Project Announcements

We here at the institute have received a number of questions and, if I am honest – complaints –  about the user interface for the archive. I wanted to explain why we chose to format the archive the way we did.

First it is important to note the condition of the archive elements themselves. The archive as discovered was not in a digital form. Rather, every fragment was either originally authored – or transcribed from a former digital record – onto paper handmade from local materials. This native paper, while durable, has also tended over the centuries to fuse together. Recovery of the various fragments is not a matter of file retrieval but instead one of painstakingly separating the individual records and maintaining their integrity so that they can be transcribed. Eventually, the full archive will be transcribed into a dataspheric format and made available to the public. For now, we offer those fragments that have survived the most intact, and retain the most durability.

In deciding to share our work during this process, there was serious debate over how to present it. Originally the most obvious solution was simply to transcribe the material and present it on the datasphere. However, my esteemed colleague – and wife – Dr. Lyra Abdi-Lund eschewed this approach, insisting that viewers needed to connect with the archive, if only in a small way.

Hence, our interface. When you, our viewers, read from the archive, you are not seeing digitally transcribed text. You are viewing a scan of the fragments themselves happening in real time. When you access the records, the physical fragments (or pages) are sorted via magnetic bottling in the electrostatic stasis fields in which they are housed and scanned, live. The narrow viewing field in the interface ensure that only small parts of any fragment are being scanned at any one time, minimizing potential defacement.

While this may cause some frustration, especially among the faster readers, with this method we have allowed for the viewer to physically interact with the fragments themselves, all while protecting them from harm.

We here at the project hope that this knowledge helps to alleviate any consternation the viewer may have with accessing the archive, and furthermore we hope we have given you all a greater feeling of connection to our past.

Thank you, as always, for your patronage,

Dr. Jeric Lund, Project Director, The Somnius Report

The Project Director has added a Meta to aid in understanding of The Somnius Report:

Meta

The Meta will be updated on a regular basis as restoration efforts on the Archive continue.

After some lengthy debate, the project directors have elected to henceforth display all fragments in their original chronological order as written rather than the order of their discovery.

We are thrilled to reveal that we have uncovered our first Second Wave source entry in the archive. We will be publishing the entry immediately.  It is short, little more than a brief ship’s log, but I think everyone will agree that it was a serendipitous find, and gives us a great deal of insight into the minds of the people on the Second Wave Expedition.

Please Go Here to view.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage and support.

Project Directors

Staff Commentary related to this Announcement can be found here.