http://dmf.culture.fr/culture/courrier/m950128.htm (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)Washington Post, 28 Jan 1995.
Out of the Caves.
The discovery happened the way it always seems to
with cave paintings, those most stirring
and historically rare finds from the past.
Some explorers near Avignon, France,
last month felt a draft blowing out of the ground
and followed it, only to find long-blocked caves
with human and bear footprints, flint tools
and an unbelievable cache of stone Age cave paintings.
But what happened next wasn't much like what always happens:
As of this week, a bare month after the stunning discovery,
images of some nearly 300 paintings and engravings
are available for viewing on the Internet
and have been zipping around the world on commercial
and noncommercial information systems,
accompanied by some explanatory pages (in French)
and the photo and e-mail address of the French cultural official
who took the trouble to load them on.
Whatever magic the unknown Stone Age painters thought
they were summoning up - one of many fuzzy theories
as to why masterpieces like these exist - it couldn't have topped
this wonder of access and distribution.
People worry about the relative sparseness
of cultural information that cruises the Net,
but if this is the direction things are going to take,
the problem may eventually evaporate.
For now, though a handful of dedicated scribes
are typing serious books onto the Internet,
a huge majority of the 27 million or so people
hooked onto it are reading recent journalism
or government statistical information or swapping jokes
and David Letterman Top Ten lists.
Copyright problem and the discomfort of reading long works
of, say litterature on one's immovable computer screen
almost guarantee that progress will be slow in this direction.
But if anything is a candidate for wide dissemination,
it's delicate and hard-to-see art works
like the cave paintings of Neolithic Europe,
whose great age (the new ones are said to be
about 20,000 years old) and extraordinary fragility
have sharpen reduced access to them by tourists.
The well known caves at Lascaux, also in France,
used to be open to the public,
but even the breath of visitors and the microbes
on theirs shoe-soles turned out to cause them hazard,
and they are now shown only in glimpses to people
who may wait years for an opening on the guest list.
At other sensitive sites whose discovery, while thrilling,
may well have been the beginning of their ultimate loss
through deterioration - the tombs in the Valley of the King in Egypt,
for example - officials have struggle with this problem,
and some sites (including Lascaux)
have gone so far as to construct exact replicas for visitors.
How much more dramatic and less difficult,
at least as a first step, to do what the discoverers
of this new batch have done, and simply load the images
onto a snazzy graphic part of the electronic universe
called the World Wide Web. For those who understand such things,
the place to find it is called
http://www.culture.fr/gvpad.htm.
For those who don't, just call it magic.
From: jimross@Laser.NET To: bottin@culture.fr Subject: gvpda Pardon me for writing in English; I read French, but I don't write it easily. You will be interested to hear than an editorial in the Washington Post this morning is a review of your World Wide Web link: http://www.culture.fr/gvpda.htm. I have myself just accessed that site, through Mosaic, which allows me to download the .jpg files immediately. *And* your further remarks about palaeolithic art in France, as well as your own "M. B." file, including a handsome picture and your address. My own prediction is that this kind of "publishing" on the INTERNET will be an example of what's possible there; this is also the prediction of the Washington Post. This is not my field: I am a Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, specializing in Early Bronze. But I have always appreciated French and Spanish palaeolithic work: years ago my wife and I visited Fontes de Gaume (sp?) on a camping trip through the Dordogne. My heartiest congratulations, both on the find, and the way you have presented it. You deserve the title "Webmaster". Isn't the INTERNET marvelous? I carry on a correspondence with dozens of people; my regular groups are ANE (ancient Near East) and Ioudaios (first century A. D. Judaism). James F. Ross | jimross@laser.net Virginia Theological Seminary | CIS 10235,143 Alexandria, VA 22304 | (703)-370-4455
From: letourne@gsat.ens.fr (Francois Michel Le Tourneau) Subject: bravo ! To: bottin@culture.fr Nous constatons avec plaisir que le ministere de la culture se donne les moyens de renforcer l'image culturelle de la France a travers un reseau qui semblait un peu trop exclusivement americain. Pour ce que nous avons pu lire des News, il semble que le serveur www.culture.fr soit apprecie. Merci pour les images de la grotte de Pont d'Arc... est-il prevu que toutes soient mises sur le reseau ? Pour notre part, nous essayons de developper un serveur interactif sur l'art du proche-orient (http://mercator.ens.fr/home/letourne/server.html). Existe-t-il deja des choses dans les projets du ministere ? Y a-t-il des gens qui travailleraient deja sur un tel projet ? Au fait, comment le serveur du ministere de la culture est-il gere ? Y a-t-il un service specialise ? Encore une question si nous pouvons nous le permettre : savez-vous ce qu'il en est des projets de serveurs http du Louvre et de la Bibliotheque Nationale ? Dans l'attente de votre reponse, nous vous remercions d'avance. Francois Michel Le Tourneau 45 rue d'ULm 75005 PARIS
a
zxmrh01@student.uni-tuebingen.de (Joachim Rehmet) sent the following comment about le serveur WWW du ministere: ------------------------------------------------------------ What about at least some sentences in English? The Internet is international and the most used internmational language is and will be english! Sorry for that, but it is a fact. Otherwise: Excellent server!
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