Holding Onto History In The Digital Age

Remember the Boston Tea Party? You probably learned about it in fifth grade, and again in your high school social studies class. I wasn’t there - and unless you’re 235 years old, you weren’t either … but I don’t think either of us would dispute that something momentous happened in the Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, and probably involving tea.

There are paintings and etchings of British ships under siege, handwritten accounts, newspaper articles, a yellowed leaflet calling for participants – tangible bits of evidence that are preserved in museums and libraries, some accessible to the public, others under lock and key. These documents are part of the corpus of information we call “history”. But the way we document life’s big events – births, deaths, wars, presidential inugurations – has utterly transformed in the historical blink of an eye. And how we preserve these digital images, cell phone videos, MP3s and blog posts and safeguard their authenticity for future generations is - to quote a recent New York Times article – “one of the most vexing engineering challenges.”

Dr. Batya Friedman is a professor at the University of Washington’s information school and is part of a team trying to crack this techno-conundrum. She joins us to talk about her work.