2007.05.23
Decyphering Modern Texts
One would think that the decyphering of old writings would be the domain of archeologists poring over ancient palimpsests. It turns out that, thanks to modern technology, the quality of documents written only a decade ago can decay to the point of requiring decypherment. And don't get me started on the problems of digital preservation and the decay of URLs.
The image above comes from a
publication retrieved from the US
Education Resources Information Center (ERIC).
Commendably, ERIC has launched a project
to digitize 340,000 documents indexed between 1966-1992,
and now available only on microfiche.
Unfortunatelly, it turns out that the road from paper, to microfiche, to bits,
is not as smooth as we would like.
