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Speaker 1: Pushkin. As dawn broke on the fourteenth of October ten

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Speaker 1: sixty six, two great armies, each more than five thousand men,

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Speaker 1: lined up for battle near Hastings on the south coast

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Speaker 1: of England. Ranged along a hilltop where the English forces

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Speaker 1: of King Harold They faced an invader from France, William,

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Speaker 1: Duke of Normandy, with his force of archers, infantry, and

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Speaker 1: mounted knights. At nine in the morning, the battle began

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Speaker 1: with the terrible sound of trumpets on both sides. The

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Speaker 1: English formed a shield wall, holding the high ground. The

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Speaker 1: Norman cavalry and archers probed for an opportunity to shatter

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Speaker 1: the English line. Then words spread among the Norman army

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Speaker 1: that their Duke William had fallen. The left flank crumbled

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Speaker 1: and fled down the hill, pursued by the English. And

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Speaker 1: then what's this? William himself, helmet raised to reveal his face,

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Speaker 1: rode forth and proclaimed, look at me, I live, and

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Speaker 1: with God's help I shall conquer. His forces rallied and counterattacked,

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Speaker 1: slaughtering the English who had surged forward. The battle was brutal,

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Speaker 1: but as the autumn sun began to set, the final

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Speaker 1: Norman assault broke. The English line, King Harold was slain.

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Speaker 1: The next King of England would not be English, but

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Speaker 1: Norman I shall conquer, William had said, And on Christmas

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Speaker 1: Day ten sixty six, William the Conqueror was crowned William

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Speaker 1: the First of England. But the French invader. William faced

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Speaker 1: struggles to have his right to rule excepted. Two decades later,

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Speaker 1: he stumbled upon an idea to establish his legitimacy over

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Speaker 1: his vast fiefdom, an idea that still shapes the world today.

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Speaker 1: He began a grand survey of what was in that fiefdom.

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Speaker 1: Commissioners set up special sessions of county courts to hear

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Speaker 1: testimony about who owned what and what there was to own,

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Speaker 1: from land to mills to people. There was no single hide,

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Speaker 1: nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox, nor

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Speaker 1: one cow, nor one pig which was left out. The

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Speaker 1: result of this great survey was the Doomsday Book. In fact,

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Speaker 1: there were two of them, Great Doomsday and Little Doomsday,

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Speaker 1: remarkably detailed snapshots of William's in ten eighty six AD.

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Speaker 1: It was all a long time ago, and yet it's

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Speaker 1: a very modern project. If the state wishes to govern,

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Speaker 1: to tax, to help the deserving and punish the wicked.

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Speaker 1: That state needs comprehensive, detailed records of where everyone lives,

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Speaker 1: what they do, and where they came from. I'm Tim

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Speaker 1: Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales where they came from.

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Speaker 1: Michael Braithwaite came from the sunny island of Barbados in

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Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one. Little Michael, just nine years old and

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Speaker 1: traveling with his brother, crossed all the way over the

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Speaker 1: ocean to arrive under the gray skies of Britain, despite

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Speaker 1: the weather and the risk of a hostile reception from

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Speaker 1: a mostly white British population. It was a journey many

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Speaker 1: other people had taken. At the time of Michael's journey,

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Speaker 1: Barbados was still part of the British Empire, and the

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Speaker 1: UK government had been welcoming migrants and offering them considerable

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Speaker 1: legal protections. Michael's father already had a job with the

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Speaker 1: Royal Mail, his mother with the National Health Service. Michael

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Speaker 1: and his brother were traveling to be reunited with their parents.

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Speaker 1: It must have been a daunting journey, but it was

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Speaker 1: a one way trip. Michael started attending a British school,

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Speaker 1: and from that moment he recalls. We regarded Britain as

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Speaker 1: our home. Michael and his brother entered the UK with

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Speaker 1: a British Caribbean passport stamped indefinite leave to remain. Michael

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Speaker 1: grew up and started his own family. He went on

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Speaker 1: to have three British children and five grandchildren. What he

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Speaker 1: didn't have was a UK passport. Legally he didn't need

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Speaker 1: one and never applied for one, and for five decades

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Speaker 1: there was no problem. But Michael Braithwaite was going to

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Speaker 1: discover what William the Conqueror knew. Records matter. Something else

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Speaker 1: matters too, what you record them on. In nineteen eighty three,

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Speaker 1: the BBC television producer named Peter Armstrong is pondering the

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Speaker 1: looming nine hundredth anniversary of the Doomsday survey. That anniversary

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Speaker 1: will happen in nineteen eighty seve just three years away.

