And this guy is either blind or a propaganda agent, readers.
Wait until you get a load of this:
"Everyone's a historian now; How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate"
Stephen Mihm is a history professor at the University of Georgia and author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters" (Harvard, 2008).
UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of , say, [enter chosen event here], 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 [chosen event]
.... 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.
"When a historian writes about a particular period of American history, he has a few hundred pages to do so, and things inevitably get left out," says Daniel Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Projects that employ crowds of researchers and writers, he says, "allow for a wider array of details and perspectives that a single master narrative doesn't allow."
Is THIS GUY BLIND? He ever here of BLOGS?!?
So far, only a handful of professional historians have begun to exploit crowdsourcing, which remains a relatively crude tool for gathering and organizing knowledge. But as the power of crowds meets the practice of history, these online repositories represent a remarkable change not only in how historical materials are gathered and organized, but, perhaps most important, in how deeply and broadly the past can be understood.
BLOGS?
. . .
The closest thing to crowdsourcing that most people have encountered is Wikipedia....
Oh, that's what he uses as the top source?!
X!!! Didn't make our survey!!!
Read the blogs to find out what a shithole of censorship wiki is!!!
Beyond just asking online volunteers for help compiling and sorting information, a handful of historians have been asking: What if we used this approach to capture history as it happens?
Seriously, WHERE HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN?
Several years ago, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, George Mason University history professor Roy Rosenzweig set up a site where people could post photographs, videos, documents, e-mails, and recollections of that day and its aftermath.
The site, now known as the September 11 Digital Archive, was so successful that the Library of Congress selected it as its first significant "digital acquisition."
Translation: We have an OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA SITE SET UP (just wait for the kicker).
Rosenzweig died last year, but projects that he set up with his successor, Daniel Cohen, continue to set the standard for online archives. Their most recent success is the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, now a premier online archive of materials relating to Hurricane Katrina.
It's hard to know how historians will use these sites. Cohen believes that the sheer quantity of material has an importance unto itself: The Sept. 11 site was able to amass a quarter million private photographs relating to the tragedy of a single day. Cohen believes that this granularity has its advantages. "There's a quality that comes with the quantity," he says.
. . .
Absent a watchful librarian or archivist, it's natural to wonder about the reliability of the information posted by the crowd.
As opposed to what?
"Official" sources and their LYING and COMPLICIT ENABLERS in the MSM?!
In the case of the 9/11 archive, for example, Cohen recalls that a handful of photos posted to the site had been digitally doctored. After some debate, he decided to keep them in the collection. "Just because it's digital doesn't mean you check your brain at the door," he says. "Plus, there are lies, forgeries, and false things in regular paper archives."
Oh, yeah, YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!!!
EVERYTHING they told me in the history classes was a bunch of GD LIES!!!!!!!!!!
But what of crowds and the actual interpretation of history? How do we know that the people contributing things know what they're talking about?
This coming from a NEWS SOURCE that LIED US INTO WARS, huh?
Yeah, can the BLOGS be TRUSTED, right?
.... Cohen sees the potential for partnerships between the lone professional historian and crowds of helpers, particularly as the quantity of historical material increases. It's possible, for example, for a historian of Colonial America to read every document written by the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (though such a task would still be time-consuming). It's altogether another thing for a historian of modern America to tackle the vast output of the Bush White House. "One person can't read it," explains Cohen, "but a hundred or thousand could read individual documents and tag them with keywords."
Considering the focus of the piece is supposed to be the Internet, you would have thought these guys would have CHECKED OUT SOME BLOGS!!!!!!
Because THAT is WHAT THEY ARE DESCRIBING!!
I, for one, American, am TIRED of the INSULTS from the SHITSTINK ELITE!!!
Especially after that INDOCTRINATION I PAID FOR is worth SHIT!!!!
Though Cohen welcomes what he terms a "multiplicity" of historical perspectives, he still thinks that there will always be a place for the individual historian in weaving all those disparate strands into a coherent narrative.
"Having the crowd on your side is a good thing at certain stages of the research and publication process," says Cohen. "But at other times, historians will still want to be by themselves, sitting at their computer screen, using their own words to knit things together and make sense of the past."
Yeah, guys like ZELIKOW!!!!!!!
"In researching the Bush administration’s manipulation of public perceptions, I came across an interesting summary of the State Department’s Philip Zelikow, who was Executive Director on the 9-11 Commission, that greatest of all charades. According to Wikipedia:
"Prof. Zelikow’s area of academic expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, 'public myths’ or 'public presumptions’ which he defines as 'beliefs (1) thought to be true ( although not necessarily known with certainty) and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.’ In his academic work and elsewhere he has taken a special interest in what he has called 'searing’ or 'molding’ events (that) take on transcendent’ importance and therefore retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene….He has noted that 'a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make the connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all." ("Thinking about Political History" Miller center Report, winter 1999, p 5-7)
Isn’t that the same as saying there is neither history nor truth; that what is really important is the manipulation of epochal events so they serve the interests of society’s managers? Thus, it follows that if the government can create their own "galvanizing events", then they can write history any way they choose.
If that’s the case, then perhaps the entire war on terror is cut from whole cloth; a garish public relations maneuver devoid of meaning."
In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored (with the former head of the CIA) an article entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism" in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded 'the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_D._Zelikow )
That was written in 1998!?!
Amazing. It is almost like Zelikow knew what was going to happen on 9-11 and was drawing attention to the "draconian measures" (scaling back civil liberties) which may seem attractive to ruling elites in the policy establishment.
Now, (coincidentally) everything has evolved almost exactly as Zelikow predicted. Just like Pearl Harbor, 9-11 has "divided our past and future into a before and after". The post-9-11 world relates to a world in which personal liberty is no longer protected, and where surveillance, detention and the use of deadly force are all permitted. It is a world in which "America’s fundamental sense of security" has been shattered and will continue to be shattered as a way of managing public opinion.
As Zelikow presciently implies, the post 9-11 world depends entirely on "public myths"; fairy tales invented by society’s supervisors which perpetuate the illusion of democracy, freedom and the rule of law."
Isn't that the DEVIL'S PISS? A guy who specializes in creating cultural myths WROTE the "official" version of the 9/11 attacks? Do you STILL believe, reader?"
