Historical preservation project announced!

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Hey all, I’ve got a new project. Here’s the idea:

There is a wealth of life experience out there. Many of us had to interview grandparents or other relatives in school on life as it was during past events. There must be millions of recordings and other accounts out there detailing firsthand accounts of history. Enter ‘Firsthand History’!

OK, so here’s the plan. I’m going to build a site that is basically like Flickr (Zooomr), but you will be able to choose from the following:
- browse by time (1944, 1960) and get firsthand accounts of life at that time
- browse by location (Honolulu, Hawaii; Groom Lake, Nevada) and get firsthand accounts from that locale
- browse by affiliation (NASA, First Infantry Division) and get a list of firsthand accounts for those organizations

I’m thinking of having the people supply the following information:
- audio upload (.mp3 only?) and/or full text transcriptyear being discussed
- location where this happenedtheir role during this storytheir name
- language of the story
- summary of story (limited to a certain amount – like 30 char)
- tag the entry (WWII, tank, Iwo+Jima, airfield, minefield) need to avoid dupes! no WW2, WWII, etc.!!

people would be able to search the database and do the following:
- see their results on a google map
- stream the audio to their desktops
- download the audio, and have the proper ID info embedded as to speaker, event, etc.
- be able to search by tag. So if you wanted to find a story about what it has historically been like for tank drivers, you could do so.

In fact, maybe I should base the entire searching system off of a tagging system? They would enter all of the above info in, but I would just keep record of everything in tags for search flexibility…?

examples of possible tag searches, which would result in a list of firsthand accounts of people who experienced the following:
- 1960, racism, united+states
- USS+Arizona, WWII
- NASA, Gemini
- Moscow, Stalin
- Titanic
- New+Orleans, flood, 2005

What do all of you think? Any other ideas? I’m going to do this, there is so much information that is a shame to lose from generation to generation!

I think it will be important to specify that I want people who were directly involved in the event…although I’m sure millions of people could give their accounts of the JFK assassination, the site would have to specify explicitly that I’m only looking for people who experienced it firsthand, i.e. ‘they were there’.

I think I might need some online tools as well, like for converting .wav to .mp3, splitting .mp3 into different files, etc. Anyone know how to do this? I’ll be on a server with PHP and MySQL, but I’m thinking JavaScript or something…

Comments (2) | March 16th, 2006

2 Responses to “Historical preservation project announced!”

  1. RL Says:
    March 16, 2006 at 7:06 pm

    Great concept! The only thing that you should be concerned about is the ability of the end user to be able to actually post video and audio. Then again you could just let the end user choose the format to upload. Most individuals will have a media player that will play it or you could just design the site to automaticaaly suggest a player for unique file format. For example, if its a .mov file then let the page suggest quicktime for its player and auto insert the hyperlink to the suggested player download site. Wav files could be a problem with file size but if you are really concerned about that, then add more storage space or create an instructions page to let the end user do the work.

  2. Dan Says:
    March 17, 2006 at 1:40 pm

    yes, I think the biggest problem is going to be storage space and bandwidth. I think both will be easily addressable, but I hate to put a cap on bandwidth to that server. Don’t think I’ll have a choice though…

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