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Speaker 1: So what should the BBC do about it? Make a

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Speaker 1: television series? Sure, they could do that, but Peter Armstrong

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Speaker 1: had a better idea. I just thought, if we were

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Speaker 1: to have a doomsday book now, how would we do it.

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Speaker 2: Now?

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Speaker 1: Indeed, Peter Armstrong had two ideas, both of which were

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Speaker 1: ahead of their time. The first was that the whole

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Speaker 1: community would be involved in gathering information. All of us,

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Speaker 1: who like me, were British school kids in the nineteen eighties,

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Speaker 1: knew about the BBC Doomsday Project. The BBC will be

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Speaker 1: writing to all thirty thousand schools in Britain to ask

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Speaker 1: them whether they want to participate in collecting facts during

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Speaker 1: the summer term next year, explained a contemporary magazine. It

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Speaker 1: is estimated that ten thousand schools will be needed to

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Speaker 1: make the scheme work, which would involve about a million children.

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Speaker 1: It was dubbed a people's database, a kind of Wikipedia,

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Speaker 1: almost two decades before Wikipedia. There were organized surveys and questionnaires,

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Speaker 1: but also plenty of cub reporting as children went out

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Speaker 1: to photograph their local area. It was a massive grassroots effort.

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Speaker 1: Peter Armstrong's second idea was just as visionary. The BBC

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Speaker 1: Doomsday Project would manifest itself not in some weighty encyclopedia,

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Speaker 1: but in an interactive digital format. The project team decided

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Speaker 1: that the best way to store this vast trove of

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Speaker 1: information would be on something called a LaserDisc. Laser discs

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Speaker 1: were silver discs of plastic, similar to the also newly

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Speaker 1: invented CD, but much bigger. They were a foot across

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Speaker 1: like a vinyl album. The Doomsday Project was trying to

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Speaker 1: use laser discs in a groundbreaking way. It combined digital

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Speaker 1: text and analog video with a clever, if slightly Rube

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Speaker 1: Goldberg esque technique that produced revolutionary looking results. A complete

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Speaker 1: Doomsday system consisted of a laser disc player, a monitor,

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Speaker 1: a track ball de ice and a beautiful, boxy beige

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Speaker 1: computer with black and red keys called a BBC Master.

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Speaker 1: It was expensive. Each system cost half a year's salary

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Speaker 1: at the typical wages of the day, but the BBC

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Speaker 1: and its commercial partners hoped that the system would be

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Speaker 1: the foundation of a whole new market for business and education,

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Speaker 1: with a vast range of other laser discs available. That

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Speaker 1: never really happened, alas the system was too pricey for

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Speaker 1: most schools and the technology moved on as technology does.

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Speaker 1: The CD ROM replaced the laser disc as a more

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Speaker 1: practical way to put multimedia projects on a silvery platter. Still,

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Speaker 1: there was no shame in the low sales of the

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Speaker 1: Doomsday Multimedia System. Peter Armstrong's project team were years ahead

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Speaker 1: of their time and had a great deal to be

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Speaker 1: proud of. They had created the mother of all time capsules,

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Speaker 1: a remarkably rich and detailed picture of the UK in

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six, one which future generations could consult, learn

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Speaker 1: from and enjoy. Or could they, because by two thousand

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Speaker 1: and two, when the Internet age had truly arrived, the

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Speaker 1: Doomsday Project had almost been forgotten. The BBC department that

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Speaker 1: had created it had been shut down for years. Nobody

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Speaker 1: was in charge of keeping the project alive, and so

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Speaker 1: it died. The British newspaper The Observer reported it was

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Speaker 1: meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess, a

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Speaker 1: computer based multimedia version of the Doomsday Book. But sixteen

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Speaker 1: years after it was created, the two point five million

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Speaker 1: pound BBC Doomsday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status.

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Speaker 1: It is now unreadable. Old documents have a habit of disappearing.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes that's an unhappy accident. You have a laser disc

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Speaker 1: but you can't find anybody with a LaserDisc player anymore.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes it's all too deliberate. The year is two thousand

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Speaker 1: and nine. In a basement in a towering government office

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Speaker 1: in Croydon, Southeast London, there are thousands upon thousands of

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Speaker 1: aging cardboard documents, each one recording the arrival in the

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Speaker 1: UK of someone from the Caribbean or from other former

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Speaker 1: colonies of the British Empire. These documents hardly ever consulted.

