rains at York Archaeological Trust
The current size of the
> Silchester IADB database is just over one gigabyte (1080mb), approximately
> 350,000 records split between Finds, Contexts, Photos, Plans, etc. To this
> you could add the large amount of stuff (high resolution images,
> spreadsheets, Word documents, Illustrator files, etc) on the file server in
> Reading which hasn't reached the IADB yet. We're probably about two thirds
> of the way through Silchester, so that by the end of the project I wouldn't
> be surprised if the total goes over 2gb (or more - every year I think we
> generate more digital data than in previous years). I would guess that the
> Insula IX excavation represents less than 1% of the total area of
> Silchester.
M
2009/10/14 Scott <[log in to unmask]>:
> I believe that we need to prepare for exabytes of information; petabytes
> will run out too quickly.
>
> The most crucial question should be how are we going to store this amount
> of data--and whom can we trust to decide what to maintain and what to
> discard. I heard a secondary school librarian brag that she had rid her
> library of all the obsolete books by Hardy, Austen, and the Bronte sisters
> to make room for the great classics being written now that are pertinent
> to our new society. I remarked to her, "Adolf Hitler and Stalin would be
> proud of you." Before I am bombarded by angry librarians, they should know
> that I have only the greatest respect for librarians in general and the ones
> that I know now in particular. The librarian in question was from San
> Francisco.
>
> Despite the alleged claim by some Classicists that they only need a small
> sample on which they can build their theories, I have read too many satires
> on the USA in which extraterrestrial or 3rd or 4th millennium Terran
> archeologists explore our civilization and try to recreate our times and
> manners, usually with very credible answers that could hardly be more
> inaccurate. A poll was done in 1957 on geographic knowledge of college
> freshman by selecting one school in each state and interviewing the first
> willing freshman. I was selected at MSC and answered all of the questions
> correctly and pointed that two of the questions had more than one answer
> (capitals of The Netherlands and Bolivia)--I was very interested in
> political geography from elementary school on. Mississippi was rated as
> having the most knowledgeable students in the USA in the field of
> geography--and I went to high school in FL. This poll, which was quickly
> discounted for many reasons--not all valid--is an excellent example of
> making wide statements on an invalid sample. Just how do any historians--I
> am more of a Medievalist than a Classicist--decide that their limited
> samples are sufficient to make a conclusion. I hedge my bets by making my
> sample equal to my population (e.g., the listed names on a particular codex)
> or by generalizing (e.g., I wrote an article on the quadra nomina just to
> show than agnomina and other such names were used in a reply to an article
> that stressed the tria nomina and ignored the existence of the other name
> forms. That they existed was my point--not what percentage of the
> population had them--that would be another paper.
>
> N. Scott Catledge, PhD/STD
> Professor Emeritus
> history & languages
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Digital Classicist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of Willard McCarty
> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 10:15 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [DIGITALCLASSICIST] How much server space would the Classical
> world occupy?
>
> I'd guess that people here know about the genre to which this question
> belongs, perhaps best exemplified by Michael Lesk's asking "how much
> information is there in the world?" (Googling for his name and the
> question will turn up some things which illustrate.) Lesk used to count
> it in terabytes, but I suppose the figure has gone up somewhat, now that
> we commonly have terabyte discs. It strikes me, however, that one should
> also be asking what we would not have if all that can be stored on a
> hard disc in whatever format were all that there is. What would happen
> to the library if ALL that we had was the buildings and the books and
> other resources in them?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> Melissa Terras wrote:
>> But you may also want to make the comment that Classicists are *used* to
>> dealing with data loss, and extrapolating findings from the smallest
>> scrap available. For example, pay packets and the Roman Army - someone
>> out there will know better than me, but I remember reading somewhere a
>> calculation of how many payslips would have been created (millions) and
>> how many have survived (a handful) - yet we can understand a lot from
>> the extant material.
>>
>> Additionally, its not good archival practice to keep everything... you
>> have to make choices about what you will save, and what you will discard!
>>
>> M
>>
>> Paradoxographer wrote:
>>> Hello everyone, and thank you all for your contributions and help.
>>>
>>> To answer James' question about motivation ... I'm currently working
>>> in research in the field of records and information management (though
>>> a classicist by education and inclination, hence my continued
>>> membership of this list). I am trying to get a feel for the volume of
>>> material involved to inform a case I intend to argue in a paper /
>>> article against the view - common in the records and archives field -
>>> that we are entering a 'digital dark age' beacause of our current
>>> inability to preserve more than a tiny fraction of born-digital
>>> material. I know that the figures for current rates of information
>>> creation are not exactly models of precision either, but they are
>>> frequently bandied about in journals and conferences, and for my
>>> purposes orders of magnitude will suffice.
>>>
>>> And I entirely agree that images, archaeological reports / records,
>>> etc would have to be taken into consideration for any proper
>>> assessment: the reason I provisionally excluded them was that I feared
>>> it was too much like asking 'how long is a piece of string?' and did
>>> not want to try the patience of the list with impossible questions!
>>>
>>> Kind Regards,
>>>
>>> Rachel Hardiman
>>>
>>
>
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing,
> King's College London: staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/
>
--
_______________________________________________
Melissa M. Terras MA MSc DPhil CLTHE
Senior Lecturer in Electronic Communication
Department of Information Studies
Henry Morley Building
University College London
Gower Street
WC1E 6BT
Tel: 020-7679-7206 (direct), 020-7679-7204 (dept), 020-7383-0557 (fax)
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/melissa-terras/
Digital Humanities Quarterly: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
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