100-year-old negatives discovered in Antarctic (2013) | Hacker News Reader

100-year-old negatives discovered in Antarctic (2013)

imaging-resource.com

125 pointsvoidlogic43 comments

Actual source: http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/12/27/on-ice-100-y...

If you'd like to see the images as large as they are (warning: SWF): http://www.nzaht.org/assets/gallery6/flash/slideshow.swf?r=8...

Thanks. We changed the url to that from http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/antarctica-conserv....

Also, there is a description of the discovery at http://www.nzaht.org/content/library/Century_old_Antarctic_i... [pdf].

Wow, what's with the awful low resolution scans? As public domain historical material, I thought they'd want to offer them at the best resolution possible.

I guess they were resized for the flash widget:

http://www.nzaht.org/

From the press release about the images:

Background to the conservation process

The photographs found in Captain Scott’s expedition base at Cape Evans, Antarctica required specialist conservation treatment. The Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ) engaged Photographic Conservator Mark Strange to undertake the painstaking task of separating, cleaning (including removing mould) and consolidating the cellulose nitrate image layers. Twenty-two separate sheets were revealed and sent to New Zealand Micrographic Services for scanning using a Lanovia pre-press scanner. The digital scans were converted to digital positives.

So it at least sounds like they would have captured most of the available detail.

Ah, I shouldn't have said scans. What I meant was why are they only serving these crappy low-resolution images to the public, rather than making the originals available. I hope this was inadvertent rather than deliberate.

Uploaded all of the images in the highest quality to imgur: http://imgur.com/a/zlGL8

Also added descriptions that I found in http://www.nzaht.org//content/plugins/gallery6/xml/gallery_2...

Thanks, appreciated, can't believe they wrapped them in flash on primary site?!

I don't get it. The dirty (as found?) negatives look to be already processed. Did the film survive for a century unprocessed or not?

That's it: I'm going to go find Douglas Mawson's camera! All joking put aside, it's a really amazing, but sad, story. However, it would appear that his camera and film are still out there. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/125-mawson-trek/ro...

How many of our photos from today will be view able in 100 years? I worry we are entering into the start of a digital black hole as far as our history. We've done a wonderful job in ensuring that we can digitize everything, but not so good with reformatting it all as the march of technology moves on. Film and Silver prints, are quite durable comparatively.

Maybe this doesn't count under your definition of "viewable" but I'm sure one would be able to recover a very high number of photos. If not from the remains of a single hard drive, than from the remains of many hard drives that had once saved or cached that photo. (again, technically and physically challenging, I know)

My argument is more - there will be a time in the future (probably in my lifetime) where there are no modern computers that can read jpeg - much less the multitude of raw formats so many people seem to want to store their images in.

We've seen it with obsolete video tape formats, and other media too. The only real preservation method with digital is to keep it in either online storage, and then reformat it to whatever the current is - or transform it back to analog and store that.

Jpeg is already more than 20 years old and there are multiple liberally licensed implementations. Between that and the tendency for people to emulate everything, I don't think it will be a problem to read jpeg in the future.

There's open code for the raw formats too.

Digital data is easy to copy around as long as you keep up with it, but people don't realize that most media will definitely not last 100 years stuck in a closet. Especially those CD backups you burned in 2005. You might have trouble getting even 10 years out of those. Even your hard drives will crap out sooner or later. Keeping data in a name-brand cloud service might be the best low-maintenance solution for now, as long as you move it if they ever go out of business. But what if the person with the password gets hit by a bus?

When I die, all my pictures and thoughts and work will be lost on my personal laptop. It isn't encrypted, but my family wouldn't know how to get past the OS password. The age of perusing the belongings of dead people is past, for better or worse.

And how about letters? We have tons of letters from famous people pre-2000, but now their thoughts and communications will be lost locked up on email servers unless either party goes out of their way to save them. Privacy is good, but losing data of historical value is unfortunate.

I actually put a lot of thought into these issues. http://mrgris.com/blog/2013-03-27-survivorship-in-the-digita.... My solution is way too complex for a lay-person, though.

> My solution is way too complex for practical use, though.

That looks really interesting. I may actually put this to use.

Very interesting. Not sure I would go to all that for after I'm gone. But it sounds like a cool way to make some sort of puzzle activity for friends. :)

I'm just thinking about things like public records and archives for a start, personal images and data is another problem.

> When I die, all my pictures and thoughts and work will be lost on my personal laptop. It isn't encrypted, but my family wouldn't know how to get past the OS password. The age of perusing the belongings of dead people is past, for better or worse.

It's an interesting thought that I have entertained as well, but at the same time, we have so many pictures/documents nowadays that virtually NOBODY is going to go through your files even if they can get access to them. We used to live with a few rolls of photo films used per year and maybe dozens of letters written, now we have thousands of emails every year, thousands if not dozens of thousands of pictures every year, there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant.