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Speaker 1: Who needs old landing cards detailing the moment someone stepped

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Speaker 1: off a boat from Barbados or Jamaica in the nineteen

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Speaker 1: fifties or nineteen sixties. Actually, every now and again someone

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Speaker 1: did need one if you'd arrived in the UK on

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Speaker 1: one of those boats. The nineteen seventy one Immigration Act

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Speaker 1: gave you the right to live in the UK for

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Speaker 1: the rest of your life. You hardly ever had to

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Speaker 1: prove you had that right in daily life. Nobody asked.

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Speaker 1: It was only if you were, say, applying for your

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Speaker 1: first British passport, that you might need to prove your

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Speaker 1: date of arrival, and those landing cards provided that proof.

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Speaker 1: One of the clerks who worked at the Croydon office

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Speaker 1: were called. Sometimes the Passport office would call up and

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Speaker 1: people would say, look in the basement. Still that didn't

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Speaker 1: happen often anymore. After four or five decades. Most people

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Speaker 1: who'd ever want a passport would surely have applied for one,

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Speaker 1: and so when an office relocation beckoned, someone higher up decided,

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Speaker 1: let's get rid of those old bits of cardboard. They

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Speaker 1: take up too much space. The clerks protested, couldn't we

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Speaker 1: at least make digital copies, but the bosses decided there

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Speaker 1: was no money for any of that, and late in

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Speaker 1: twoenty ten the landing cards were destroyed. A couple of

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Speaker 1: years later, the government introduced a new law they wanted

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Speaker 1: to get tough on illegal immigration. The law required landlords

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Speaker 1: to check for proof that their tenants had the right

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Speaker 1: to live in the UK, and banks to check their customers,

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Speaker 1: and employers to check their workers. In principle, these rules

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Speaker 1: applied to everyone, although you have to wonder if they

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Speaker 1: were more tightly in FROs for people with foreign accents

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Speaker 1: or people who, like Michael Braithwaite, were black. More than

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Speaker 1: half a century had passed since Michael Braithwaite stepped off

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Speaker 1: the boat from Barbados as a nine year old boy

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Speaker 1: and made Britain his home. He felt British he had

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Speaker 1: the permanent right to live and work in Britain, but

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Speaker 1: he'd never had to prove it. Nobody had ever asked.

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Speaker 1: Now they would. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.

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Speaker 1: For more than two decades, Michael Braithwaite had been a

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Speaker 1: teaching assistant in a school in North London, working particularly

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Speaker 1: with young children who had special educational needs. He loved

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Speaker 1: his job and he loved the kids. We grew a

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Speaker 1: great bond between us, he told one interviewer. One day,

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Speaker 1: Michael was summoned to see the head teacher. The head

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Speaker 1: looked scared. Michael remembers his mannerisms were nervous. The head

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Speaker 1: explained he had been threatened with five years in prison

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Speaker 1: if he was found to be employing anyone he had

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Speaker 1: reason to suspect didn't have the right to work in

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Speaker 1: the UK. As Michael had no passport, he was going

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Speaker 1: to need an official biometric ID card. He kept asking,

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Speaker 1: what are you going to do, Michael. Michael had felt

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Speaker 1: like part of the school family. Now he realized that

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Speaker 1: he was on his own. I was totally confused, he said,

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Speaker 1: because I never knew of a biometric card or what

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Speaker 1: it meant to someone like me. It was a perplexing

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Speaker 1: and bewildering situation. The government department in charge of handing

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Speaker 1: out biometric cards was called the Home Office. Michael Braithwaite.

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Speaker 1: Remember absolutely had the right to live and work in

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Speaker 1: the UK because he'd arrived before nineteen seventy one, but

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Speaker 1: the cardboard landing card that would prove that had recently

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Speaker 1: been destroyed by the Home Office. Now they told him

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Speaker 1: he needed to provide documentary evidence that he had been

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Speaker 1: living in the UK since the nineteen seventies, at least

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Speaker 1: one official document for every single year for more than

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Speaker 1: four decades. It was an impossible demand. Michael was refused

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Speaker 1: his biometric card, and in twenty seventeen he was summoned

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Speaker 1: to another meeting at the school and told that he

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Speaker 1: couldn't keep his job. He'd have to leave that day.

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Speaker 1: You could have pulled my heart out and chucked it

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Speaker 1: on the floor, he said. Michael walked out of the

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Speaker 1: headmaster's office. The children had their weekly swimming lesson that afternoon.

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Speaker 1: He helped a colleague walk them safely to the pool

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Speaker 1: and then back again. Then he slipped into the school storeroom,

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Speaker 1: picked up a box of his belongings and left the building.

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Speaker 1: Michael was not the only one treated in this way.

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Speaker 1: A whistleblower who worked in the Home Office Archives contacted

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Speaker 1: a journalist, Amelia gentleman and told her what was happening.

