Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Che-Wei Wang
Wait, only a hundred years?
Interviewer
You can go with a thousand if you like.
I think humans have this need to uncover something from archives.
Che-Wei Wang
I have two thoughts. One that is top of mind for us is gold plate lithography, because we’ve been messing around with it. It’s nano etching gold-plated sapphire and gold-plated glass to make tiny high-resolution images that you look at through a microscope. What’s cool is that you don’t need any crazy technology to see it, all you need is magnification, which is abundant and probably will be around for a long time. But it doesn’t have to be images, it could be anything encoded onto it. Gold-plated sapphire is not going to corrode. It’s very stable. There are many examples of this, like the Voyager Golden Record.
The other area that I’m immediately thinking of has nothing directly to do with digital technology. I often think about cultures that don’t have written history, where instead it’s all oral tradition and passed down through generations of people, like Māori oral tradition. Whoever is holding the memory is responsible for passing it to the next generation, and so on. I find that very different to how we treat storage currently. We used to treat CDs like they were forever, but they’re not. We use media that is ephemeral, it decays within your lifetime. So you hold the responsibility of then moving it to the next medium or moving it to the next person or whatever it takes to keep it going.
Taylor Levy
I think humans have this need to uncover something from archives. There are people all over the world making things that are never going to have an audience at this moment. But the right person in the very distant future can connect to something that was created in this present day and have that transform them. For example, so much of Bach’s work had disappeared, and then Mendelssohn had them in a box. It was the right person who connected with them. All of a sudden, it was brought back to the world. A part of why we archive things is because we have a history of unarchiving things and being like, “oh, I didn’t know all this stuff was there!” That’s a place to reverse engineer and design from.
At least in my head, this is what drives humans to be like, “oh we need to preserve all this knowledge.” So going back to your original question of what we would do if we had a gazillion dollars, I think it’s all about finding ways to turn the act of preservation into a ritual, instead of trying to invent permanent media, because nothing really is permanent. How can you make it a tradition, to build it into the culture, so that collections are maintained?
I think it would also be really interesting to create a new biology where you could start to archive within DNA. To have our complete body of knowledge distributed throughout our entire ecosystem. So it isn’t just humans carrying human-created knowledge, it’s really everywhere.
Che-Wei Wang
That’s a cool idea. I have another idea too. I’m not sure exactly the mechanism, but it would essentially be a time capsule that returns. The way I’m thinking about it is a rocket. You fill a rocket with stuff, you launch it, intentionally on a trajectory where it’s meant to orbit for however many years until it comes back. And that is the ritual. You know when it’s going to come back, and you prepare for that, and prepare for the next rocket to go, it’s a continuous uploading into the sky of this archive that also returns. You keep uploading and downloading. The difference between a time capsule and an archive is the time capsule has a date when you open it. There’s an actual moment where you’re meant to go through it and look through it, versus an archive that has no designated moment to experience it. Time capsules force you to acknowledge that this thing happened many years ago.
Interviewer
How do each of you think about approaching stewardship and access to knowledge that is being accumulated or stored?
Taylor Levy
One thing that comes to mind is having access to diverse ways of experiencing archives and their collections.
I went last week to my 20-year college reunion, and the school that I went to has a super beautiful library. I went there with my friend and my friend’s kid. We were mucking around in the basements and pulling these big racks from side to side and then discovering these old books that were so amazing. We felt like we had no business touching and opening them. It’s such a privilege to have access to that, to your public library, to have an hour there, you find stuff every single time that’s interesting. Making sure people have permission to explore and wander these places is important, especially in a way that isn’t just fed to you on the computer.We also spoke with Lori Emerson, whose organization prioritizes sparking visitors’ joy and their ability to interact with objects from the past.
Che-Wei Wang
The big problem in my head of archives and institutions holding knowledge is maintaining these things is essentially an interface problem. The Library of Congress does an amazing job of archiving everything, but I don’t know that many people who are accessing it. And it’s the same with all libraries. I worry people are quite lazy. People want to use an interface that has the least amount of friction. If there’s any amount of friction to getting the information, that’s like a barrier that steers you towards getting that information some other way or maybe not even getting the information at all or getting some other version of the information, it’s avoided.
As much effort as we put into archiving knowledge, there needs to be equal and maybe more effort into making it accessible. Accessibility is determined by interfaces. Interfaces have to allow people to wander and explore or search, accommodate all these ways of finding and discovering and bumping into things.
It’s really hard to provide interfaces that are productive, that people don’t feel like they’re too big of a hurdle to enter to access. But I keep going back and forth between wanting it to be as seamless as possible, as friction-free as possible, and acknowledging there’s friction in the library that’s good. You have to walk to the stack and find that book and you discover things along the way. I think that balance has to be just right.
Taylor Levy
I feel like independent bookstores have really nailed this. Every bookstore I go to these days, Books Are Magic, Greenlight, McNally Jackson, they have all mastered the design of the experience at a very human scale.
They are built to both easily just grab whatever you want quickly, but also to spend a lot of time exploring. Every time I wander in a bookstore, I feel inspired and like something small in me has changed. In the Pratt Library, I used to spend the whole day reading magazines in the periodical section because you can find the most incredible and most garbage stuff to read all at once. It is insane you should go there, it’s so good. We should go there.