Daniel Rourke /stream

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that…

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Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or more.…

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One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy table, to encode…

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Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen…

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If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And…

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In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up…

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A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard: 39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was running…

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We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the…

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Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the…

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Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No…

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Researchers working in Japan say they might have the breakthrough archivists are praying for - a sealed permanent memory bank that will be easily readable now and far into the next…

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For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of…

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I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986. The…

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The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is constantly…

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that…

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Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or more.…

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Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where…

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Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen…

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If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454…

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The story of Google’s algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page’s now legendary insight was to…

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In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up…

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A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard: 39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was running…

Bookmark

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the…

Bookmark

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No…

Bookmark

For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of…

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When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome.…

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I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986. The…

Bookmark

The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is constantly…