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Speaker 1: Every week or so someone would say I've got another

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Speaker 1: one here. People were writing to say, I've been here

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Speaker 1: forty five years, I've never had a passport, I've never

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Speaker 1: needed a passport. Now I'm being told I'm not British. Previously,

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Speaker 1: the Home office worker would have said I'll look in

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Speaker 1: the basement. Now the archive of landing cards was gone. Instead,

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Speaker 1: the officials would send a standard reply, we have searched

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Speaker 1: our records. We can find no trace of you in

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Speaker 1: our files, which was perfectly true and perfectly disgraceful. As

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Speaker 1: Michael Braithwaite said, they took everything out of me, my confidence,

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Speaker 1: my self esteem, who I am? It tore me apart.

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Speaker 1: It's tempting to think if only the archives had been digitized,

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Speaker 1: and yes, that might have helped for a while. But

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Speaker 1: as the BBC doomsday fiasco tells us, just because something's

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Speaker 1: digitized doesn't mean it lasts forever. BBC remember, had embarked

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Speaker 1: on a huge project in nineteen eighty six to crowdsource

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Speaker 1: a unique historical record for the Ages, and a mere

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Speaker 1: sixteen years later it had become unreadable.

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Speaker 2: Or had it.

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Speaker 1: Gets meet Sally and Adrian Pearce a couple of civically

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Speaker 1: minded nerds who lived in a small town to the

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Speaker 1: south of London. They were interested in community activities such

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Speaker 1: as maintaining local footpaths, but also in computers and education.

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Speaker 1: Sally had been one of the original community researchers for

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Speaker 1: the BBC Doomsday Project in the early nineteen eighties. She

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Speaker 1: had fond memories of gathering data. By the year two thousand,

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Speaker 1: she was working as a professor of education at the

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Speaker 1: University of Brighton, teaching the next generation of teachers to

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Speaker 1: use computers to access and analyze historical documents. Her husband, Adrian, meanwhile,

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Speaker 1: was an IT consultant. Both of them had heard about

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Speaker 1: how difficult it was to access the Doomsday LaserDisc systems.

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Speaker 1: Adrian was feeling burned out from long hours patching old

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Speaker 1: corporate computers. He needed a change of pace, and Sally

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Speaker 1: suggested that helping to revive the BBC Doomsday system might

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Speaker 1: be just the project. Sally's vision was that young teachers

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Speaker 1: in classrooms of the twenty first century would be able

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Speaker 1: to access Doomsday data from the nineteen eighties, either using

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Speaker 1: CD ROMs or the Internet, and Adrian had the technical

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Speaker 1: expertise to try to make it happen, but a huge

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Speaker 1: challenge faced Sally and Adrian peers because digital archives are

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Speaker 1: like chains, one weak link that can break them. Consider

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Speaker 1: those laser discs. They had been touted as being almost indestructible,

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Speaker 1: and that may be true that without the player to

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Speaker 1: read them, the laser discs were just glorified mirrors. I'm

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Speaker 1: a child of computer engineers. I fondly remember from the

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighties the scream of the matrix printer, my mother

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Speaker 1: with a screwdriver attacking the weird inwards of a beige

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Speaker 1: computer with its lid off, fixing it so I could

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Speaker 1: play classic games again. But I can tell you from

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Speaker 1: experience there are only so many times you can pound

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Speaker 1: those keys excitedly as you shoot at space bandits before

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Speaker 1: the system will fall apart. So, of course, most laserdisk

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Speaker 1: systems from nineteen eighty six had stopped working by the

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Speaker 1: twenty first century, or schools had thrown them out to

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Speaker 1: make room for shiny new PCs or max. But Sally

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Speaker 1: Pierce got lucky. She discovered an entire doomsday system in

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Speaker 1: storage at the University of Brighton when they plugged it in.

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Speaker 1: It still worked. Yet as Adrian explored the Doomsday system,

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Speaker 1: he realized there were more weak links in the chain.

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Speaker 1: He had absolutely no technical documentary. He didn't know how

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Speaker 1: the data was being stored or organized by the Doomsday System.

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Speaker 1: It was all in hexadecimal, picture the slow waterfall of

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Speaker 1: green code in the movie The Matrix. How could it

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Speaker 1: be translated into a format that the modern computer would understand?

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Speaker 1: Adrian Pearce ended up decoding the hexadeesimal structure the hard

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Speaker 1: way by hand. He later described it as like trying

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Speaker 1: to solve a crossword puzzle, if the crossword puzzle was

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Speaker 1: enormous and written entirely in an unknown language. After a while,

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Speaker 1: like Neo in The Matrix, Pierce was seeing patterns in

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Speaker 1: the data. By eye reading programming books from the mid

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighties and slowly groping his way through the rows

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Speaker 1: and columns. He began to understand how the data had

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Speaker 1: been structured, and to write new programs to search and

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Speaker 1: interpret it. But Adrian also needed to solve a different problem.

