Learn more about Long Now’s Rosetta Project: building a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. Please reblog and share with others you think would be interested.

First in a series of posts by Rosetta Project Director Laura Welcher



The Rosetta Project was developed by The Long Now Foundation, conceived as an exploration into how we might reliably store information for very long periods of time—-on the scale of thousands of years.

The chosen storage technology is one developed by Los Alamos Labs for possible use in nuclear waste storage facilities. The process begins by using a focused ion beam laser to etch written information into a silicon wafer on a microscopic scale. From this silicon master, a series of positive and negative images are made. The last stage is a positive image formed in a thin sheet of nickel built up by electroplating. The information is formed in the nickel itself, and will not corrode or melt away except under the most extreme conditions. Depending on the amount of written information, it can be read with an optical microscope, or even an electron microscope.

For content, the Long Now Foundation sought out parallel texts and word lists for the world’s languages—-as many as could be collected. The resulting microetched language collection was named “The Rosetta Disk” after the original Rosetta Stone which held parallel translations of the same text. Thanks to this parallelism the Rosetta Stone enabled the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and thus unlocked knowledge of an ancient civilization stored in written form.

The first prototype Rosetta Disk, shown above, has 13,000 scanned text pages with parallel information (texts, wordlists, grammatical information, etc.) for over 1,500 human languages. The pages can be read much like the pages in a book—except that you need a microscope with ~500 power magnification (that is, optical technology that has been in use for hundreds of years).

The archiving of language resources is at best not an individual enterprise, but a collective one. The challenges to long-term archiving are significant and many. The enterprise needs a community to contribute to it, and committed resources of a discipline to maintain, develop and reap the long-term benefits of it.