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.

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.

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