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Speaker 1: He needed to get all the data off the disc,

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Speaker 1: and the only way he could see of doing that

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Speaker 1: was to pipe every bit of data through the old

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Speaker 1: BBC computer and onto something modern. The old computer wasn't

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Speaker 1: built for that. Some of the files took more than

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Speaker 1: fifty hours to transfer, a few of those marathon transfers,

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Speaker 1: and what happened next was inevitable. The BBC Master's motherboard

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Speaker 1: was fried. Adrian Pearce had started with a rare thing,

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Speaker 1: a working doomsday system, but in trying to extract the data,

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Speaker 1: he destroyed that system. Cautionary tales will be back in

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Speaker 1: a moment. Michael Braithwaite had lost the job that he loved.

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Speaker 1: His own school had told him that he was an

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Speaker 1: illegal immigrant. His own government had destroyed his only means

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Speaker 1: of proving otherwise. Other people in his situation were being deported.

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Speaker 1: It was just a matter of time then until he

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Speaker 1: was deported too. I was informed they turn up at

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Speaker 1: six in the morning, he said. I was already dressed

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Speaker 1: and ready, waiting for that moment to come. Every morning

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Speaker 1: for eighteen months he got up early after a sleepless night,

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Speaker 1: got dressed and waited for the knock at the door.

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Speaker 1: I talked about Michael Braithwaite recently with my friend Patricia Sleeman.

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Speaker 1: She's a digital archivist in her early career, she worked

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Speaker 1: on the kind of nerdy projects that occupied people like

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Speaker 1: Adrian and Sally Pearce, trying to pull data out of

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Speaker 1: unreadable old computer systems. Then, about a decade ago, Patricia

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Speaker 1: did something that at the time I couldn't really understand.

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Speaker 1: She went off to work for the UNHCR, the UN

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Speaker 1: agency responsible for protecting the rights and the welfare of refugees.

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Speaker 1: I didn't get it. It seemed like my wonderful, nerdy

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Speaker 1: archivist friend was dashing off to join an emergency relief effort.

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Speaker 1: What did the UNHCR need with an archivist? But when

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Speaker 1: I realized what was happening to people such as Michael Braithwaite,

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Speaker 1: I finally understood that archives are a human rights issue.

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Speaker 1: The UNHCR archive goes back to the nineteen fifties and

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Speaker 1: it contains photographs, interviews, and documents describing the lives and

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Speaker 1: fraught journeys of some of the most vulnerable people in

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Speaker 1: the world to prove where they came from and when

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Speaker 1: and why. A refugee needs that data or they risk

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Speaker 1: disappearing into some nightmarish bureaucratic black hole, just like Michael Braithwaite,

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00:25:25,970 --> 00:25:31,250
Speaker 1: condemned to stress, shame, unemployment, and the fear of a

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Speaker 1: knock on the door at six o'clock in the morning.

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Speaker 1: Digital archives feel better to us than paper archives. Digital

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Speaker 1: files are searchable, You can back them up with a click.

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Speaker 1: You can store huge quantities of information in a tiny space.

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Speaker 1: In contrast, paper archives are a hassle. They take up

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Speaker 1: space in filing cabinets in rooms that could be used

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Speaker 1: for something else. No wonder. People are sometimes tempted to

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Speaker 1: save money by throwing old paper archives away, but digital

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00:26:08,770 --> 00:26:13,850
Speaker 1: archives are also surprisingly vulnerable. While paper archives have to

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Speaker 1: be deliberately discarded, digital archives can be lost without any

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00:26:18,010 --> 00:26:22,650
Speaker 1: effort at all. For example, I have Microsoft word documents

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Speaker 1: on my computer dating back to nineteen ninety four, copied

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00:26:27,210 --> 00:26:30,770
Speaker 1: and recopied every time I bought a new computer. I

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00:26:30,810 --> 00:26:34,410
Speaker 1: always assumed I could read them anytime, but after I

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00:26:34,530 --> 00:26:38,050
Speaker 1: talked to my friend Patricia Sleeman, I wasn't so sure.

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Speaker 1: So I clicked over to the old archive folder and

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Speaker 1: double clicked on the first document I saw. Did it open?

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Speaker 1: It did not? Instead, a pop up informed me that.

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Speaker 2: You are attempting to open the file type that has

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Speaker 2: been blocked by your file block settings and the trust Center, it.

