While reading Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, I was struck by two questions that they asked:
“In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it?”
“How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?”
These two questions, I feel, are still very important and relevant questions to ask. In an era where things are easily deleted, considered irrelevant, or even produced only through email, we’re facing, as historians, a dilemma of maintaining sources for the future. During my time at the University of Central Florida, one of the things we discussed the most for the Veteran’s History Project was the importance of collecting oral histories, as much of the correspondence of recent veterans is through email, rather than writing letters. These emails are easily lost or even just deleted, which would remove a huge source of information for future and present historians that are trying to explore this information. How do we, as historians, tackle the issue of the the deletion of potential sources? How could we potentially make this information available? Certainly, the internet has made many sources available people that were not previously available, such as through digital archives and web projects, but is there a way to inform people about the importance of their digital footprint and sources? It is also important to consider the vast amount of content that people are creating now, through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other web sources, and how these items could potentially relate to the future historic record.
Clearly it would be impossible to save every single item that is created, and even still, we might not want to. However, it is worth considering what types of sources will be saved from our very digital and easily deleted era.
[…] By anneladyem […]
This is a very interesting post. Working for the Army in a history preserving capacity, I’ve wondered how they, as well as other information repositories, are going to account for the millions of e-mail “letters” sent home by soldiers in the field that describe their time in a war zone, etc. This is the stuff that historians crave, or will crave, but is something that I have not seen collected. Interestingly, I do remember saving an e-mail home from a soldier who was wounded during our early involvement in Iraq that was forwarded to my mother from the soldier’s relative.