The Domesday Duplicator (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The Domesday Duplicator (2022)

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47 pointszeristor27 comments

The BBC Domesday Project has some remarkable content, containing observations on life from an extraordinary range of people at the time it was made. I recently read an entry from a child of the age I would have been at the time, talking about "milk time" (if anyone remembers that) and the school day. It was fascinating.

It was brought back online for a while, but I can't seem to find it, the BBC have archived the page:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/domesday

It is ironic and tragic that the original Domesday Book has lasted nine centuries and the Domesday Project is struggling to last four decades.

The Domesday Project came from the early years of mass computing, when we (collectively) hadn’t yet learned some important lessons about data management. I think experiences like this project are one of the reasons we are better at digital preservation now. The main risks to data durability are no longer technical, but social - neglect, for example.

"The great silence"

It was available online at http://www.domesday1986.com/ but this now redirects to https://www.domesday86.com/ (which references the duplicate project in the linked repo)

I remember participating in the Domesday Project in the eighties when I was in primary school, and it inspired me to help set up similar project in 2005 (https://www.geograph.org.uk). At the time, we were in contact with the BBC to see if we could incorporate the Domesday data, and while they were warmly receptive to the idea, they concluded the legal framework under which the original data was collected did not allow for much flexibility in re-purposing it.

The name "Domesday" (pronounced like "Doomsday") comes from effort to archive the laserdiscs from the BBC Domesday Project [0], which was a cultural successor to the Domesday Book [1]. The original Domesday Book was a sort of written time capsule of life in 11th century England, and the Domesday project was a digital time capsule of the UK in the mid-1980s. After lapses in archival by the BBC, the Domesday Project is being kept alive by independent volunteer efforts.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

1: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/

Thanks for the info! Wouldn't hurt to mention that in the project's README...

Twenty years ago I asked about the “Doomsday project” in a history newsgroup and was ridiculed, probably lightly, but I didn’t dare post for a year.

I try to be kind online.

There was a project to digitise the Domesday Book, the thing is it didn’t index by settlement, but by owner.

Which if memory serves made it tricky to search. Is there data in a database form that can be queried?

The National Archives have a search available, although not for free: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/...

I worked on Domesday Explorer back in 2000 or so. You can still find CD ROMs on eBay or other places but I don't think it's sold anymore.

It has place name and name indexes all cross linked to entries. They are paradox database tables underneath.

More information can be found here:

https://www.domesdaybook.net

Also see:

https://opendomesday.org/

Which uses much of the same data but is available on the web.

I see you added it to your username too.

Haha, you are probably the first person to notice the meaning of the number :)

OP likely found this through this YT video published today:

https://youtu.be/QDlbwl3f39Q?si=dxjm7PZ87srjmnPP

That's a great video.

This hardware is incredible. It's somewhat like the difference between RAW and JPG. We can properly rip LDs now.

There's a fork of the same software decoder (to be covered in video part 2) that does VHS tape signal instead https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

Pt. 2 will be the software side of this (Domesday) project, not the vhs-decode. Software is considerably more complex and nuanced than capturing and why he decided to make a 2-part video for a deeper dive.

I'm hoping he does vhs-decode too, it's far more accessible and potentially can bring the attention to more people as this also serves many's personal purposes of having a digital master of their home tapes (and not necessarily or exclusively preserving [no longer available] commercial media.

Not quite, I did a search inspired by Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast, Laser vs Parchment:

https://timharford.com/2023/11/cautionary-tales-laser-versus...

Which contrasted this with the Windrush scandal where the Home Office destroyed the legal documents of people welcomed from the Caribbean in the Sixties, and in their absence started to deport them.

Update: that is an excellent video, setting the context of the problem and walking through the fix. I doubt I would have found it.

It’s handy to remove the “si” field from YouTube videos, it looks to be tracing.

Did not know that, thank you!

Tim Harris just did an episode on this as part of his Cautionary Tales podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cautionary-tales-with-...

Coincidence?

It prompted me to look up the site, but I found this instead.

Lovely name. Callback to a slightly older project:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book

More directly, the analog LaserDisc that came with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

When I got my book someone had already robbed the disc, reminds me I must contact the publisher.

Thinking of Laser Quills.

Monks with Laser Quills copying out Laser Discs.

Those would be electric monks :)

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