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Speaker 1: Turns out that I can't open my own Microsoft word documents.

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Speaker 2: Well, what did you expect? This file is donkeys years old.

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Speaker 1: I'd carefully copied those old word documents over and over again,

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Speaker 1: but at some stage my system stopped being able to

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Speaker 1: read the files, and I never knew when that moment

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00:27:21,210 --> 00:27:26,610
Speaker 1: was because I didn't check. Joni Mitchell sang, don't it

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00:27:26,690 --> 00:27:29,130
Speaker 1: always seem to go that you don't know what you've

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00:27:29,170 --> 00:27:33,130
Speaker 1: got till it's gone. When it comes to digital archives,

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00:27:33,410 --> 00:27:35,650
Speaker 1: you might not know what you've got till it's been

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00:27:35,650 --> 00:27:43,050
Speaker 1: gone for years or decades. The psychologist James Reason, an

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00:27:43,090 --> 00:27:48,690
Speaker 1: expert in human error, calls this a latent condition. When

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00:27:48,730 --> 00:27:50,850
Speaker 1: the battery is in the fire alarm of run flat,

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00:27:51,130 --> 00:27:54,530
Speaker 1: you won't discover that unless you check, or until there's

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00:27:54,530 --> 00:27:58,450
Speaker 1: a fire. When your digital documents have become unreadable, you

359
00:27:58,490 --> 00:28:02,730
Speaker 1: won't discover that either until you check, or since you

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00:28:02,810 --> 00:28:06,850
Speaker 1: probably won't check, you won't discover it until you desperately

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00:28:06,930 --> 00:28:10,250
Speaker 1: need them, and by then it may be far far

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00:28:10,330 --> 00:28:16,850
Speaker 1: too late. In two thousand and seven, three researchers studied

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00:28:16,930 --> 00:28:21,570
Speaker 1: how often links from online legal articles no longer existed

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00:28:22,210 --> 00:28:25,250
Speaker 1: on the website of the US Supreme Court. Half of

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00:28:25,410 --> 00:28:30,850
Speaker 1: all the links cited in legal opinions didn't work. Half

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00:28:30,890 --> 00:28:35,370
Speaker 1: of them in top legal journals, more than two thirds

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00:28:35,370 --> 00:28:38,250
Speaker 1: of the links were broken. This is the law of

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00:28:38,330 --> 00:28:41,770
Speaker 1: the land. We're talking about simply coming a part of

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Speaker 1: the seams, and it isn't just legal opinions. Political statements

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00:28:49,090 --> 00:28:53,210
Speaker 1: are often deleted by the politicians who made them. Old tweets,

371
00:28:53,370 --> 00:28:57,890
Speaker 1: old speeches, they all vanish unless someone makes it a

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00:28:57,930 --> 00:29:02,570
Speaker 1: priority to capture and preserve them. That somebody is often

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00:29:02,690 --> 00:29:07,650
Speaker 1: the Internet Archive, most famous for operating the Wayback machine,

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00:29:07,930 --> 00:29:10,410
Speaker 1: which allows you to travel back in time to view

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00:29:10,610 --> 00:29:15,810
Speaker 1: earlier versions of any web page. The Internet Archive is

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00:29:15,850 --> 00:29:19,570
Speaker 1: a private initiative run on a shoe string, and people

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00:29:19,570 --> 00:29:22,890
Speaker 1: who don't like what it preserves keep trying to shut

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00:29:22,890 --> 00:29:28,210
Speaker 1: it down. We tend to take archives for granted. We

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00:29:28,250 --> 00:29:31,170
Speaker 1: assume that when there's a digital record of something, if

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00:29:31,170 --> 00:29:35,970
Speaker 1: it matters, it'll get preserved. But this preservation doesn't happen

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00:29:36,050 --> 00:29:42,450
Speaker 1: by accident. It takes money and organization and determination. George

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00:29:42,570 --> 00:29:46,650
Speaker 1: Orwell's nineteen eighty four painted a picture of life under

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Speaker 1: a totalitarian state which continuously rewrote the historical record. The

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00:29:53,530 --> 00:29:59,770
Speaker 1: past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

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00:30:01,770 --> 00:30:05,090
Speaker 1: But we don't need a totalitarian dictatorship to lose our

386
00:30:05,130 --> 00:30:08,770
Speaker 1: grip on the past. We just need to stop paying attention.

387
00:30:12,730 --> 00:30:16,410
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine all the problems Adrian Pierce had

388
00:30:16,450 --> 00:30:20,890
Speaker 1: to solve to reincarnate the Doomsday system. They went so

389
00:30:21,050 --> 00:30:24,490
Speaker 1: much further than just finding an old system in working order.

