"Digs that I've participated in have produced information that is now digitally gone because the platforms and the storage mechanisms became obsolete, and that's in the space of ten years," he said. "When we look down the road and ask, 'What will we leave for people 25 years from now, 100 years from now?' we're faced with a huge issue that people are just starting to confront."

Over the course of 16 years, researchers have developed a rich dataset related to research in the urban center and agricultural territory of Chersonesos, a Greek colony on the Crimean peninsula that thrived through the Byzantine age. Thanks to support from the Packard Humanities Institute, the Institute of Classical Archeology was able to use increasingly sophisticated digital methodologies to document its excavations. But by 2008, some of the systems that organized the digital data sat on a single portable server that the team carried back and forth to Ukraine and that, say the researchers, "could have blown up at any time."

Over the last couple of years I have developed, gradually and not altogether intentionally, a three-stage method of organizing and responding to what I read online. It works like this:

So while the Web age has definitely made the self-assembly easier, it has had almost no impact on the evaluation process; there is, actually, an argument to be made that the Web has even decoupled information from evaluation, for the former is increasingly available for free on sites like Wikipedia while there is a growing desperate demand for the latter, as making sense of the growing body of information out there is becoming impossible. Under this set-up, it's easy to imagine why we might actually want to turn back to the good old books as our only reliable guide to guide us through the information age.

Within his first day in office, President Obama signed off the Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government and the Freedom of Information Act. Both clearly aim to engage the public in policy making and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. One such example recently emerged at the How-To Wiki of Wired, which has an interesting post [howto.wired.com] about how to help build "data.gov", a possible future website that aims to make US government data more accessible and easier to use. In particular, the post aims to help focus attention on valuable data resources that need to be made more accessible or usable, and to create an online collaborative place to report where government data is locked up by design, neglect or misapplication of technology.

Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, well, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?

On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest. “You’re not trying to pack the screen,” a cell-phone novelist named Rin told me. (Her name, as it happens, actually was borrowed from a dog: her best friend’s Chihuahua.) “You’re changing the line in the middle of sentences, so where you cut the sentence is an essential part. If you’ve got a very quiet scene, you use a lot more of those returns and spaces. ...”

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful.