scholarly journals Digital Remains Made Public: Sharing the dead online and our future digital mortuary landscape

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Priscilla Ulguim
Keyword(s):  
Information Age ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Computing Technology ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Public Sharing ◽  
The Dead

We live in the information age, and our lives are increasingly digitized. Our quotidian has been transformed over the last fifty years by the adoption of innovative networking and computing technology. The digital world presents opportunities for public archaeology to engage, inform and interact with people globally. Yet, as more personal data are published online, there are growing concerns over privacy, security, and the long-term implications of sharing digital information. These concerns extend beyond the living, to the dead, and are thus important considerations for archaeologists who share the stories of past people online. This analysis argues that the ‘born-digital’ records of humanity may be considered as public digital mortuary landscapes, representing death, memorialization and commemoration. The potential for the analysis of digital data from these spaces could result in a phenomenon approaching immortality, whereby artificial intelligence is applied to the data of the dead. This paper investigates the ethics of a digital public archaeology of the dead while considering the future of our digital lives as mnemonic spaces, and their implications for the living.

scholarly journals Digital Remains Made Public: Sharing the dead online and our future digital mortuary landscape

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Ulguim
Keyword(s):  
Information Age ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Online Journal ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Public Sharing ◽  
The Dead

We live in the information age, and our lives are increasingly digitized. Our quotidian has been transformed over the last fifty years by the adoption of innovative networking and computing technology. The digital world presents opportunities for public archaeology to engage, inform and interact with people globally. Yet, as more personal data are published online, there are growing concerns over privacy, security, and the long-term implications of sharing digital information. These concerns extend beyond the living, to the dead, and are thus important considerations for archaeologists who share the stories of past people online. This analysis argues that the ‘born-digital’ records of humanity may be considered as public digital mortuary landscapes, representing death, memorialization and commemoration. The potential for the analysis of digital data from these spaces could result in a phenomenon approaching immortality, whereby artificial intelligence is applied to the data of the dead. This paper investigates the ethics of a digital public archaeology of the dead while considering the future of our digital lives as mnemonic spaces, and their implications for the living.Ulguim, P. F. 2018. Digital Remains Made Public: Sharing the Dead Online and Our Future Digital Mortuary Landscape. AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology 8(2):153. https://doi.org/10.23914/ap.v8i2.162

Deoxyribonucleic Acid as a Tool for Digital Information Storage: An Overview

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Ashish C Patel ◽  
C G Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Data Storage ◽  
Dna Sequences ◽  
Consensus Sequence ◽  
Random Access ◽  
Information Storage ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Digital File

Current data storage technologies cannot keep pace longer with exponentially growing amounts of data through the extensive use of social networking photos and media, etc. The "digital world” with 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 has predicted it to reach 44 zettabytes by 2020. From the past 30 years, scientists and researchers have been trying to develop a robust way of storing data on a medium which is dense and ever-lasting and found DNA as the most promising storage medium. Unlike existing storage devices, DNA requires no maintenance, except the need to store at a cool and dark place. DNA has a small size with high density; just 1 gram of dry DNA can store about 455 exabytes of data. DNA stores the informations using four bases, viz., A, T, G, and C, while CDs, hard disks and other devices stores the information using 0’s and 1’s on the spiral tracks. In the DNA based storage, after binarization of digital file into the binary codes, encoding and decoding are important steps in DNA based storage system. Once the digital file is encoded, the next step is to synthesize arbitrary single-strand DNA sequences and that can be stored in the deep freeze until use.When there is a need for information to be recovered, it can be done using DNA sequencing. New generation sequencing (NGS) capable of producing sequences with very high throughput at a much lower cost about less than 0.1 USD for one MB of data than the first sequencing technologies. Post-sequencing processing includes alignment of all reads using multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms to obtain different consensus sequences. The consensus sequence is decoded as the reversal of the encoding process. Most prior DNA data storage efforts sequenced and decoded the entire amount of stored digital information with no random access, but nowadays it has become possible to extract selective files (e.g., retrieving only required image from a collection) from a DNA pool using PCR-based random access. Various scientists successfully stored up to 110 zettabytes data in one gram of DNA. In the future, with an efficient encoding, error corrections, cheaper DNA synthesis,and sequencing, DNA based storage will become a practical solution for storage of exponentially growing digital data.

