Capturing the Present for the
Future
Web 1.5?
My first encounter with the concept of 2.0[1]
was in the fall of 2010 when I read Zadie Smith’s scathing review of not just
the film, “The Social Network”, but the whole milieu it represented.[2] I stored away the idea for later enlightenment
and felt somewhat smug to be in the company of such youth and brilliance. Having dived into Facebook with the
expectation that it was going to feel like a cozy community conversation I had
become rapidly disenchanted by the banal entries and self obsessed displays. It reminded me of the redundant doo dads you
can buy to decorate up your photo pages in an album; time and resources down
the proverbial drain.
What I had not understood, however, was that there was great
capital to be made from the application of this and other evolving interactive
media to the wholesale capturing of human experience and conditions in our
times. Now, perhaps for the first time
in history, it had become possible to tap the very grass roots of human society
to preserve a new kind of archive material for the future to examine.
It took me a while to catch on to the positive benefits of
web 2.0, (or Tim O’Reilly’s idea of “harnessing collective intelligence”)[3] as
applied to saving historical evidence. I
do dimly remember being struck when I heard on the news in April 2010 that The Library
of Congress had acquired the entire Twitter archive and was intending to
continue collecting every public tweet at the rate of more than 50 million a
day indefinitely.[4] At the time I probably wondered how important
that could possibly be. After all it was
probably full of self-reflection and banality.
Besides my cynicism, I did not have any realization that this was in
fact a relatively late capturing of such media.
The origins of collecting grass roots manifestations of modern
human history are now well over a decade old (which of course is like eons on the digital technology time chart) and
represent a testament to the farsightedness of various individuals and
institutions of the late 1990’s and their financial supporters. The non-profit “Internet Archive” started its
ambitious collecting of digital life, (“Alexandria style”, though their goal
was far more egalitarian and did not involve wholesale stealing of texts!) as
early as 1996. The Center For History
and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University started their preservation of
history online in 1998 with the Blackout History Project, which was followed in
2001 by ECHO. Of
course, events later that year prompted immediate and profound responses from several
of the major players in digital archives.
Digital communications arising from the great tragedy of 9/11 were
grabbed up for preservation by the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive,
WebArchivist.org, the Pew Internet and American Life and CHNM, in an effort to
preserve as broad and detailed a picture as possible. The results were impressive. E mails, photographs, videos, first hand
accounts, news broadcasts and the like were captured from thousands upon
thousands of people.
With this experience under their belt, CHNM set out four
years later to capture yet another human tragedy of mammoth proportions and complex
social implications. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina had inflicted
its devastation on Louisiana, Mississippi and neighboring Gulf states, the
staff at CHNM realized that they had a responsibility to collect, archive and
make accessible the digital outpourings that they predicted would flow out of
the event. In “Essays on History and the
New Media, Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5”, Sheila Brennan and T
Mills Kelly chart what in fact became the uncertain progress of this venture as
it evolved. They launched the web site
in November 2005… Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
The project was carefully thought through by this now
seasoned team, though the lessons they learned suggest that planning is not
always going to pay off equally in this new arena. The site is simply laid out and tailored for
easy access, both for contributors and for browsers. An evocative photograph and tidbits of
information on the home page pull the audience and potential contributor in. The mission and general organization of the
project is laid out straightforwardly and gives reassurance that this is a
genuine site with prestigious partners, both local (the University of New
Orleans) and National (Smithsonian, National Museum of American History, Alfred
Sloan Foundation). Copyright status is
clearly published in the bottom bar of the page, leaving copyright with the
participant, and the site is designed to W3C standards to create the easiest
possible accessibility for the most people.
Beyond the site itself and its ease of use, other careful
efforts were made to encourage participation.
In order to break the ice and
“prime the pump” contributions were solicited from within the University
community before the web site launched. Provisions were also made for those without
digital access. Contributors could
either call in their stories to be collected as oral histories or write them on
purpose made postcards from which they could be keyed in. Staff members living on the Gulf Coast
developed partnerships with organizations in the region to further publicize
the project.
Yet despite all this,
success on the scale of the previous 9/11 the project was found wanting when
the team assessed it. Ironically it was
speculated that the very increase of digital media in the interim period had
infact created other outlets for aggregating information that might have
otherwise come their way. Still, as of
today there are 13,889 total items in the collection which might not otherwise
have been preserved and which certainly would not have been organized in a well-maintained
historical bank.
[1]
I’m excited to discover that the source of the definition of 2.0. is Tim
O’Reilly, proponent of ‘open software’, whose ideas about the “global brain”
may well become prophetic.
[2]
“Generation Why?”, The New York Review
of Books , November 25th 2010 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false#fnr-1
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