{"id":754,"date":"2011-04-18T11:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T15:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=754"},"modified":"2013-03-17T11:06:30","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T15:06:30","slug":"the-scouring-of-the-white-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/04\/18\/the-scouring-of-the-white-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scouring of the White Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The owld White Harse wants zettin to rights
\nAnd the Squire hev promised good cheer,
\nZo we’ll gee un a scrape to kip un in zhape,
\nAnd a’ll last for many a year.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Thomas Hughes, The Scouring of the White Horse<\/a><\/em>, 1859<\/p>\n

On a recent trip to London<\/a>, I had an extra day free, and decided to visit the Uffington White Horse with a friend<\/a>. The Uffington White Horse<\/a> is one of the most mysterious human artifacts on the planet. In the south of Oxfordshire, less than two hours<\/a> west of London\u00a0by Zipcar<\/a>,\u00a0it sits atop White Horse Hill in the Vale of White Horse to which it gives its name. It is the oldest of the English chalk figures<\/a>, which are constructed by removing turf and topsoil to reveal the chalk layer below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The Uffington White Horse, photo by flickr user superdove, used by permission<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The figure is sui generis in its magnificence,\u00a0far surpassing any of the other hill figures extant in England. The\u00a0surrounding landscape<\/a> \u2014 with its steep hills, the neighboring Roman earthworks castle, and pastoral lands still used for grazing sheep<\/a> and cows \u2014 is spectacular<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Uffington horse is probably best known for its appearance in Thomas Hughes<\/a>\u2019s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays<\/a><\/em>. The protagonist Tom Brown, like Hughes himself, hails from Uffington<\/a>, and Hughes uses that fact as an excuse to spend a few pages detailing the then-prevalent theory of the origin of the figure, proposed by Francis Wise in 1738, that the figure was carved into the hill in honor of King \u00c6<\/strong>thelred<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0victory over the Danes there in 871.<\/a>[1]<\/sup><\/p>\n

As it turns out, in a triumph of science over legend, Oxford archaeologists<\/a> have dated the horse more accurately within the last twenty years. They conclude that the trenches were originally dug some time between 1400 and 600 BCE, making the figure about three millennia old.<\/a>[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n

How did the figure get preserved over this incredible expanse of time? The longevity of\u00a0the horse is especially remarkable given its construction. The construction method is a bit different from its popular presentation as a kind of huge shallow intaglio, revealing the chalk substrate. Instead it is constructed as a set of trenches dug several feet deep and backfilled with chalk. Nonetheless, over time, dirt will overfill the chalk areas and grass will encroach. Over a period of decades, this process leads chalk figures to become “lost”. In fact, several lost chalk figures<\/a> in England are known of.<\/p>\n

Chalk figures thus require regular maintenance to prevent overgrowing.\u00a0Thomas Baskerville<\/a>[3]<\/sup> captures the alternatives:\u00a0“some that dwell hereabout have an obligation upon their lands to repair and cleanse this landmark, or else in time it may turn green like the rest of the hill and be forgotten.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Figure from Hughes’s The Scouring of the White Horse<\/em> depicting the 1857 scouring. From the 1859 Macmillan edition<\/a>.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

This “repairing and cleansing” has been traditionally accomplished through semi-regular celebrations, called scourings<\/em>, occurring at approximately decade intervals, in which the locals came together in a festival atmosphere to clean and repair the chalk lines, at the same time participating in competitions, games, and apparently much beer<\/a>.\u00a0Hughes’s 1859 book The Scouring of the White Horse<\/a><\/em> is a fictionalized recounting of the 1857 scouring that he attended.<\/a>[4]<\/sup><\/p>\n

These days, the regular maintenance of the figure has been taken over by the National Trust<\/a>, which has also arranged for repair of vandalism damage<\/a> and even for\u00a0camouflaging of the figure during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The author at the Uffington White Horse, 19 March 2011, with Dragon Hill in the background. Note the beginnings of plant growth on the chalk substrate.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Thus, the survival of the Uffington White Horse is witness to a continuous three millennium process of active maintenance of this artifact. As such, it provides a perfect metaphor for the problems of digital preservation. (Ah, finally, I get to the connection with the topic at hand.) We have no precedent for long-term preservation of interpretable digital objects. Unlike books printed on acid-free paper, which survive quite well in a context of benign neglect, but quite like the White Horse, bits degrade over time. It requires a constant process of maintenance and repair \u2014 mirroring,<\/a>[5]<\/sup> verification, correction, format migration \u2014 to maintain interpretable bits over time scales longer than technology-change cycles. By coincidence, those time scales are about commensurate with the time scales for chalk figure loss, on the order of decades.<\/p>\n

