| Documenting history in the digital age Marshall Poe, students create online memory bank BY ADRIENNE FRANK
Photo courtesy of Marshall Poe |
Last spring, students in Marshall Poe’s survey of Russian history came prepared to learn about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. But Poe had something else in mind. “I said, ‘For those of you who want to learn Russian history, I’ll have a separate class. And for those of you interested in something different, stay put,’” recalls Poe, a former Harvard professor who replaced friend Eric Lohr while the AU historian was on research leave last year. “Almost everyone stayed in their seats.” Poe, a writer and analyst for Atlantic Monthly, had been working on a piece about the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. He was intrigued by the site, which allows users to edit and update nearly 1 million entries, calling it “an inflection point in the history of the media.” “I was fascinated by it,” he explains. “I wanted to know how this forum could be used to leverage historical content.” That’s where the Russian history students came in. Originally, Poe tasked them with creating an online repository for Russian history—a database of essays from historians and memoirs from people who’d lived through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and other events. But that soon evolved into something much bigger and more inclusive. “We had a brainstorming session, like you would at a corporation,” Poe explains. “We knew we had this vessel for content, but what was the content going to be? We had a megaphone, but what were we going to shout?” The group “lit on the idea of memoirs” because it seemed like something that people would be willing to freely contribute. And with that, MemoryWiki was born. “Everybody has a story. Everybody, at some point, is a part of something historic, though they might not realize it until they get to the site. It could be anything from, ‘I was there when JFK was shot’ to ‘I was at the last Led Zeppelin concert,’” says Poe. “Imagine if we had a bunch of memoirs when the telephone was first introduced. Originally, telephones were kept in boxes, and no house would have more than one because they were considered [unsightly],” he explains. “It’s the same thing with iPods. People use them in a certain way now; who knows how people will use them in 50 years.” During the course of the semester, students built and marketed the site, and solicited content. The latter proved to be most challenging. People have this notion that if you just put up a site, people will flock to it. That was not the case,” laughs Poe. “You have to do a lot of initial footwork to convince people that this is something that’s trustworthy, it’s not a scam. That takes time, and that’s the way it should be.” Poe and his students did “lots of person-to-person public relations,” recruiting writers and scouring the Web for reputable blogs from which to pull content. “If you look at the first 100 memoirs, they’re all by our friends and family,” he says. They also contributed dozens of their own memories. Poe, for instance, wrote about playing basketball with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at the Harvard recreation center in the late ’80s. (“Barack had game, and he was even then a natural leader,” Poe writes of the “lanky forward.”) Despite its slow beginnings, word of MemoryWiki, which was launched in October 2005, is beginning to spread. The site currently boasts more than 500 memoirs, with new entries being posted almost daily. “Right now, it’s just a matter of gaining a certain reputation,” says Poe. “Then I think people will come in droves.” Because the site’s guidelines are vague—it accepts anything “that someone else might conceivably find interesting, now or in 500 years”—the content runs the gamut. Log on to www.memorywiki.org and you can read about a teenage girl’s first kiss or a soldier’s first combat experience in Iraq. And while there are dozens of heart-wrenching entries about 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the site also offers more light-hearted content. A Massachusetts woman recalls having her wisdom teeth removed on her 18th birthday—“Nothing says ‘Happy Birthday’ like oral surgery,” she muses—while another writer chronicles his American Idol audition. “[MemoryWiki] creates a forum for anyone to record their memories about any subject,” says George Walker, a senior in the School of International Service who helped create the site. “One of the advantages of the site over other wikis [Web sites that allow users to edit content] is that it allows for esoteric and seemingly unimportant material. But that’s just it—random stuff is always important to someone.” Submissions are posted in real time and there’s very little editing, though Poe says four-letter words are discouraged. “I’m amazed that people have been so well behaved,” he says. “We were anticipating vandalism, and people lying, and we’ve had none of that.” Poe is currently looking for institutional partners to help boost submissions. In August, MemoryWiki will partner with the city of Cleveland, acting as a “repository for all things Cleveland,” Poe says. “We’d like to partner with universities, government organizations, high schools, even Girl Scout troops,” he laughs. “No community is too small.” Eventually, he hopes MemoryWiki will go international, like its parent site, Wikipedia, which is available in more than 200 languages. “Americans don’t have a monopoly on history,” he says. Ian Roberts, a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs, chronicled MemoryWiki’s beginnings for the site. At first, he was most intrigued by the lack of tests and papers associated with the project; by semester’s end, however, Roberts realized he was a part of something special. “Whatever happens in the future,” writes Roberts, “I will forever remember being a part of the birth of MemoryWiki. After all, it’s hard to forget a semester in which your Russian history course turns into a mad scientist’s memory data bank [project]. “In time, I picture myself surfing the Web, coming upon a thriving MemoryWiki, and feeling pride that I was a part of its dawn. I helped start something huge.” |
