Linguistic Data in the Long View
Laura Buszard-Welcher · The MIT Press eBooks · 2022
very long-term archiving, that is, on the scale of hundreds to even thousands of years.Indeed, I work on one such project myself.3 If anyone would be working on the problem of how to move knowledge into the future, it seems like it should be this cohort of very long-term archivists.But we generally don't address the question either.We are pursuing emerging technologies, such as storing data in nano-manipulated quartz crystals (SPIE 2016) or the nucleotides of DNA (Church, Gao, & Kosuri 2012) or discovering methods we didn't even know existed such as quantum information storage in the orbital angular momentum of photons (Erhard et al. 2017).We are also exploring new archival environments such as storing data in salt mines (Memory of Mankind, n.d.), or on the moon (Arch Mission Foundation, n.d.), or in geosynchronous orbit (Quast 2018), or transmitting data across interstellar space (Interstellar Beacon, n.d.).These are methods of moving data into the future, but don't specifically address how knowledge will be transmitted to the future.Partly the problem of how to move knowledge into the future relies on making sure it lasts and remains accessible.Any of these explorations into new archival materials and methods could lead to ways of reliably storing or transmitting data in the very long term, and they could help solve the problem of how to store large amounts of data reliably in the here and now.Yet none of these projects is explicitly focused on the problem of how future archival users will be able to make any sense or gather any meaning out of the data they retrieve, if indeed they can discover and access it.I suspect that as linguists this problem may sit squarely in our bailiwick because humans encode, express, and transmit knowledge over vast lengths of time through our languages and cultures.I will say at the outset that I don't have a solution to this problem and apparently Buszard-Welcher