This Week in Clio-Wired

This week’s readings were of interest particularly Leary and Norvig.  They certainly challenged me to think about using better search methods to find relevant material.  The Learned Society article was less inspiring to me.  I found it interesting that in the week that Google settled its lawsuit over digitizing its books, the learned article was mired in academic thoughts.  The Google settlement proves that if it is profitable, it will happen, and you do not have to trample on author rights in order to make it happen.  We just have to stop thinking about the internet as free. 

I was also struck about the learned article’s emphasis on NEH grants.  Instead of worrying about how to beg for grant money, universities need to think more in terms of what a constituency wants.  That is what Google did in digitizing its books.  Consider the possibilities if historians tapped into people’s desires to think about their own history.  For instance, Ancestry.com charges a steep price for people to do genealogy searches.  It seems to me that if academics think in terms of relating people’s personal histories with larger themes, the sites would be successful.  I believe it would be powerful if you could find out not only who greatgrandmother was but also what the issues were that shaped her life.  On the scholarly side, UVa has developed a site to aggregate census data.  What a great tool to get supporting data for your research.  My guess is that money would come to digitize the War Department records if a coherent argument can be made that a significant audience would use the data after it was published.

As I recall, we were asked to explain how we preserve our own history.  I have never owned a camera and have left my wife to take all the cute kid pictures as they grew up.  They are printed out and put into albums to gather dust on the shelf.  We store nothing on the computer.  The same is true with our household records.  We store nothing on the computer that is not backed up by paper.  I use a program to do my tax returns, but we keep a folder by year of tax information.  I get electronic bank statements, but I meticulously balance my checkbook each month so that I have a paper record of transactions.  We shred paper documents on a regular basis so we do not keep too much paper.

I have addressed my personal history in three different ways.  I write eulogies for family members that have died or are close to death.  Therefore, my family will have my thoughts on my relationships with my parents and brother.  I have also prepared an album of family trees and pictures of ancestors for my children.  I have included any stories that I can document about any of these people.  Finally, I intend to write a short narrative of my life for my children so that they can understand the themes that I think are important about my life.

Although I came from a family of letter writers, I have preserved none of this correspondence.  When I cleaned out my parents house, I threw away the few things my mother had kept.  I believe this is personal correspondence, and I would not keep this without permission.  In our modern household, we diligently delete e-mails so that my wife and I generally have less that 20 easily accessible e-mails.  We print out business e-mails that we need to keep.

I am a firm believer that each person is in charge of how he/she wants to be remembered.  Mostly, that responsibility comes from the way we live every day.  But, our most inner feelings should be revealed only as we see fit.  Few people want their picture taken in their swin suits.  Similarly, I do not want people accessing my unfiltered thoughts from blog posts or e-mails.  Obviously, we live in a world of compromised privacy, but I avoid the electronic world as much as possible in today’s world.