Microfilm Media and Technology in a Digital World

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Breslawski
Keyword(s):  
Data Storage ◽  
Storage Conditions ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Current State ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Information Collections ◽  
Media And Technology ◽  
Digital Data Storage

With the rapid changes in technology for information creation, capture, display, distribution, storage and preservation, questions abound about the current state of microfilm and its place in the modern information management industry. Clearly there is a place for microfilm in the modern preservation vision. When it comes to information having permanent value, micrographic media remains a stalwart companion of those not willing to risk their data to the perils of digital data storage only. Quoting Jim Harvey of Altek Systems, “Now the word on the street is that without migration, degradation occurs in as little as seven years depending on storage conditions. This is an anathema to archival collections of information … Some are getting ‘that old time religion’ and backing up digital information collections with a permanent micrographic copy.”

scholarly journals ENHANCED PARTICIPANTS' REGISTRATION MODEL ON OPEN PUBLIC EVENTS

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Aigars Andersons ◽  
Siegfried Ritter ◽  
Rafail Prodani ◽  
Jozef Bushati
Keyword(s):  
Radio Frequency Identification ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Near Field ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Event Management ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Research Activities

The Digital transformation (DT) has challenged most of the Event Management (EM) services at a time when organizers of open public events still faced a lot of manual operations upon registration of the public event’s participants. This survey demonstrates a model to increase a level of digitalization and use of technology, with increased self-service level for registered participants and digital data transfer. The model is based on outcomes from the series of several case studies, practical tests and research activities in Latvia, Albania, and Germany. The paper examines different ways how organizers are able to innovate their routine activities and encourage the broader public to learn and use various digital technologies: Radio-frequency identification (RFID), Near-field Communication (NFC), Quick Response (QR) codes and Mobile apps with a purpose to link the physical and the digital world in the one coherent model. In this research the major part of event management process modelling had been done by Business process Model and Notation (BPMN2) approach. The approach proposed by authors aims to reduce the costs and workload of organizers associated with participants’ registration in open public events where preliminary registration is still practically impossible or forbidden because of personal data protection issues.  

scholarly journals THE AFTERLIVES OF MEMORIAL MATERIALS: DATA, HOAX, BOT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bjorn Nansen ◽  
Larissa Hjorth ◽  
Stacey Pitsillides ◽  
Hannah Gould
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Research Network ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
De Vries ◽  
The Dead

The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel attend to the growing significance of the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. Over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. Early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). The emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. Scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016; Gibbs et al., 2015; Karppi, 2013; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Stokes, 2012). Scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the Death Online Research Network and the DeathTech Research Network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this AoIR panel. This panel contributes to the growing field of research on death and digital media, and in particular poses challenges to focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass broader issues around the data and materiality of digital death. Digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. Questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. These extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. It is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. References Brubaker, J. R. and Callison-Burch, V. (2016) Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose California. de Vries, B. and Rutherford, J. (2004) Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5-26. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information Communication and Society, 18(3): 255-268. Karppi, T. (2013) Death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead Facebook users. Culture Machine, 14, 1-20. Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (2012) “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3), 378–400. Phillips, W. (2011) LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. First Monday 16(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org Roberts, P. (2004) The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57-76. Stokes, P. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy and Technology, 25(3), 363-379. Veale, K. (2004) Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org  

scholarly journals Aerolysin nanopores decode digital information stored in tailored macromolecular analytes

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (50) ◽  
pp. eabc2661
Author(s):  
Chan Cao ◽  
Lucien F. Krapp ◽  
Abdelaziz Al Ouahabi ◽  
Niklas F. König ◽  
Nuria Cirauqui ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Storage ◽  
Single Molecule ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Portable Devices ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Single Molecule Level ◽  
Ultrahigh Density ◽  
Digital Data Storage ◽  
Alternative Solutions

Digital data storage is a growing need for our society and finding alternative solutions than those based on silicon or magnetic tapes is a challenge in the era of “big data.” The recent development of polymers that can store information at the molecular level has opened up new opportunities for ultrahigh density data storage, long-term archival, anticounterfeiting systems, and molecular cryptography. However, synthetic informational polymers are so far only deciphered by tandem mass spectrometry. In comparison, nanopore technology can be faster, cheaper, nondestructive and provide detection at the single-molecule level; moreover, it can be massively parallelized and miniaturized in portable devices. Here, we demonstrate the ability of engineered aerolysin nanopores to accurately read, with single-bit resolution, the digital information encoded in tailored informational polymers alone and in mixed samples, without compromising information density. These findings open promising possibilities to develop writing-reading technologies to process digital data using a biological-inspired platform.

scholarly journals Data Pollution

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 104-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omri Ben-Shahar
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Carbon Tax ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
External Effects ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Digital Ecosystem

Abstract Digital information is the fuel of the new economy. But like the old economy’s carbon fuel, it also pollutes. Harmful “data emissions” are leaked into the digital ecosystem, disrupting social institutions and public interests. This article develops a novel framework—data pollution—to rethink the harms the data economy creates and the way they have to be regulated. It argues that social intervention should focus on the external harms from collection and misuse of personal data. The article challenges the hegemony of the prevailing view—that the injuries from digital data enterprise are exclusively private. That view has led lawmakers to focus solely on privacy protection as the regulatory objective. The article claims, instead, that a central problem in the digital economy has been largely ignored: how the information given by people affects others, and how it undermines and degrades public goods and interests. The data pollution concept offers a novel perspective why existing regulatory tools—torts, contracts, and disclosure law—are ineffective, mirroring their historical futility in curbing the harms from industrial pollution. The data pollution framework also opens up a rich roadmap for new regulatory devices—“an environmental law for data protection”—which focuses on controlling these external effects. The article examines how the tools used to control industrial pollution—production restrictions, carbon tax, and emissions liability—could be adapted to govern data pollution.