As for photos, I know that I personally print out photo albums of the most worthy trips, and my guess is that this kind of stuff will remain, somehow, longer than the digital files.

Digital files' issues is not just about the format they are saved on. Will we be able to read IDE hardrives 100 years from now ? How about SCSI ? How about the formats we use nowadays ? Will the be completely obsolete and potentially unreadable 100 years from now ? How about the OS, file systems we will use ? There's really no way you can predict anything to cover all the "wrong" things that can occur in a long time from now.

100 years from now, technoarchaeology grad students will be writing jpg parsers in Z# because nobody can figure out how to compile the old ones on quantum CPUs.

>there's too much noise in the data to make it worth trying to find anything relevant //

Sounds like a challenge to a group of hackers, no?

I was interested in the algorithms used by Facebook for their anniversary video clips they did a few months back. Likes and other indicators obviously were used. I changed my profile pic as part of a gag and their algo picked up on that as an indicator that it was important to me - though it was actually the least important of my profile pics. There was also a joke post that got lots of likes from acquaintances that was wrongly promoted as the most important. Others videos worked pretty well though.

I'd think some linguistic analysis along with indicators like numbers of emails exchanged would allow a corpus to be gleaned that had potential to represent one's [email] life quite well.

Similarly with photos, images with the most members of family or those that have been viewed most often ... etc. ...

There's probably already a "life digest" app around somewhere that one can run against a user account.

I can imagine in the future a personal computer (like in Her) saying things like "your dad visited this area, here are a few of the photos he took" when you go on holiday or something.

Consider the fact that the Library of Congress doesn't even allow modern color negative and transparency films into its archives, let alone digital files! Only silver based negatives and prints that have gone through a very specific washing method are allowed in, as they pass the "500 year" test.

I've actually been shooting a lot more black and white film these days, on the off-off chance that someone will want to look at my pictures some day.

Buy one of these: http://www.mdisc.com/

And you are good for way more than a hundred years.

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised that someone is thinking about longevity of recorded data. Thanks!

Looks like an excuse to upgrade my Thinkpad docking station with something like this http://support.lenovo.com/ru_RU/product-and-parts/detail.pag...

and I should be able to write disks that last? Sounds good.

Someone probably should still carve instructions on how to build a Blu-Ray reader into a few traditional stone tablets. Hopefully whoever reads it in 1,000 years won't assume "Laser" is the name of our fertility goddess.

Amusing how modern the guy in the last image looks - demonstrates the (partly) cyclical nature of fashion.

I guess there are only so many ways to arrange a piece of cloth with some holes in it.

Also the beard. He'd look like a weirdo in the 80s or 90s, but fit in just fine right now.

I think there's more to it than being cyclical. We have experimented with a lot of styles over the centuries and we have arrived at a situation where many of them have been absorbed into the mainstream.

For a person alive today, there is just an immense repertoire of clothing styles to choose from. If you look at the crowd in a reasonable metropolitan street you'll probably see most clothing and hair styles of the last 100 years around, at least.

Reminds me of the photos from the ill-fated arctic balloon expedition in 1897 to the North Pole. Those negatives were found after 30 years and restorated in the 1930s.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._A._Andr%C3%A9e's_Arctic_Ba... .

I definitely saw a bunch of these at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Tarlton acquarium in Auckland back in January.

Are there better quality images anywhere? On the Antartic Heritage Trust site it's just a crappy Flash slide show. Would be nice to see high res JPEGs.

In my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7855893) I linked to the SWF file by itself, but it seems like even the images in that are low-res.

Highest res images I could put together: http://imgur.com/a/zlGL8

Aw darn, I read 'natives' at first. Photos turning out not nearly as exciting as I had expected..

Old news: 100-Year-Old Negatives Discovered in Block of Ice in Antarctica

Posted by katie hosmer on December 30, 2013 at 10:00am

Your post would have been better if it read:

Old news:

Negatives Discovered in Block of Ice in Antarctica Posted by katie hosmer on December 30, 1913 at 10:00am

What I get down-voted because this was posted on HN 6 months ago and I was just letting everyone know?

Maybe I should start posting news stories that Steve Jobs has just passed away.

C'mon HN.

I think the community as a whole realizes that lots of good posts never make it past /new and don't particularly mind "old" news that is interesting making it up to the front page 6 months later.

I think they downvoted you because you're not suppose to question the selection of submissions. It adds nothing to the conversation. If it's on the front page, then people like it enough for it to be there. I learned things like that the hard way. Also, HN has a strange hive mind. Saying the same thing in two different posts can get you downvoted in one and upvoted in the other.

you could have linked the original and done us a service instead of just bitching.

That said your comment on it's own is not that out of line. However as a user with no prior karma (-4) you are not really adding to the conversation.

I would start with more constructive posts and comments and then feel free to post certain neutral ones like this later.

What does the karma have to do with the post content?

I agree about the link though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com