Last year my colleague Sheila Brennan and I spent some time trying to make sense of the lessons we’d learned from several years of work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank–a project that Sheila did the vast majority of the heavy lifting on here at CHNM. The essay we wrote about our experiences is now online on CHNM’s Essays on History and New Media page.
From my perspective, the most valuable part of the essay is in the “lessons learned” section where we discuss some of the reasons why we think the project succeeded while simultaneously failing to live up to our (admittedly high) expectations. We learned a tremendous amount about how the interface influences both the number of contributions and the nature of those contributions, about building relationships with contributors, about driving traffic to the site, about auto-collecting content from various sites (blogs, Flickr.com, etc.), about the importance of partnerships with individuals and organizations with a vested interest in the subject of the project, and about how to more accurately forecast staffing needs for digital collecting projects.
I hope you will take a few minutes, read this relatively brief essay, and let us know what you think.
I hope CHNM can step back someday and tell us how operating in crisis mode to capture a digital record of events like 9/11 and Katrina is different from taking the time to produce simple-yet-complicated products like Omeka and Zotero.
How much correlation was there between the level of contributions to the Katrina web site and declines in participation at Wikipedia?
Do you think digital history will ultimately favor the measurement of change over time within texts instead of across texts? Wikipedia allows the former with its history tab. The digital archives at CHNM treat texts that are fixed at a specific moment in time. Is there room for reimagining born-digital texts that have versions that can be searched?
Were the debates at CHNM over tagging unique to web sites that dealt with contemporary history? Would tagging be so controversial with the records of people who lived in the 1800s?
I love your points about the problem of scale. It would be great to hear more about how often your experiences outstripped your expectations and more about the reasons why automated solutions didn’t work for you. I can’t help but wonder if you had allowed more tagging whether you would have developed a much more complete vocabulary for finding Katrina web sites through web crawl methods and sifting through the results.
I wonder if some practitioners of digital history have inherited an outdated philosophy from physical archives. The physical repositories imagined themselves existing in isolation. Their collections stood on their own merits and any possible connections with collections at other archives, not to mention published work that cited the archive’s collections, could be ignored. I don’t think digital archives can afford to maintain this attitude of indifference to context. In an era of aggregation and social networking, it is hard to imagine digital archives succeeding without linking their content to other digital archives and to digital copies of publications based on the contents of those archival collections.
As you continue using the Dublin Core with your forthcoming digital archives, do you anticipate any debates at CHNM on whether to abandon the participatory chaos of Web 2.0 for the automated standardization of the semantic web? As you negotiate these politics of digital history, will the compromise solution be something like Web 2.5?