Talk at the Human Document Project

Last week, I visited the Human Document Project 2017 in Freiburg, a project that seeks to preserve information about humans beyond the existence of the human race. As scify as this may sound on the first sight, as interesting it is, how many different questions and disciplines need to be involved into the plan of creating a time capsule that could witness of our existence even if we, that is, humanity, no longer exists. They invited philosophers, artists, technicians, data-experts, informaticians, physicists, and also me, as a linguist, whose job it was to give a rough overview on linguistic diversity and how we try to represent our knowledge about it. Although my talk, titled Storing our knowledge of linguistic diversity: Towards the standardization of cross-linguistic data formats did not involve the longer perspective of the next million years, I had the impression that it triggered the interest of the colleagues. While I remain sceptical about the general usefulness of science fiction questions in science, I have to admit that the day I spent in Freiburg was very inspiring, as I learned so many new things. Maybe, in the end, this is even the more important aspect of the HUDOC project: bringing together people from different disciplines and having them talk with each other...