Vimeo of the Day: The Rosetta Project

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This is a remarkable short film about The Rosetta Project by Scott Oller (for his film production major at Loyola Marymount University).

What is The Rosetta Project?

As its website states, it's "a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages." That is, it's an effort to preserve human language for the future at a time when the increasing digitization of our civilization, with more and more of our culture going online and succumbing to "digital obsolescence," is threatening to render our spoken languages long-lost things of the past.

It's an effort to build a new Rosetta Stone, a digital archive of all documented human languages -- and to do so through the use of technology to protect ourselves and our culture, ironically enough, from technology and ourselves.

It's run by The Long Now Foundation, which "hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common," and it's an incredibly important effort to keep alive perhaps the very essence of being truly human.