Rally the crowds, it's historical sourcing time! Note: This blog asks more questions than it answers

                In a world with so much information at our finger tips, in combination with increasing technology at unfathomable rates, it is hard to plan how to process, even contain all of the information we have.  Let’s hypothetically proclaim that money and time aren’t an issue, how do we preserve all of that which we know?  Think about it, if the ancient civilizations were able to document and store their architectural documents for such works as: the Egyptian pyramids, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, etc., we wouldn’t have to have television programs-as well as other medias-speculating whether or not extra-terrestrials helped in some way to construct them!  We would either know aliens did help or didn’t, as well as how precisely they were built.  So now, thousands of years later, we have nothing to fill the gaps in information.  Imagine what civilization will wonder about our place and time in 6 thousand years…   

                This dilemma is shaping the world of digital preservation as we speak.  From not only deciding on how to collaborate, what exactly to preserve, how to fund it and whether or not to share it, historians-along with every other profession-have to figure out how to preserve information so that the information will be around for millennia, and not just twenty years.  Because of technologies’ rapid turnover, it can be cost degrading, time inefficient and overall consistently disappointing in trying to keep up.  One decade we’re preserving our data to floppy disks, yet a few decades later we need to switch everything over to a hard drive and a second hard drive (at least) for backup!  At this rate, those wishing to preserve will be “re-preserving” every twenty years, neither time nor cost effective in the least.  Is the HD-Rosetta disc the best we can come up with?  Did anyone else feel that a disc created to specifically withstand nuclear war, a little disheartening?

The Library of Congress is another site  that has an array of American and world history topics, separated by: different eras in American history and different regions of world history.  The LOC interacts with other users and institutions by using an array of social media technologies and websites to engage the public with Library news, events, acquisitions and exhibits. The LOC is also sharing selected historic content from their own collections.  By creating your own LOC account, you can: view and create your own collection by saving interactive exhibitions, individual exhibition objects, lesson plans, online activities and more (stated from the email they sent me after I created my account).

    

                Cohen and Rosenzweig speculate on this exact issue.  But first, wonder how to assess proficient ways in collecting oral histories.  Online collecting of information from those willing to contribute their stories, documents, images, etc. is not the answer all to gathering recent history, as opposed to traditional ways-such as collecting in person.  But it certainly is a respectable way of gathering a sizable cohort to create a solid discussion on your topic of interest.  Which raises the question, what is an ample following for your topic?  Is it enough that you get a hundred people participating in discussing the Vietnam War when considering millions of people are still alive today who contributed and lived through Vietnam in multiple facets?  Say we meet our expectations for what is sizable, is collecting that information online an appropriate method for collecting oral history when those currently still alive are considered senior citizens?  Not the biggest internet user demographic exactly. 

                History is about community, and I would argue that the youth who knows no time before the internet, finds it difficult to socialize without the comfort of sitting at their own home and hiding behind their monitors.  So, is this technology preventing us from interacting with our community face to face?  Isn’t there some value in interviewing a war veteran in person when a well written historical narrative would describe the veteran’s emotions as he described his experience?  IMs, emails, blogs, forums-none of these can describe “tonal inflections of a spoken dialogue”.

                Crowd sourcing, the utilization of a crowd of people to do work for you, can be exemplified with Zooniverse’s (found here https://www.zooniverse.org/) project of cataloging the different types of galaxies.  There are millions of galaxies captured in Zooniverse’s database, yet the majority of them are not distinguished according to type.  Zooniverse, ingeniously, created a website where viewers can take a quick tutorial on the different types of galaxies, and then, those that grasp the differentiations can begin cataloging the pictures according to their galaxy type.  This is saving NASA and astronomers big bucks and time, while also engaging the community.  This is just one example of crowd sourcing.

                Estlund’s and Hebert’s ‘Creating Citizen Historians’ describes their project, Utah Digital Newspapers, as participating in collecting newspapers from all over Utah with the help of many institutions and organizations.  Their aim, as evident, is to build a vast digital newspaper archive.  They aim at using the originals as well as having a board of individuals decide exactly what to digitize, no easy feat as mentioned in the beginning of this blog.  UDN, as of 2007, when the article was written, had goals of becoming financially self-sustaining, broadening their user community and to engage a bigger K-12 audience.  Though, as of 2007, they stated they do not have sufficient funding to digitize anything after 1922, a graph on their site depicts that as of 2010 funding has been achieved.                   

           

     

            Another site utilizing the concept of crowd sourcing is Flickr: the Commons.  This site is a site geared towards crowd sourcing with the collaboration of the LOC.  Everyone visiting can comment and /or describe a multitude of public photographs.  An array of museums, archives, libraries, universities, societies, NASA, organizations such as: the Smithsonian, Library of Congress and the Getty Research center, from all over the world participate.  

Cebula’s article, "Lick This": LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing, our author points out the obvious, is our society in general “mature” enough to be given this responsibility?  Is crowd sourcing hurting or helping us?  When the majority-by a long shot- of comments on a single photograph on LOC’s and Flickr’s project are not historically helpful, let alone arguably mature, can the government afford to spend resources on it?  And do we want this representing our civilization when the site is unearthed by (humans?) hundreds of years from now?  Is the movie ‘Idiocracy’ fulfilling some sort of prophecy?

In summary, I agree with Spellbound Blog, crowd sourcing is not perfect.  There will be many ways to tag a photo, regardless of the tag’s content, but in all rationale each tag does increase the chances of a viewer’s capability in finding the photograph.  And this is LOC’s pilot project, and like all projects, kinks will occur but will be dealt with accordingly. If anything is obtained with this project, the very least is that people are exploring history and taking an active interest in it.  Hopefully with the collaboration of LOC and Flickr, more citizens will find their way back to the LOC site. 

Crowd sourcing is a hot topic among all academic disciplines, and I think the overall consensus is that it does add a valuable component to understanding history.  But there is some responsibility to the viewer to decipher what is quality information and which is not, for instance, are you going to lick the forehead of the female aircraft worker…?