Sending Messages to the
Future - a Bibliography
Some of the academic and institutional research that went into the Scientific American article "How to Send a Message to Future Civilizations." If you have trouble surmounting a paywall on any of this, ping me and I'll see what I can do.
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Bowker, Geoffrey C. “The Archive.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, June 2010, pp. 212–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791421003775733.
Brady, Catherine E. A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Using Anecdotal Data and Photographic Evidence to Obtain Baseline Data for Southeast Florida Reefs. 2016. Nova Southeastern University.
Brown, Richard Harvey, and Beth Davis-Brown. “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of National Consciousness.” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 11, no. 4, Nov. 1998, pp. 17–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519801100402.
Cao, Ben, et al. “Efficient Data Reconstruction: The Bottleneck of Large-Scale Application of DNA Storage.” Cell Reports, vol. 43, no. 4, Apr. 2024, p. 113699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2024.113699.
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Second, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Chapekis, Athena, et al. When Online Content Disappears. Pew Research Center, 17 May 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears.
Colagè, Ivan, and Francesco d’Errico. “An Empirically-Based Scenario for the Evolution of Cultural Transmission in the Human Lineage During the Last 3.3 Million Years.” PLOS One, vol. 20, no. 6, June 2025, p. e0325059, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325059.
d’Errico, Francesco, et al. “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music–An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective.” Journal of World Prehistory, vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 1–70, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023980201043.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, University Of Chicago Press, 1996.
Eliseev, Emmaline Drew, and Elizabeth J. Marsh. “Externalizing Autobiographical Memories in the Digital Age.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 25, no. 12, Dec. 2021, pp. 1072–81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.08.005.
Fackler, Martin. “On Stones in Japan, Tsunami Warnings — Aneyoshi Journal.” New York Times, 21 Apr. 2011, p. 6, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html. A.
Ford, Heather. “Becoming Eventful through Data: The Mediated Construction of Historic Events in the Age of Data.” Handbook of Digital Politics, edited by Stephen Coleman and Lone Sorensen, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023, pp. 196–241. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800377585.00023.
Ford, Heather, and Andrew Iliadis. “Wikidata as Semantic Infrastructure: Knowledge Representation, Data Labor, and Truth in a More-Than-Technical Project.” Social Media + Society, vol. 9, no. 3, July 2023, p. 20563051231195552. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231195552.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Vintage Books, 2010.
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Goldman, Nick, et al. “Towards Practical, High-Capacity, Low-Maintenance Information Storage in Synthesized DNA.” Nature, vol. 494, no. 7435, Feb. 2013, pp. 77–80, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11875.
Grass, Robert N., et al. “Robust Chemical Preservation of Digital Information on DNA in Silica with Error‐Correcting Codes.” Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 54, no. 8, Feb. 2015, pp. 2552–55, https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201411378.
Hayek, Friedrich A. von. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4, Sept. 1945, pp. 519–30.
Hennessey, Jason, and Steven Xijin Ge. “A Cross Disciplinary Study of Link Decay and the Effectiveness of Mitigation Techniques.” BMC Bioinformatics, vol. 14, no. S14, Oct. 2013, p. S5, https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-14-S14-S5.
Henshilwood, Christopher S., F. D’Errico, et al. “A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa.” Science, vol. 334, no. 6053, Oct. 2011, pp. 219–22, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1211535.
Henshilwood, Christopher S., Francesco D’Errico, Karen L. van Niekerk, et al. “An Abstract Drawing from the 73,000-Year-Old Levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa.” Nature, vol. 562, no. 7725, Oct. 2018, pp. 115–18, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0514-3.
Henshilwood, Christopher S., Francesco D’Errico, and Ian Watts. “Engraved Ochres from the Middle Stone Age Levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa.” Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 57, no. 1, 2009, pp. 27–47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005.
