The Race is on to Preserve Our Heritage - Digital Science

I recently read a fascinating article about how a new process called ‘cyber-archaeology’ is helping us to save some of our endangered cultural heritage sites. The article highlighted the plight of St. Elijah’s Monastery, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, which was completely destroyed by ISIS earlier this year after standing for 1,400 years near the city of Mosul. While nothing can now be done for St Elijah’s, the race is now on to digitally preserve thousands of other at-risk sites around the world before they meet a similar fate. The idea of ‘cyber-archaeology’ has been devised as a means to digitally preserve historical sites, which simplified down involves the coupling of archaeology with engineering, computer and natural sciences. Thomas Levy, distinguished professor of anthropology at UC San Diego and director of the Centre for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, has been undertaking a great deal of this work. He and his team have been focusing their efforts on the Middle East, currently the most critical area for threatened archaeological sites ... If cyber-archaeology sounds a bit far-fetched and somewhat abstract from the day-to-day, let me talk about a related concept – that of digital preservation. Digital preservation is also a hot topic amongst museums, galleries and other memory institutions right now, who are urgently looking at how they can save our cultural heritage for the future.  There is a lot of debate going on about the price we are prepared to put on our nation’s memory. How do we decide what is worth preserving or not? Can we afford to preserve it all? These are the questions that many memory institutions are grappling with right now. In the last 12 months, digital archiving has hit the headlines in a big way as people begin to worry publicly about our society’s digital memory.  Just last week, it was reported that the Australian Government is making cuts to the National Library of Australia (NLA), which will probably lead to a scaling back of its digitisation efforts ... So why is this of concern? To my mind, this will equate to a type of cultural Alzheimer’s or memory failure that will inevitably impact on the way we access the records of Australia’s evolution, from the first Australians who walked the continent 60,000 years ago until now ..."