Whether you were all the way across the country as I was or in the neighborhood, you have, no doubt, very strong feelings about the event and may want to memorialize it somehow. But reabsorbing the terrible images seems almost unwholesome to me, personally. Do it if you want, if you think it will benefit you, but watch out. An alternative might be Broadcastr's September 11 Memorial. Here you can bear witness, in person or via telephone and your testimony will become part of the historical record.

Kate Petty, Broadcastr's director of communications, described the project for us. It is a collaboration between Broadcastr (whose efforts to preserve 9/11 oral histories we've written about before), HISTORY (formerly the History Channel) and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

"We're inviting anyone to contribute a recorded story of what happened to them on 9/11, through a toll-free call-in line at 855-We-Remember, or at interactive kiosks installed at the 9/11 Memorial Visitor Center.

"All stories will be kept in the 9/11 Memorial's oral history archives. Select stories will be uploaded as MP3 files to Broadcastr, where they are accessible for free on the iPhone and Android apps, as well as on the Web."

The kiosks do not open until September 12, but the phone lines, though not promoted until tomorrow, are already receiving calls, 100 at last count.

"Everybody has a 9/11 story," Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Broadcastr told us. "We wanted to create a way that anybody, anywhere could share these memories with each other, and preserve them as part of the 9/11 Memorial archives."

Also, I'm not sure who I'm kidding about my comments at the top of this post. While writing this up, I have already listened to the testimonies of nurse Francine Kelly, NYPD officer David Brink and New York firefighter Mike Moran. ...

WTC memorial photo by Pingnews

If you are a fan of fashion, this is huge news. If you're not, it's huge news. History is more than big decisions made by bigwigs in big buildings. It's how we think, eat, buy, sing, move and dress. Vogue is, for better or worse, a prominent lens onto a substantial segment of our cultural mores. Not to mention, it helps to bring history alive when you can picture the details. Now there will be an archive of the sartorial side of those details.

"According to a reliable source, we've learned that this mysterious web property will be a digital archive. That means every single issue since the fashion bible launched in the 1890's will be available online."

We sent Vogue questions about the site, the archive and whether access will be free or paid, but they remained unanswered at the time of posting. If we receive a response, we will update.

Do you know this man? The folks at Lost Films hope that you do and that you can identify the name of the film from which the still was taken. Archivists know it's a German film, and they believe it was made in the 1930s. And they're asking for anyone with more information to help.

But this new project seeks to help identify and recover some of these films by using an online, crowdsourced platform where users can upload, tag, and comment on old stills and videos. The aptly named Lost Films contains a list of more than 3500 films it believes have been lost, and it's asking users to help provide more information.

The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Association and is a collaborative effort by film societies in several countries, including Germany, France, Poland, and New Zealand.

Anyone can join the site and can help identify the films they have in the archive or can upload clips and images from other "mystery" films as well.

Already 56 films have been found and 72 others have been identified.

"'Retrieved from the cloud,' the collection of approximately 40,000 emails dating from 2004 to the present," the Library said in a statement, "is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks."

This is not an email.

The acquisition cost the Library just under $53,000. They have wrapped it in a multimedia presentation, "as part of a wider programme of enhanced curatorial activities." This included a "panoramic digital photograph of Cope's study and an interview recorded on the day the material was collected, in which she reflects on her archive and the writing life it represents, will allow researchers to reconstruct a retrospective context for the physical and electronic records acquired, as well as recording for posterity the space which informed the creative process."

These sorts of issues - what to collect and how to contextualize the collections - have always been big in archival circles. The electronic elements are just another turning in archivists' relationship to the materials.

This is not the first time poet's emails have been collected, but it seems to be, by far, the largest such collection. As more media is used by poets to correspond, take notes, make drafts and float ideas, the collections will grow. Already, Twitter, blogs, social networks and searches are no doubt growing on the hard-drives, thumb-drives and clouds that surround contemporary poets.

You have to wonder though about the sense of poetic presence that a physical medium allows. When you see a poets marginalia in a book of, say, Dickinson poems, there is a sense of "I am where she was." Can that be communicated with electronic media?

Listen to Cope reading several of her poems, "Strugnel's Haikus," "Flowers," "The Christmas Life" and "On a Train."

Page image from the British Library | other sources: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.

