Tibetan monks wax poetic about computers. Boing Boing reader Ben Vershbow says,
"Kim White, my colleague at the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, recently attended the Changing Book conference at the University of Iowa. There, she saw a spellbinding presentation by Jim Canary, Head Conservator at Indiana University's Lilly Library, on Tibetan book craft and current preservation and archiving efforts being carried out in collaboration with local monks. Kim describes the presentation and quotes from a poem written by one of the monks in praise of computers:"
"Some monks are now working on laptops, transcribing text and burning DVDs. Here is an excerpt from a poem written by one of the monks in praise of digital materials, which, in his eyes, are 'as exquiste as a patina made from lamp black, Yakskin glue, and brains, burnished to a gloss and inscribed with an ink made from crushed pearls and silver are to me.'
A snip from the poem:
'The light of the disk is endless
like the light of the disks in the sky, sun and moon.With a single push of our finger on a button
We pull up the shining gems of text.'— Gelek Rinpoche
Reader comment: Mike Shea says,
It saddens me to see tibetan monks using computer media, media that has no chance to survive the ages as a well preserved book can. How sad a future we will face in 500 years when the 150th generation of tibetan monks goes back to restore data and finds out that oxidation has eaten all of their carefully transcribed material away. They should stick to Yakskin glue, brains, and crushed pearl and silver ink. Now I just have to hire monks to record my blog entries on Yakskin.
Michael Kaiser says,
I would hope that in 500 years the human race will have figured out a way to store 1's and 0's in a non-oxidizing format. What I worry about is this: if China has its way, in 500 years, will there even be such a person as a Tibetan Monk?
By digitizing these books they will be able to spread this information across the world. That alone will ensure their survival in some kind of format for many, many generations and hopefully help spread the word of the plight of the Tibetan people.
Simone Davalos from The Long Now Foundation says,
Long Now has a project that is embryonic, approached with a variety of resources and with the help of many other projects both web and non. It's called The Long Server, here's the discussion thread on Omidyar.net: Link.
Our first project is a clearing house of file format converters, which might eventually lead to a universal file format converter, which will eventually lead to a universal file sharing system, etc etc. It's pretty theoretical in some places, but work onthe file format clearing house is going on with the help of several other non-long now outfits, among them the Vintage Computer Museum in Silicon Valley and other file format clearinghouses on the web.