scholarly journals Secure Data for the Future: A Risk Assessment

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 327-343
Author(s):  
Bendik Bryde ◽  
Roberto Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Scenario Development ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Storage Media ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Future

The guarantee of secure and authentic future access to any digital data is a big worry to those who work with data now and those who are responsible to keep it accessible for the future. There are a wide range of threats to digital data that these people should need to take into consideration. The project PreservIA had the goal to assess the risks of using analogue 35mm film to store and preserve digital information and define its strengths and weaknesses for long-term secure preservation of all kinds of digital data. The research project was examining the application of the Piql technology to ensure the security, integrity and authenticity of the information stored on a unique storage medium. PiqlFilm has been designed for a life span of 500 years or more and the research tries to assess how well this solution could maintain the authenticity and availability of the information, independently of internal and external changes in the surrounding environment over time. The research project has been designed using a scenario-based approach and the morphological method of scenario development is used to define a set of scenarios covering the risks to the service. The scenario classes used were accident, technical error, natural disaster, crime, sabotage, espionage, terrorism, armed conflict and nuclear war. A scenario template has been included for the purpose of describing current and future scenarios. The final scenario analysis identified potential vulnerabilities. The paper shows briefly how Piql Preservation Services holistic preservation approach perform the work, defines a methodology to select the scenarios for the assessment and then studies the vulnerabilities and security challenges of the solution on those scenarios. The project also includes a comparison of other existing storage media to evaluate their robustness to the addressed scenarios in relation to Piql technology.

Nomadic life archiving across platforms: Hyperlinked storage and compartmentalized sharing

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-815
Author(s):  
Yang Wang ◽  
Sun Sun Lim
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Information Storage ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Digital Content ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
Nomadic Life

People are today located in media ecosystems in which a variety of ICT devices and platforms coexist and complement each other to fulfil users’ heterogeneous requirements. These multi-media affordances promote a highly hyperlinked and nomadic habit of digital data management which blurs the long-standing boundaries between information storage, sharing and exchange. Specifically, during the pervasive sharing and browsing of fragmentary digital information (e.g. photos, videos, online diaries, news articles) across various platforms, life experiences and knowledge involved are meanwhile classified and stored for future retrieval and collective memory construction. For international migrants who straddle different geographical and cultural contexts, management of various digital materials is particularly complicated as they have to be familiar with and appropriately navigate technological infrastructures of both home and host countries. Drawing on ethnographic observations of 40 Chinese migrant mothers in Singapore, this article delves into their quotidian routines of acquiring, storing, sharing and exchanging digital information across a range of ICT devices and platforms, as well as cultural and emotional implications of these mediated behaviours for their everyday life experiences. A multi-layer and multi-sited repertoire of ‘life archiving’ was identified among these migrant mothers in which they leave footprints of everyday life through a tactical combination of interactive sharing, pervasive tagging and backup storage of diverse digital content.

The Absurd Injunction to Not Belong and the Bidūn in Kuwait

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 726-732
Author(s):  
Claire Beaugrand
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Male Voice ◽  
Central System ◽  
Additional Remark ◽  
Special Mention ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Mobile Phone Camera

In a tweet posted on 29 March 2018, a bidūn activist—who was later jailed from July 2019 to January 2020 for peacefully protesting against the inhumane conditions under which the bidūn are living—shared a video. The brief video zooms in closely on an ID card, recognizable as one of those issued to the bidūn, or long-term residents of Kuwait who are in contention with the state regarding their legal status. More precisely, the mobile phone camera focuses on the back of the ID card, on one line with a special mention added by the Central System (al-jihāz al-markazī), the administration in charge of bidūn affairs. Other magnetic strip cards hide the personal data written above and below it. A male voice can be heard saying that he will read this additional remark, but before even doing so he bursts into laughter. The faceless voice goes on to read out the label in an unrestrained laugh: “ladayh qarīb … ladayh qarīna … dālla ʿalā al-jinsiyya al-ʿIrāqiyya” (he has a relative … who has presumptive evidence … suggesting an Iraqi nationality). The video shakes as the result of a contagious laugh that grows in intensity. In the Kuwaiti dialect, the voice continues commenting: “Uqsim bil-Allāh, gaʿadt sāʿa ufakkir shinū maʿanāt hal-ḥatchī” (I swear by God, it took me an hour to figure out the meaning of this nonsense), before reading the sentence again, stopping and guffawing, and asking if he should “repeat it a third time,” expressing amazement at its absurdity. The tweet, addressed to the head of the Central System (mentioned in the hashtag #faḍīḥat Sāliḥ al-Faḍāla, or #scandal Salih al-Fadala), reads: In lam tastaḥī fa-'ktub mā shaʾt (Don't bother, write what you want).

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