[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July
Henry Lowood
lowood at stanford.edu
Sat Aug 22 12:08:37 PDT 2009
Grady, and others --
if you'd like a presentation on what is happening with the Preserving
Virtual Worlds project (Virtual Worlds = interactive fiction + digital
games + virtual worlds per se), I'd be happy to do that. The project is
being taken on by a consortium of Stanford, UIUC, Maryland, and RIT,
with funding from Library of Congress. We're working on a bunch of
issues that are relevant here, from packaging and metadata for software
to preservation of user (player) activities.
General project info here:
http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/
Stanford work here (esp. on the wiki, button on the upper right):
http://howtheygotgame.stanford.edu
or direct path to PVW portion of wiki:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/htgg/cgi-bin/mediawiki/index.php?title=Preserving_Virtual_Worlds
see esp. the work on DOOM
Henry L.
Grady Booch wrote:
> i think there are two issues here: the collection of raw software
> artifacts, and the classification of that data.
>
> in the former case, time is not on our side. for example. when i heard
> reports a few months ago that microsoft had terminated their popular
> Flight Simulator program, i wrote to Ray Ozzie, asking if we could
> preserve that code. He said he'd look into it, but I never heard back.
> I suspect that that code base may be lost to time. Frankly, I don't
> need a shared language to preserve that stuff - i need feet on the
> street, people close to projects such as these who have a place they
> can put such code in a place for safe keeping.
>
> as for the classification of that data, my personal opinion is that we
> spend way too much energy worrying about metadata and not enough
> energy collecting. the metadata will emerge as we collect a larger and
> larger body of artifacts. get this loose confederation up and running,
> create mechanisms for collecting and preserving, and i am confident
> that the classifications will emerge organically, probably in ways we
> cannot a prior predict.
>
> i want a community of indiana jones types who are out there fiercely
> collecting artifacts before they turn into dust. let us sort out how
> we present them along the way, for frankly, this we are breaking new
> ground: how does one present, how does one classify, how does one tell
> the story, how does one reveal the inner beauty of these objects that
> spring from human cognition and have no material manifestation other
> than their operation and some lines of code?
>
> Grady Booch, IBM Fellow
> Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, IBM Research
> Voice: (303) 986-2405
> Fax: (303) 987-2141
> Mobile: (720) 299-8292
> E-mail: gbooch at us.ibm.com
> E-mail: egrady at booch.com
> Skype: gbooch
> Video: video.booch.com
> Web: www.handbookofsoftwarearchitecture.com
> SLURL: Alem Theas @
> http://slurl.com/secondlife/ThorneBridgeTown/59/154/28?title=ThorneBridgeTown&msg=IBM%20Research
> <http://slurl.com/secondlife/ThorneBridgeTown/59/154/28?title=ThorneBridgeTown&msg=IBM%20Research>
> GPS: 39.6195/-105.069
>
>
> From: Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com>
> To: Tim Shoppa <shoppa at trailing-edge.com>
> Cc: scc_active at computerhistory.org
> Date: 08/22/2009 07:46 AM
> Subject: Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July
> Sent by: scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> In saying "you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software
> collection process," you express a misunderstanding. I'm looking for
> something else--the ability of repositories and scholars to share
> stuff in those particular cases in which *_they want_* to share, and
> to annotate by links that show "interesting" relationships of stuff as
> well as other metadata, sharing those annotations without confusing
> them with the original materials. In this, "share" might or might not
> involve copying.
>
> To achieve this without limiting what any institution or individual is
> able to do and also to support building on other people's similar work
> requires that certain aspects of metadata follow common conventions.
> I.e., it helps immensely to have common methods/representations for
> how metadata is linked to data and other metadata. E.g., a reason
> that you can productively use any library in the world is that the
> libraries use common conventions for their catalogues and for
> library-annotations on the spines of books.
>
> Another way of saying the same thing is that a museum collection is
> useful only if it is a great deal more than a pile of stuff collected
> into a single room.
>
> Your "loose coalition" would not work without shared language among
> its members. An example of shared language might be a common way of
> identifying works so that anybody can clearly see which are identical
> and which are different, and also which different ones are related to
> each other.
>
> Best wishes, Henry
>
> H.M. Gladney, Ph.D. _http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/_
> (408)867-3933
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 05:37, Tim Shoppa <_shoppa at trailing-edge.com_
> <mailto:shoppa at trailing-edge.com>> wrote:
> Henry Gladney <_hgladney at gmail.com_ <mailto:hgladney at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > This is because I am disappointed that CHM some time ago quit credible
> > interest in preserving software, which I regard as of commensurate
> > importance to the areas that it is investing in. This happened
> > notwithstanding the fact that there are clear ways of achieving this
> > relatively inexpensively and the efforts of the now-suspended volunteer
> > Software Preservation Group.
>
> A couple years ago the SPG at CHM sponsored "The Attic and the Parlor",
> which made it clear to me that they appreciate the loose and broad
> coalition of individuals and corporations and institutions that
> preserve software.
>
> I also got to hear some of the difficulties (esp. legal ones) and triumphs
> (CHM's then-new software curator's results) of doing this in the CHM
> framework.
>
> Henry, it seems you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software
> collection process through the CHM. I've come to the realization that
> the base
> of interesting software "in the wild" is tremendously huge and often
> extremely specialized. I think a loose coalition of software archives
> and archivists, both professional and non-professional, is the right
> solution
> at this point.
>
> Tim.
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--
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602
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