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Holly, H. Hobart. “Lowell Waterpower System.” Civil Engineering Practice, vol. 1, no. 2, fall 1986, pp. 141–45, https://www.bscesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/CEP-Vol-1-No-2-06.pdf.
Hovers, Erella, et al. “An Early Case of Color Symbolism.” Current Anthropology, vol. 44, no. 4, Aug. 2003, pp. 491–522, https://doi.org/10.1086/375869.
Hradil, David, et al. “Clay and Iron Oxide Pigments in the History of Painting.” Applied Clay Science, vol. 22, no. 5, 2003, pp. 223–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-1317(03)00076-0.
“James Bicheno Francis, 1815-1892: President of the Society, 1880-1882.” Civil Engineering, Early Presidents of the Society, vol. 7, no. 2, Feb. 1937, pp. 142–43.
Judson, Sheldon. “Paleolithic Paint.” Science, vol. 130, no. 3377, Sept. 1959, pp. 708–708, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.130.3377.708.
Kalnikaité, Vaiva, and Steve Whittaker. “Software or Wetware?: Discovering When and Why People Use Digital Prosthetic Memory.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [San Jose California USA], 2007, pp. 71–80, https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240635.
Karamperidou, Christina. “Extracting Paleoweather from Paleoclimate through a Deep Learning Reconstruction of Last Millennium Atmospheric Blocking.” Communications Earth & Environment, vol. 5, no. 1, Sept. 2024, p. 535, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01687-y.
Lantz, Mark A., et al. “Magnetic Tape Storage Technology.” ACM Transactions on Storage, vol. 21, no. 1, Feb. 2025, pp. 1–70, https://doi.org/10.1145/3708997.
Legge, Eric L.G., et al. “Building a Memory Palace in Minutes: Equivalent Memory Performance Using Virtual versus Conventional Environments with the Method of Loci.” Acta Psychologica, vol. 141, no. 3, Nov. 2012, pp. 380–90, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.09.002.
Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature, vol. 519, no. 7542, Mar. 2015, pp. 171–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258.
Lim, Cheng Kai, et al. “A Biological Camera That Captures and Stores Images Directly into DNA.” Nature Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, July 2023, p. 3921, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38876-w.
Lustig, Jason. “Epistemologies of the Archive: Toward a Critique of Archival Reason.” Archival Science, vol. 20, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 65–89, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09313-z.
Malone, Patrick M. Waterpower in Lowell. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Manoff, Marlene. “Archival Theory in the Age of the Machine.” [Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz], 2022, Photo Archives Vlll: The Digital Photo Archive. Theories, Practices and Rhetoric, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.
———. “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 10, no. 4, Oct. 2010, pp. 385–98, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2010.0005.
———. “The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 6, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 311–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2006.0042.
———. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 9–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2004.0015.
Marx, William. Libraries of the Mind. Princeton University Press, 2025.
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McClenachan, Loren. “Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs.” Conservation Biology, vol. 23, no. 3, June 2009, pp. 636–43. ResearchGate, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01152.x.
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Molloy, Peter M. The Lower Merrimack River Valley: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites. Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, 1978.
Momméja, Julie. “Time, Bits, and Nickel: Managing Digital and Analog Continuity.” Long Now Ideas, 9 July 2025, https://longnow.org/ideas/time-bits-and-nickel/.
Moore, Frances C., et al. “Rapidly Declining Remarkability of Temperature Anomalies May Obscure Public Perception of Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 11, Mar. 2019, pp. 4905–10, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816541116.
Moskowitz, Clara. “DNA-Coded ‘Lunar Library’ Aims to Preserve Civilization for Millennia.” Scientific American, 28 Sept. 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-coded-lunar-library-aims-to-preserve-civilization-for-millennia/.
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Robertson, Craig. The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Rogers, Adam. “We’re About to Enter the Digital Dark Ages.” Business Insider, 15 Oct. 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-dark-ages-internet-history-old-websites-disappearing-link-rot-2024-10.
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