Week Four Digital History Post: Documenting the Present and (hopefully) Preserving it for the Future

Alright, we have a lot of ground to cover this week. As historians struggle to come to grips with what the information age means for their practice, the prospects are both exciting and daunting. A perfect example of this is The Commons on Flikr. Through this new project, Flikr has teamed up with a number of institutions, such as NASA, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library (to name just a few) to allow public access to the images stored in these archives. The archives aren't just making themselves available for viewing, however, but are actually allowing visitors to interact with the archives, through the time-honored Flikr tradition of tagging.

An image from Flikr.com 

 

 

 

 

This program really is a unique solution to the problem of collecting history online. The internet allows the archival to become a two way process, with the public being able to actively participate. Many tools, such as blogs, email, and even instant messaging have already come to be in common use. The creation of The Commons signifies the discovery of yet another creative use of the internet to collect archival information. In mining information in this way, it is in effect, as Newsweek puts it “bringing the mountain to Muhammad.” By putting these photos on a site which people visit everyday, they are inserting themselves into people's daily routines. The process is remarkable non-invasive. Many people may not even realize that they are participating. By partnering with an already well-traveled site, ie. Flikr, these institutions are able to create far more traffic for their project than they would have been able to otherwise. The fact that this project has a presence in the real world, through the brick-and-mortar archives which have elected to participate in it, lends it an air of legitimacy that it might otherwise lack. It is a wedding of the popular and academic, in a way that will hopefully make the academic more popular, and vice-versa.

Of course, this is far from being the first attempt at using the interactivity of the internet to collect historical information. Far from it. The accessibility of the internet has allowed all manner of web sites aimed at collecting people's information and stories to pop up. A perfect example of this is the bevy of sites which popped up in the hours and days after the September 11^th attacks. Professionals and amateurs alike set up shop and opened public venues for people to express the experiences and reactions, saving them for others to look at and hopefully even for posterity. Though efforts such as these may seem unconventional, they in fact are operating very closely with the spirit of some of the earliest historians. Heroditus, and Thucydidies after him, sought to document what was happening in the world around them for the benefit of later generations. They not only labored to preserve the past, but the present as well. The internet by its very nature encourages a return to this original focus.

A Polaroid of a floppy disk.  Irony.

The biggest question which haunts us is not whether or not we will be able to collect enough information. It is instead how to preserve it once collected. The medium which Heroditus entrusted his historical record to was, and is, proven to last. While perhaps it may not last forever, time has show that parchment and other more traditional mediums can withstand the test of time. What of the digital medium? When paper technology changes, legacy technologies such as vellum do no simply become unreadable. With digital sources, this is often the case. If you were to come across documents that you had saved on an old floppy disk, how would you access it? Furthermore, how can you be sure that the data on the floppy hasn't been compromised. While time can weather away parts of ancient texts recorded on rock and parchment, other parts still remain for historians to document. In the digital medium, a little damage can compromise an entire work, or even worse, a collection of works. What is to be done? There is no easy answer. If we are to save all of this information collected on sites like The Commons or wherewereyou.org, it is a wrinkle which will need to be ironed out.