Everyone's a historian now / How the Internet - and you - will  make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. [Telecom]

Everyone's a historian now / How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. [Telecom]

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Everyone's a historian now / How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. [Telecom] Monty Solomon 05-26-2008
Posted by Monty Solomon on May 26, 2008, 9:51 pm
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Everyone's a historian now
How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and
more accurate.

By Stephen Mihm | May 25, 2008
The Boston Globe

UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a
fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II,
research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your
bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for
something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get
online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that
participated in the battle - the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or
the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and
their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized
repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log
books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served
on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact
information for surviving crew members and their relatives - perfect
for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical
change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for
decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge
and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people,
"crowdsourcing," as it's increasingly called, may transform a
discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a
single historian toiling in the dusty archives.

Some venerable research institutions are already starting to harness
the power of crowds in an organized way. The Library of Congress
recently launched a project on the photo-sharing site Flickr that
invites visitors to identify and analyze photographs in its
collection, while the National Archives, working in partnership with
a for-profit company, is inviting people to do the same to online
versions of its documents. And a growing number of projects are
taking the logical next step, creating "raw archives" of photographs
and documents for momentous events: Sept. 11, for example, or
Hurricane Katrina.

...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/25/everyones_a_historian_now/


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