Born Digital

This week I asked you to take a look at a few different websites that function as virtual archives for documents and information that have been created digitally – there is no paper back up for this information. All three of these digital archives are very interesting in that they were set up almost immediately after the event in an effort to collect and document the events that were happening in real time.Yet, the archives have remained open and people continue to contribute to them.Part of each of these projects involved uploading “real” documents and pictures, but other aspects of these sites were designed to capture people’s feelings and memories.

I think there is also an interesting parallel here with oral history, but still different. By opening up a forum for people to post their “raw” memories, we see (and preserve) what they felt were personally the most important. There is no historian here to prompt or flush out different aspects of that memory. Nor are there any means to filter or fact check those memories. As someone who primarily works on collective instead of personal memories, I have a hard time processing these individual impressions and extrapolating a larger meaning.

The Flickr Commons is not necessarily an “active” digital archive like the other three examples, but both the larger Flickr site and the Commons component have created a fascinating depository for digital photographs. The commons area in particular is very interesting. The first large donor to the commons was the Library of Congress, who submitted thousands of photographs so that users could comment on them and help the curators at the library identify who was pictured and where these photographs were taken. This raises the issue of “shared authority” that all public historians need to deal with. However, here we see a great example of where the public might have a body of knowledge that curators lack and can provide better, more accurate accounts and descriptions than the professional. I really like how people have marked up the various photos and commented with their own experiences (or the memories that they have of parents or grandparents talking about an event). This sort of community building and social networking are very interesting aspects of these “born digital” archives – the objects on display might have once been analog, but now that they are digital they are creating new digital addendums or annotations.

Let me also raise a few other questions for the class (some that also stem from my own reading of Dan Cohen’s article on the “Future of Preserving the Past.” First, how do we control for authenticity with these “active archives”? Of course preserving the thoughts and memories of the “common man” is important, how do we authenticate (or do we need to) that memory as real or constructed? Secondly, by relying on digital contributions to these digital archives, what do we do with all of the potential analog media that might be ignored only because it is analog (of course things can be converted…)? I also wonder about the opt-in nature of such archives. What if someone didn’t want to contribute their material to a digital archive, but their material was of great importance to the project at hand? Are we creating an artificial bias toward digital contributions and artifacts? Of course, we have this difficulty with normal archives as well – some are public, others are private. There are laws to protect privacy and items can be closed for 30+ years in most western cultures without filing court papers to force their release.

On a more positive note – these new digital archives greatly increase the repository of information for future scholars to use. They allow for searchability that current archives cannot even try to mimic. Finally, the biggest issue with archives that are born digital is the issue of preservation, but we will address this in two weeks, so I don’t want to get into that now even though it is a related issue.