Save everything. For culture!

[reddragdiva]

• I've posted something about Bayesian postmodernism to LessWrong and they didn't promptly cough up their own skulls in horror. Critique welcomed.

I'm all about the digital archiving lately. A Rocknerd post, three articles on the Save Aussie Music wiki on digitising audio, image scanning and negative scanning, and a call to action on the SAM blog. My target here is to get bored suburbanites with collections from their youth and leverage their nostalgia.

The big problem at the moment is nowhere to put it (legally). I want to find a library (state reference library level if possible) who can accept deposits of people's home digitisations such that, at the very least, researchers can access them. Of course, with indie stuff, creators are often quite happy to let you put stuff up on a blog (and pleased and surprised anyone still cares). So if you have contacts at major libraries, that would be fantastically helpful.

I'm also looking for expertise in digital archival in general, and also anyone who's got experience digitising video tapes. Plain old DVD recorders do an adequate job — but if you've digitised video tapes to your PC, please tell me as much detail as possible about your software and hardware.

("Good enough" for VHS appears to be DVD-formatted MPEG2 at a high bitrate, which would indeed be way higher quality than any source material.)

I've certainly leveraged my own nostalgia — I bought a side table yesterday for ten quid just to put my turntable and cassette deck on and they're all hooked up and ready to roll. Now to find my Perth stuff ...

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if these folks would have helpful suggestions: http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#Uploading_Content

[reddragdiva]

Yep! We have IA onside as the depository of last resort. The hard part there is actually making stuff available to anyone even for reference purposes.

[greylock]

I am greatly disturbed that the tags 'lemon' and 'party' are too, too close together at that Wiki.

[sidhedmento]

I hope you're out taking photos of that street party down the road from you. ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Incidentally, the concept that a Bayesian == believer in Bayes' Theorem is popularly made but completely untrue. All statisticians use Bayes' theorem. Not all statisticians are Bayesians. Indeed there is some dispute as to whether Bayes would have been a Bayesian (as the modern concept post-dates him by some way). I think what you wrote rather conflates Bayes' Theorem (I've never met a statistician who would even question it) with being a Bayesian (I'm a frequentist myself and have met many statisticians who hate the concept and who fundamentally reject that interpretation).

The actual difference between a frequentist and a Bayesian is a subtle one and I'm not sure it quite comes across in what you wrote. Suggest the article on frequentist inference on WP is a good start to understand what a Bayesian actually is.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, the equation, the techniques and the epistemology are different beasts; I was concentrating on the third, which most fans of actually try to evangelise using the second or even just the first.

[(Anonymous)]

It's the epistemology where the controversy is for sure. The equation is sort of a blind alley as both sides are fine with that and the techniques used properly are fine to both sides. It's all about the interpretation. I guess I was slightly disappointed as I found nothing in the article which would allow anyone even to tell how a frequentist and a Bayesian would disagree.

[reddragdiva]

Most of the detailed writing on that I have is on LessWrong and is tangled up in all the other local LW tropes. But, of course, the two are not identical. Suggestions and pointers welcomed.