Saving Endangered Data From Ancient Rome To Trump's America
From San Francisco to New York City, groups of scientists, librarians, researchers and concerned Americans have rushed to preserve federal data and citations that have begun to disappear from government websites. Such efforts have culminated in a series of independently organized events across the country dubbed Endangered Data Week.
Believe it or not, this isn’t a new problem. Even in Ancient Rome, political leaders were fond of destroying records and documents that painted a picture of a reality they couldn’t accept.
In the city of Rome during the Republic, public access to documents was limited. It appears that many but not all state records and laws were stored first in the Aerarium and then in the Tabularium near to the Capitoline Hill after 78 BCE. As historian William Harris has argued, there was an increase in literacy rates in the late second century BCE near to the time of Tiberius Gracchus that may have made the storing and presentation of laws more in-demand.
Yet sifting through these documents could be a harrowing task. In his treatise on laws, De Legibus (3.20.46), Cicero recounts his exasperation with the lax archivists and their inattention to the filing of laws at Rome properly. He noted about a trip to the Aerarium: "We have no guardianship of the laws; thus our laws are whatever the clerks want them to be. We get them from the copyists and then have no public memory officially established in public letters." As Cicero found out, there was no formalized procedure for filing each law in a stable archive, though it appears that Roman magistrates called aediles were supposed to maintain a record of plebiscites. Laws could then be manipulated and modified by magistrates or rulers.
Like today, archives were sensitive to the desires of ruling political parties--for good or bad. In fits of goodwill, Roman rulers could burn debt records that released borrowers from repayment to the imperial fiscus. Hadrian strategically used this method to gain popular favor in 118 CE, instructing his soldiers to gather in the Forum of Trajan to set the records ablaze in a flagrant attempt to lift his approval ratings. Yet later rulers could and did use the burning of debt records as a way of getting out of payment altogether. Kings borrow money too, you know. In the middle ages, a classic antisemitic move was for kings or nobles who owed Jewish moneylenders cash to take a city and then burn the archives of those bankers whom they had borrowed funds from. In 11th century York, Christian men burned debt records and called it an act of crusading. The Jews in these towns were left with little legal redress to fight this data destruction.
he use of archives for state records did not begin with Rome. Since about 3400 BCE, Mesopotamians had used baskets to store tablets to be consulted later. In addition to state archives, many records were kept in libraries nestled within temples, gymnasia and baths throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Yet these libraries were themselves vulnerable to fire, flood, earthquakes and the occasional volcanic eruption. The most infamous loss of records is connected to the great Library at Alexandria. This library had already burned after Julius Caesar's invasion of the city from 48-47 BCE--resulting in the loss of between 40,000 and 700,000 books. The city rebuilt and housed around 490,000 scrolls in the library by the late fourth century CE, as well as close to 43,000 scrolls in the nearby Serapeum, a Temple to Serapis. As the story goes, following the anti-pagan legislation of 391 CE, Christians attacked and burned the Serapeum as an act of anti-pagan aggression that destroyed thousands of papyri.
In the U.S., our own National Archives have only been in existence since 1934. Before then, federal records were placed in many different locations without a central repository or standardized work flow for allowing public access, much as in the ancient Mediterranean. A prominent historian had campaigned for creation of the National Archives building in D.C., which was started under President Herbert Hoover but only finished under FDR. The National Archives Act assured that "All archives or records" would be under the administration of the Archivist of the United States.
In 1943, the Federal Records Disposal Act was enacted, which put severe limits on an official's ability to destroy government documents, photographs, maps and many other records. These acts were meant to provide a public service that went well beyond partisan politics to support the public interest. They also maintained the belief that federal records should be preserved and accessible to the populace. As we increasingly move into the realm of digital archives, digital humanists, librarians and even archaeologists have joined in the fight for accountability through data preservation using non-profit repositories like Archive.org. Eric Kansa, founder of Open Context, an open data publication and archiving system, notes the reason for making these websites and documents accessible: "Data are often integral to how we try to understand the world."
There is indeed an active brigade of librarians and archivists at the forefront of the endangered data movement who have begun to make the public more aware of the problems surrounding the removal of things like climate data from government websites. Bethany Nowviskie, Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) at CLIR and a Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia, has fought hard to promote initiatives that preserve pivotal research data and encourages data literacy. Nowviskie sees such efforts as keeping the doors open to data that is, in fact, already owned by the public: "Except where issues of personal privacy and cultural sensitivity are involved, data collected or produced by taxpayer-funded agencies of the federal government should be openly available to everyone. It’s a matter of transparency for the health of the republic — sunlight being, as they say, the best disinfectant — and of accountability of the government to its people."
There is still hope for maintaining the digital sunlight. Rep. Derek Kilmer has recently proposed bipartisan legislation called the Open Government Data Act which would make government data open by default. It would also require that it be provided with open access in mind, "in an open format that does not impede use or reuse and that has standards maintained by a standards organization." Such policies would also cut the expenses associated with projects focused on data extraction, transformation and loading by making machine-readable big data the norm. That is just one reason that plans to reintroduce the OGDA have recently been announced. As Nowviskie notes, "These are our datasets, and we should have the ability to analyze and build on them — using them to understand our world better, as it is, and to be able to make it better." The citizens of ancient Rome may not have been able to make their state archives fully open to the public, but we are not Rome.
By: Sarah Bond
Source: Forbes