390
00:30:25,210 --> 00:30:28,370
Speaker 1: He had to find a supplier of long obsolete parts

391
00:30:28,490 --> 00:30:31,810
Speaker 1: because he kept frying them to restore the video. He

392
00:30:31,890 --> 00:30:34,690
Speaker 1: had to find the master tapes, and of course it

393
00:30:34,770 --> 00:30:38,370
Speaker 1: was nobody's job to keep the master tapes. In the end,

394
00:30:38,650 --> 00:30:42,930
Speaker 1: cliche of cliches, the tapes were found gathering dust in

395
00:30:43,010 --> 00:30:48,890
Speaker 1: the attic of the original BBC producer Peter Armstrong. Adrian

396
00:30:49,010 --> 00:30:54,450
Speaker 1: worked on the Doomsday Project for sixteen months, unpaid, gazing

397
00:30:54,610 --> 00:30:57,490
Speaker 1: so long at hexadecimal he could read it with his

398
00:30:57,650 --> 00:31:02,010
Speaker 1: naked eye. Finally he was able to realize his wife,

399
00:31:02,130 --> 00:31:06,730
Speaker 1: Sally's dream. He produced a Windows compatible version of the

400
00:31:06,770 --> 00:31:12,210
Speaker 1: Doomsday Project and uploaded it to the web at Doomsday

401
00:31:12,330 --> 00:31:18,130
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six dot com. It all seems like a

402
00:31:18,170 --> 00:31:24,890
Speaker 1: happy ending, right, right, No, have we learned nothing about

403
00:31:24,930 --> 00:31:30,490
Speaker 1: taking digital archives? For granted, it was with a sinking

404
00:31:30,730 --> 00:31:35,330
Speaker 1: feeling that I looked for Doomsday nineteen eighty six, Adrian

405
00:31:35,410 --> 00:31:41,490
Speaker 1: and Sally's Labor of Love. It's offline. I discovered that

406
00:31:41,610 --> 00:31:45,570
Speaker 1: Adrian Pearce died in two thousand and eight, and the

407
00:31:45,650 --> 00:31:51,290
Speaker 1: site went dark shortly afterwards. That's what happens to old websites.

408
00:31:52,210 --> 00:31:55,770
Speaker 1: Adrian's obituary in the local newspaper notes that one of

409
00:31:55,770 --> 00:31:59,330
Speaker 1: his lasting legacies will be the Uckfield and District Preservation

410
00:31:59,410 --> 00:32:05,410
Speaker 1: Society website UDPS dot co dot uk. Some legacy that

411
00:32:05,490 --> 00:32:11,850
Speaker 1: website is gone too. There have been other doomsday preservation projects,

412
00:32:12,570 --> 00:32:17,450
Speaker 1: most of them are also gone. The BBC itself launched

413
00:32:17,450 --> 00:32:21,490
Speaker 1: a Doomsday Reloaded project. It went online in twenty eleven,

414
00:32:22,130 --> 00:32:26,690
Speaker 1: then disappeared. The BBC even made a radio program all

415
00:32:26,730 --> 00:32:30,210
Speaker 1: about the preservation efforts. The program has a web page

416
00:32:30,490 --> 00:32:36,650
Speaker 1: it says sorry, this episode is not currently available. The

417
00:32:36,770 --> 00:32:41,250
Speaker 1: UK's National Archives do have all the original text and

418
00:32:41,410 --> 00:32:44,530
Speaker 1: video from those nineteen eighty six laser discs, and it

419
00:32:44,570 --> 00:32:50,250
Speaker 1: is online, but in archived form. It's basically useless. There's

420
00:32:50,250 --> 00:32:53,210
Speaker 1: no way to navigate around and find what you're looking for,

421
00:32:54,410 --> 00:33:01,050
Speaker 1: or is there. In twenty twenty one, a software engineer

422
00:33:01,610 --> 00:33:06,810
Speaker 1: named Daniel Ierwicker packed together an interactive interface that looks

423
00:33:06,850 --> 00:33:10,650
Speaker 1: like Google Maps can pull out the relevant page from

424
00:33:10,690 --> 00:33:15,250
Speaker 1: the National Archives, turning an unusable heap of data into

425
00:33:15,290 --> 00:33:23,410
Speaker 1: an interactive, searchable resource again. Earwicker called his project Doomsday

426
00:33:23,530 --> 00:33:30,170
Speaker 1: eighty six Reloaded Reloaded. The multimillion pound project, built around

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Speaker 1: the labor of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, is legible

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Speaker 1: today because one volunteer, Daniel Earwicker, thought it would be

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Speaker 1: really cool if that happened. He was right. It is

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Speaker 1: really cool, and it works for now. But if the

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Speaker 1: experience of Adrian Pierce taught me anything it's that one

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Speaker 1: volunteer's digital preservation effort, no matter how heroic, is fragile.

