Maintenance begins at creation, so why are we not creating better?

The beats are the same. You work for government, or academia (lets face it, that’s probably where 90% of the work is) you have a deliverable; you save it; you print to PDF; you store it on an institutional repository with some metadata (or Zenodo, OSF or equivalent) and its done.

There’s a small chance that it’s FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) right? It has metadata that can be discovered by an audience looking for it and can be indexed by search engines. The data is potentially accessible if published correctly. They’re not particularly interoperable or easily converted, and PDFs aren’t really designed for reuse, even if tools like Apache Tika help ease the burden of extracting artifacts. It’s just a PDF, why are we even talking about FAIR? There begins a story…

The beats are the same, yet, we work in digital preservation, our backgrounds are in GLAM or software, why do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot? Why are we not using our skills to create better?

Winding down at Orcfax: a retrospective

With the recent announcement that Orcfax is heading into operational mode, it’s a bittersweet moment that means our adventure in the web3 space is almost at an end.

Operational mode means that we are finally able to leave the systems that we have created running and publishing content all-day-every-day with minimal monitoring. Our salaries are paused and we won’t receive another paycheck

RE: https://exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/digital-dark-times-salaries-in-digital-preservation/

This job is indeed the worst. Coordinator Syndromed dumpster job.

The Loon would add to @beet_keeper's excellent takedown that no one else in the Serpentine will understand, and few if any value, what the person in this job does. That will make the policy parts of this job flatly impossible, everything else merely absurdly difficult.

https://gavialib.com/2016/09/the-dumpster-job/

When you can’t pay for things the currency of payment is psychic…

Contributing back to the commons in digital preservation hasn’t been for everyone.

We know the famous XKCD that touches on the underappreciated work of maintainers in obscurity. When you, or your institutions, or services are using free and open source software, or other information and data in the commons, and you’re not contributing back, you’re perpetuating this, and what’s more, there’s a virtuous cycle that we’re missing out on.

I read something the other day and it felt like a red flag.

The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal

by @beet_keeper

When you move country you have to be prepared to change quite a lot about your life. Back at the end of 2020, apart from literally everything else going on my partner and I also moved from Canada to Germany.

For me, this was my fifth or so international move (including shorter temporary stays) in as many years.

Being able to pick up sticks and move like that means living a drastically minimized life. Most of the things you have fit in a suitcase. Most of the things you have are small, and largely not overly whimsical. Sure, you can fit a few treasures into your bag, but you learn to value small ones, not things you might otherwise use to decorate an entire apartment!! 

So, what do you do when you do have an apartment to decorate?

You ask the best known painter in your family to conjure some magic, The Painter Goblin!

#art #coding #creativecommons #cybercats #daumier #digital #digitalArt #digitalHumanities #digitalart #digitization #frozen #gameboy #glam #keithharing #letterWriting #lollyrocket #magentaconverse #marieantoinette #materialCulture #openData #painterGoblin #paintergoblin #postcard #postcards #print #remixArt #remixart #twitterBot #vagabond #wikidata

Revisiting bsdiff as a tool for digital preservation

by @beet_keeper

I introduced bsdiff in a blog in 2014. bsdiff compares the differences between two files, e.g. broken_file_a and corrected_file_b and creates a patch that can be applied to broken_file_a to generate a byte-for-byte match for corrected_file_b.

On the face of it, in an archive, we probably only care about corrected_file_2 and so why would we care about a technology that patches a broken file?

In all of the use-cases we can imagine the primary reasons are cost savings and removing redundancy in file storage or transmission of digital information. In one very special case we can record the difference between broken_file_a and corrected_file_b and give users a totally objective method of recreating corrected_file_b from broken_file_a providing 100% verifiable proof of the migration pathway taken between the two files.

#ac3 #archives #audio #audiovisual #audit #authenticity #av #bash #bsdiff #checksums #code4lib #corruption #corruptionIndex #digipres #digitalArchiving #digitalForensics #digitalLiteracy #digitalPreservation #digitalStorage #diplomatics #fileFormats #glitch #glitchAudio #glitchart #integrity #preservationAnalysis #preservationMetadata #provenance #sensitivityIndex #storage

Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data

For a while back then I was into space flight again. Scientists, science communicators, and engineers were all excited for a new era of rocket launches and the potential unification of the human race as we look towards the future.

During that time I discovered Colin Fries’ work in the NASA History Division to document all NASA “Wake-up calls”. A wake-up call is simply a piece of music used to wake astronauts on missions, a different piece of music, daily, for the duration of the flight.

Take, for example, the last Space Shuttle mission (Space Transportation System) STS-135; it was in flight for 13 days, and the wake-up call on day one was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, while on day 13 it was Kate Smith singing God Bless America.

As a huge music buff who has the radio or music television on 18 hours a day, I really wanted to delve into this further. While Colin’s work is great, it’s just a PDF file (@wtfpdf). A PDF is not an ideal file format for querying data and gleaning new insights. So, while I wanted to explore it, I first decided to turn it into a true dataset. The result was a set of resources, a website, a JSON, a CSV, and an SQLite database which are each more functional and more maintainable over time.

Lets take a look at the results and https://nasawakeupcalls.github.io below!

Looking after your URLs: tikalinkextract eight years on

We might not have a second life, but what if I told you there was a second internet? Not the deep web, but another web that we engage with nearly every day?

Think about it, that QR code you scanned for more information? That payment link you followed on your electricity bill? The website you’re told to visit at the end of a television ad?

The antipodes of the internet are these terminal endpoints, material and not necessarily material objects that represent the end of the freely navigable web — the QR code on a concert poster is the web printed onto the physical world. There is every chance it will be scanned and followed by someone from a mobile device, but it’s a transient object, something that will exist for a short amount of time, and then disappear into the palimpsest of the poster board or wall it was pasted on until it eventually disappears.

This is part of the materiality of the internet that has long fascinated me. Perhaps it comes from being a student of material culture, but if we look around, we see the Internet everywhere!

Declarative programming for Digital Preservationists @ NTTW8

by @beet_keeper

Just released on the No Time to Wait (NTTW) YouTube channel is my presentation from NTTW8 in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Slides also available here).

The presentation follows up on my proposal for iPRES 2024 and allowed me to present parts of what was, in the end, a pretty significant paper (in terms of word count).

Some of my reflections on the presentation are below.

#Code #Coding #Conferences #declarative #declarativeLanguages #declarativeProgramming #jsonid #KVAL #kvalAccessLanguage #NoTimeToWait #NTTW #NTTW8 #NTTW9 #Programming #programmingParadigms #software #SoftwareDevelopment #talks

File formats as Emoji: 0xffae

by @beet_keeper

tldr: https://emoji.exponentialdecay.co.uk

File Formats As Emoji (0xFFAE or 0xffae) might be my most random file format hack yet. Indeed, it is a random page generator! But it generates random pages of file formats represented as Emoji.

The idea came in 2016 with radare releasing a new version that supported an emoji hexdump. I wondered whether I could do something fun combining file formats and the radare output to create a web-page.

Along came a spare moment one weekend, some pyscript, and bit of sqlite, et voilà. File Formats as Emoji (0xFFAE) was made a reality.

#0xffae #Code #Coding #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #emoji #FileFormat #FileFormatIdentification #FileFormats #learning #PRONOM #pyscript #Python #SkeletonTestCorpus #teaching