Human Archive Project
The History of the Future
The Human Archive is a definitive and complete compilation of primary source material related to the events of today. It is organised and deisgned by professional historians. It is an open-source, not-for-profit project.
Motivation
The web gives historians the tools to access primary accounts of historical events with unprecedented breadth and depth. However, using such primary sources is more difficult than it should be. Such a mass of information creates embarrassment of riches. In addition, there are inherent biases in the information available on the web. Some of these biases can be minimised or removed with careful orchestration and design of data collection, based on sound historiographic principles.
The Idea
Future historians will thank us for the organisation of human experience in a meaningful and useful way. By marrying statistics and technology with history, more balanced and complete data sets can be collected and archived for posterity.
How we plan to do that is through a social platform, focused around historical projects. Users comprise professional historians, students, hobbyists and the interested. A project is created with particular goals in mind. Media (sound, video or text) are added to the project database following the guidelines set by the project creator. Guidelines could be as loose as “please tell us about…” to a detailed script of questions on a topic or event.
Make it happen
Inkstone is looking for people to work with to make The Human Archive a reality. If you are interested, get in touch. We need the following:
- Professional and academic historians to advise and help design a system that will ensure the best possible data is collected;
- Programmers and web-designers who can join in with the design and development of the Archive platform;
- Interested parties to assist in spreading the word, generating content and in whatever way they choose to lend a hand.