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Speaker 1: It may all be readable and searchable today. Tomorrow it

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Speaker 1: could be gone again, erased and forgot, like all those

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Speaker 1: old landing cards that nobody could be bothered to keep.

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Speaker 1: Michael Braithwaite never did get the knock at the door.

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Speaker 1: Thanks to the reporting of journalists such as Amelia Gentlemen,

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Speaker 1: the plight of the people being deported came to public attention.

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Speaker 1: It became a national scandal known as the wind rush

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Speaker 1: scandal after a ship the Empire Windrush, which brought more

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Speaker 1: than a thousand people from Jamaica to the UK in

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, an inquiry was held. A Cabinet minister resigned.

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Speaker 1: Apologies were published, but not before the UK government, to

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Speaker 1: its shame, had illegally deported more than eighty elderly people

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Speaker 1: who'd come legally to the UK as children but couldn't

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Speaker 1: prove it. Michael eventually got his biometric ID card, but

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Speaker 1: he couldn't face going back to his old job to

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Speaker 1: work alongside the colleagues had been too frightened to support him. Instead,

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Speaker 1: he found a new calling as a campaigner for the

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Speaker 1: thousands of people affected by the wind rush scandal, people

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Speaker 1: who'd lost their jobs, their self esteem, people who like Michael,

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Speaker 1: had been torn apart. After the inquiry, the government set

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Speaker 1: up a compensation scheme. It's being administered by the Home Office,

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Speaker 1: the people who caused the problem in the first place.

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Speaker 1: It isn't going well. You won't be surprised to hear

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Speaker 1: that there's still plenty for justice campaigners such as Michael

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Speaker 1: Braithwaite to do. And I wonder if we've fully appreciated

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Speaker 1: all the right lessons from the wind Rush scandal. It

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Speaker 1: had its roots in anti immigrant rhetoric and unexamined racism,

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Speaker 1: but also in bad archival practices, As William the Conqueror

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Speaker 1: could have told us record keeping matters. And what about

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00:36:15,730 --> 00:36:21,330
Speaker 1: the original Doomsday books? Nearly a millennium old, Great Doomsday

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Speaker 1: and Little Doomsday. Today they're regarded as the most complete

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Speaker 1: surviving record of pre industrial society anywhere in the world, surviving, yes,

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Speaker 1: surviving for centuries. William the Conqueror's original manuscripts have been

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Speaker 1: preserved for posterity. In sixteen sixty six, for example, they

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Speaker 1: were saved from the Great Fire of London. In eighteen

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00:36:50,650 --> 00:36:54,530
Speaker 1: sixty nine, they were rebound with an ornate new leather cover.

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Speaker 1: During the Second World War they were moved beyond the

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Speaker 1: reach of Nazi bombs. Now they're kept in dry cold

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Speaker 1: storage at the National Archives in London. They're perfectly legible,

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Speaker 1: nine hundred and thirty seven years old and still going strong.

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Speaker 1: If you think that archives don't matter, tell that to

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Speaker 1: Michael Braithwaite. If you think that digitization solves the problem,

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Speaker 1: tell that to Adrian Pierce. And if you think the

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Speaker 1: Doomsday books survive through chance, think again. They exist only

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Speaker 1: because every generation since ten eighty six cared enough to

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Speaker 1: make the effort. What archives today will we care about

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Speaker 1: enough to preserve for tomorrow. For a full list of

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Speaker 1: our sources, please see the show note Timharford dot com.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.

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Speaker 1: It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.

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00:38:34,810 --> 00:38:37,370
Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of

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00:38:37,450 --> 00:38:42,290
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the

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00:38:42,370 --> 00:38:46,570
Speaker 1: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma

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Speaker 1: Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been

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Speaker 1: possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,

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00:38:55,370 --> 00:39:00,730
Speaker 1: Vital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded

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00:39:06,170 --> 00:39:09,930
Speaker 1: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you

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00:39:10,130 --> 00:39:14,330
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,

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00:39:14,850 --> 00:39:17,050
Speaker 1: tell your friends, and if you want to hear the

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00:39:17,050 --> 00:39:20,530
Speaker 1: show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the

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00:39:20,570 --> 00:39:24,610
Speaker 1: show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot FM,

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00:39:25,010 --> 00:39:30,850
Speaker 1: slash Plus,