Digital Literacy Archives - Page 2 of 3 - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

René Magritte's The Lovers, Paris 1928 (Photographed at MoMA, NYC in 2017

Unrealized ideas: Unintentional Secrecy in the Era of Openness

Tyler recently posted this quote:

“History unprocessed is opportunity unrealized”

It reminds me of an unrealized article I wasn’t able to get written and into the wild, but it’s an important thought I would like to share nonetheless.

Proposed for James Lowry’s ACARM Symposium in 2015, I wanted to discuss when government is unable to adequately fund day-to-day effort, and research and development in the archive sector, leading to inefficient and potentially ineffective processing pipelines for records of archival value accessioned from government agencies and commissions.

It was just an abstract, but maybe folks have thoughts about this? Have we moved on since the early to mid 2010’s? What modern metrics do we have available to us today to see the progress? What does the advent of the new US administration mean for issues like this? As well as increasing worldwide authoritarianism?

Cat's Meow from the Offner Dynograph EEG

What will you bitflip today?

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.

I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.

Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.

A tree at sunset photographed from the train on the Bodendsee in Southern Germany

Versioning as memory?

So, it turns out my theme of the moment is code hygiene (or maybe memory?).

Today I am thinking about versioning, especially in relation to its impact on digital preservation; both software preservation and the impact of versions on long-term preservation efforts in other contexts.

Silver birth tree in Ravensburg featuring its characteristic eye-like bark.

Code as memory?

It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.

Digital Preservation and the Gen-Z Technology Skills Gap

I saw this interesting video by Ema Roloff on a Gen-Z skills gap as identified by Salesforce. Of many interesting…

iPRES2024 header for DESIGN PATTERNS IN DIGITAL PRESERVATION: DECLARATIVE SOFTWARE FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATIONISTS

Not your first paper from iPRES2024: Design patterns in Digital Preservation: Declarative software for digital preservationists

Well folks, my paper for iPRES2024 was rejected. but the good news is that you get to read it here…

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.

Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.

Stop, Look, Listen, retro game style advertising for safety at a Houston Bus Stop

Linting as understanding

I have been working on a Python template repository as part of my day-job at Orcfax.

It is based on the popular pypa sample project and adds important tooling that supports the quality assurance of projects that many developers are expected to engage with.

In my template repository I add editor defaults, linting, and prepare the repository for unit tests, and then deployment.

I have migrated a copy of the template I created for Orcfax to a new file format organisation I have created to capture work I am doing around tools such as ffdev.info (the PRONOM signature development utility).

The new template repository can be found here: ffdev-info/template.py.

I want to talk about how this tooling can be used as a way of understanding legacy, or new code that you are going to be looking at. Looking at how linting can be useful for learning and understanding.

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.

Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.

What information is in a file format identification report?

In early 2022, I was finally able to get around to writing a paper that I had been thinking about for the better part of a decade. The paper, “Fractal in Detail: What Information Is in a File Format Identification Report?” was published in the Code4Lib journal Issue 53.

The paper takes a deep dive into the fractal contents of file format identification reports exported from tools like Siegfried and DROID.

Let’s take a brief look the article and its contents below.

Category: Digital Literacy (page 2)

Unrealized ideas: Unintentional Secrecy in the Era of Openness

What will you bitflip today?

Versioning as memory?

Code as memory?

Digital Preservation and the Gen-Z Technology Skills Gap

Not your first paper from iPRES2024: Design patterns in Digital Preservation: Declarative software for digital preservationists

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

Linting as understanding

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

What information is in a file format identification report?

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