The tale of the Uffington White Horse provides some happy evidence that humanity can, when sufficiently motivated to establish appropriate institutions, maintain this kind of active process over millennia, but also serves as a reminder of the kind of loss we might see in the absence of such a process. The figure is to my knowledge the oldest extant human artifact that has survived due to continual maintenance. In recognition of this, I propose that we adopt as an appropriate term for the regular processes of digital preservation “the scouring of the White Horse”.<\/p>\n

[A shout out to the publican at Uffington’s Fox and Hounds Pub<\/a> for the lunch and view of White Horse Hill after our visit to the horse.]<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>[1]<\/sup>Francis Wise, A Letter to Dr. Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire; Particularly shewing that the White Horse, which gives name to the Vale, is a Monument of the West Saxons, made in memory of great Victory obtained over the Danes A.D. 871<\/a><\/em>, 1758.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2]<\/sup>David Miles and Simon Palmer, “White Horse Hill,” Current Archaeology<\/em>, volume 142, pages 372-378, 1995.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[3]<\/sup>Thomas Baskerville, The Description of Towns, on the Road from Faringdon to Bristow and Other Places<\/a><\/em>, 1681.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[4]<\/sup>One of the salutary byproducts of the recent mass book digitization efforts is the open\u00a0availability\u00a0of digital versions of both Hughes books: through Open<\/a> Library<\/a> and Google<\/a> Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[5]<\/sup>Interestingly, the Uffington White Horse has been “mirrored” as well, with replicas in Hogansville, GA<\/a>, Juarez, Mexico<\/a>, and Canberra, Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The owld White Harse wants zettin to rights And the Squire hev promised good cheer, Zo we’ll gee un a scrape to kip un in zhape, And a’ll last for many a year. \u2014 Thomas Hughes, The Scouring of the White Horse, 1859 On a recent trip to London, I had an extra day free, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2780,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libraries","category-scholarly-communication"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5pLfN-ca","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1691,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/02\/28\/open-letter-on-the-white-house-public-access-directive\/","url_meta":{"origin":754,"position":0},"title":"Open letter on the White House public access directive","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Thursday, February 28, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"...White House... \"White House\" image by flickr user Trevor McGoldrick. As has been widely reported, this past Friday the White House directed essentially all federal funding agencies to develop open access policies over the next few months. I wrote the letter below to be forwarded to faculty at the Harvard\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1348,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/05\/21\/open-letter-on-the-access2research-white-house-petition\/","url_meta":{"origin":754,"position":1},"title":"Open letter on the Access2Research White House petition","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Monday, May 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I just sent the email below to my friends and family. Feel free to send a similar letter to yours. You know me. I don't send around chain letters, much less start them. So you know that if I'm sending you an email and asking you to tell your friends,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":373,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2010\/01\/22\/373\/","url_meta":{"origin":754,"position":2},"title":"Harvard response to White House RFI on public access policies","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, January 22, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard's provost Steven Hyman has submitted a response on behalf of the university to the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy's RFI on public access policies. It should appear on the OSTP blog within a day or so, and is duplicated here as well. I am in strong\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2060,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2014\/04\/04\/public-underwriting-of-research-and-open-access\/","url_meta":{"origin":754,"position":3},"title":"Public underwriting of research and open access","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, April 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"\u2026a social contract\u2026 Title page of the first octavo edition of Rousseau's Social Contract [This post is based loosely on my comments on a panel on 2 April 2014 for\u00a0Terry Fisher's\u00a0CopyrightX course. Thanks to Terry for inviting me to participate and provoking this piece, and to my Berkman colleagues for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1284,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/03\/30\/statement-before-the-house-science-committee\/","url_meta":{"origin":754,"position":4},"title":"Statement before the House Science Committee","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, March 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cMajesty of Law\u201d Statue in front of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., photo by flickr user NCinDC, used by permission (CC-by-nd) Here is my written testimony filed in association with my appearance yesterday at the\u00a0hearing on \"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests\" before\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/1024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}