Susannah Belcher has a Doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford

The idea of an archive can seem like a throwback, conjuring images of rooms filled with dusty papers and elderly librarians asking visitors to be quiet. However archiving is changing very fast as a result of our lives migrating online. If 1000memories has anything to do with it, it is about to change even faster.

Jeremy Leighton John, Chief Curator of the British Library’s eMSS collection recently gave an extremely interesting talk about how digital artifacts are being integrated into archival collections, leading to intriguing new insight into the working methods and personalities of distinguished individuals. Take the playwright Harold Pinter’s e-mails, which Jeremy Leighton John was kind enough to share in the talk. Over 40,000 e-mails have been analysed by the British Library, and one of the major findings is that almost half of those were Harold Pinter e-mailing things to himself from different accounts. Who hasn’t had the experience of forwarding e-mails from old addresses or sending critical documents to yourself in order to back them up?

It’s exciting to think through how these artifacts could transform historical study, just as the collection of color footage of the second world war allowed us to understand those events on a more direct level. Just as there are few historical moments captured in color, similarly there are few opportunities to hear voices from history. While Florence Nightingale can (just about!) be heard here speaking in 1890 via the Edison phonograph, the first practical sound recording and reproduction device invented in 1877, for most of recorded history it wasn’t yet possible to preserve audio testimony. Nowadays it can be done on your phone.

Modern technology is allowing us to preserve fragments and moments of our lives in entirely new ways. Information recorded directly by a historical figure, without being recalled or filtered through others, can reveal an enormous amount about an individual. A longstanding example might be impressions and thoughts committed to a private diary, while a new one might be photographs of someone’s work space, as recently collected by the British Library for people like the poet Ted Hughes. These types of records provide a direct connection, allowing us to see and understand someone more clearly. This is just one more reason it’s so amazing to listen to Sandra Roe’s loving Valentine’s Day voicemail for her son on the 1000memories page set up to commemorate her life.

Whereas in the past we might have built our view of an individual from their written work, the impressions of others, or items like surviving letters or household objects, now we’re also able to capture truly impressive quantities of e-mail correspondence, record video interviews with a specific view to historical legacy and use photographic and audio evidence in volumes never previously thought possible. At the same time the barriers to manipulating, searching and storing such evidence are falling. Even better the list is expanding as quickly as technology advances our perspective on the possible - soon we may have video testimony in 3D, while it’s possible to record a person’s day to day movements via their smartphone signal. Apps have the potential to reveal an enormous amount about personal preferences and habits, while cloud computing applications are automatically preserving the creative process of drafting, redrafting and editing a poem, short story or even this blog post. At 1000Memories we’re seeing the evolution of some of these new ways of remembering in real time. A powerful example of just one of the moving and creative ways in which our users are remembering their loved ones comes from Sujal Parikh’s page, where his friend Adam Smith has uploaded an AOL instant messenger rap battle. It preserves a light hearted conversation about rap rhymes, allowing Sujal to speak on, preserving his own voice forever.

These memories allow us to understand and remember a person as fully as they lived. The British Library anticipate only being able to continue their amazing work of proactively gathering digital remains for a select few famous individuals. 1000Memories offers the possibility that technology will allow all of us to contribute to history by creating digital archives for everyone, whether or not they’re famous, whether or not they’re British, and whether or not they’re recorded in color.