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Crowdsourcing memories: The World Memory Project tells Holocaust story digitally

By Alan W. Silberberg

May 24, 2011 / 4:01 PM EDT / CBS News

People line up for the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum AP

(CBS/What's Trending) - The word memory evokes different things for many of us. In the digital age, memory has a double meaning, sometimes even more. There is cultural memory, and there is institutional memory. Then there's the collective global memory of humanity. Technology has infused us with ways to absorb more information, which in turn creates new avenues of memories and imbues old memories with new context. What if your memories were missing? Maybe even stolen from you by some horrific event of the past, like the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution against the Jewish people?

Older generations can now join younger generations in utilizing the latest technology to keep the time honored tradition of storytelling as a basis for the collective history of humankind. This is a unique time in that the technology exists to help capture and expand on the stories that every generation can tell. Digital stories capture and online archiving stand to create and allow a reflective contextual and factual history against some of the internet falsehoods.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has created a public/private partnership with Ancestry.com to create the World Memory Project. This is a historic, one-of-a-kind crowd-sourced website that allows people to search vital documents from World War II with an eye towards restoring names and stories to those whose identities were nearly silenced by a force that nearly succeeded in making them disappear completely from history. Now through crowd-sourced technology and human involvement in the story telling process, some of those identities and stories will be brought back into our history.

The World Memory Project combines high technology and the human experience together in a bid to restore context and missing information to history. It is a fascinating example of what can be done through public/private partnerships between governmental organizations like the USHMM and private companies like Ancestry.com by allowing people to both search and add stories, context and personal histories to complete the full picture of this time period and the dramatic loss and suffering of millions. It allows for the creation of a semantic and multilevel contextual field of understanding. It allows people whose names have been silent for so long to be reunited with the collective global memory of humanity.

While there are many resources about the Holocaust online, there is also an ongoing wave of propaganda from those who wish to deny the Holocaust and effectively rewrite history. As a result, the timing of the launch of this website from the USHMM could not be better. An unintended consequence of such a crowd-sourced website will be a way for historians to accurately use these tools to debunk falsehoods, historical mis-statements and conspiracy theories more easily. As we rush headlong into a society where our collective memory is immersed in the digital pool, it becomes ever more critical for the truth to be told and to be recognized as the truth.

Co-written by Julianne Shinto, CEO of Imprimatur Alan is the CEO of Silberberg Innovations and founder of Gov20LA and a Principal Analyst with Constellation Research Group. He blogs once a week for What's Trending about politics online. Learn more about him here.