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/