In addition to making it financially feasible, letting the public take a hand in such a project has the benefit of bringing history close to the volunteer and turning that volunteer into an evangelist for the importance of history to contemporary life. Also, it gives the historians involved a sense, as the documents are transcribed, for what the public finds the most compelling.

The project is funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission of the National Archives and the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities.

Truman building photo from Wikimedia Commons

"We have millions and millions of pages of historically and culturally valuable magazines, newspapers and journals online. The challenge is that the optical character recognition often contains errors and omissions, which hamper for example searches," says Kai Ekholm, Director of the National Library of Finland. "Manual correction is needed to weed out these mistakes so that the texts become machine readable, enabling scholars and archivists to search the material for the information they need."

In 'Mole Hunt' (Myyräjahti), the player is shown two different words, and they must determine as quickly as possible if they are the same. This uncovers erroneous words in archived material. In 'Mole Bridge' (Myyräsilta), players have to spell correctly the words appearing on the screen. Correct answers help badgers build a bridge across a river. Again, the game helps verify the OCR and make sure that digitized materials are accurate and searchable.

"We wanted to set up 'Angry Birds for the Thinking Person' - something which entertains but is also useful to us as a nation," says Ekholm, who anticipates teachers and children will enjoy volunteering to help these digitization efforts. Additional phases of the project will be aimed at "more serious historical buffs."

As libraries and archives worldwide are moving to digitize their collections, they face many challenges - in terms of technology, funding, access, and planning. To date, four million pages of different types of texts from the 18th to 20th centuries have been digitized, but there still remain huge bulks of cultural heritage archived only in paper files. "Our archives are national cultural heritage," says Ekholm. "I am proud that even such a small nation as we are able to launch something like this."

The Roman ship, excavated in Tuscany's Bay of Baratti in the Eighties, contained a host of medical implements, including 136 boxwood vials and tin containers. One of the latter was recently found to contain pills and those pills were in tact, the metal having held the water off for over 20 centuries.

The Institute and its allied scientists were able to determine that every single ingredient had been referenced in the ancient texts as being medically useful. Their success was a direct result of the long process of digitization and sharing the Institute has pursed.

Although understanding our past is paramount to any archaeologist, it is not the sole goal of the Institute.

"Not only does this discovery validate ancient texts, but also it opens promising avenues for new scientific research and even innovative thinking in drug discovery."

Increasingly, new technology helps us understand our past and the past, in conjunction with new technologies, help us define our future.

Gulf photo from Smithsonian | other sources: AOL News

To the south and east, another technological experiment has risen, that one to commemorate the fait accompli of the Rwandan genocide. The Genocide Archive of Rwanda, hosted by the Kigali Genocide Memorial, will document the 100 days and 800,000 lives lost in the brutality of 1994.

Genocide Archive of Rwanda

Today, the Genocide Archive of Rwanda opened at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in that country. A technologically sophisticated collection of the facts and nightmares of that ethnic butchery, the GAR will make the murder of 85% of the Tutsi population the most documented instance of inhumanity in history.

The archive contains video, audio, photos, maps, documents and publications. They can be accessed via a number of different criteria or searched by keyword. (And do be warned. This shit is rugged to look at.) The most important materials are the records of the "gacaca" trials - the "peace and reconciliation" type confrontations of the perpetrators by the victims and the victims' families.

Although it looks like a large sampling of the materials are available online already, the complete archive is accessible on-site only, at the memorial building near which so many victims of the violence are buried. However, all of the materials will eventually be online and available to all.

Sudan Vote Monitor

Built on the Ushahidi platform, the Sudan Vote Monitor is a website to which witnesses can post updates via mobile.

"This technology could be particularly useful in Sudan where long distances and inadequate infrastructure pose a significant challenge. The spread of mobile communications throughout Sudan in recent years offers a unique and feasible opportunity to overcome this challenge. The proposed technology is the closest thing to a real-time observation of what is happening in an election center in a remote part of Sudan."

The SVM was built by Zein, an oil and gas man in Texas who was born in Sudan. In conjunction with his sister, a college professor, he runs the Sudan Institute for Research and Policy. The ability to help monitor the upcoming elections with the use of simple SMS messages may help keep the process honest and violence-free. At least it will document any deviations from that ideal.

Read about the use of mobile and web technologies during the last Kenyan election, the employment of e-readers in Ghana, the use of mapping tech to get inhabitants more services and other ReadWriteWeb coverage of Africa tech.

Other sources: Guardian

It may not be anymore, thanks to a startup called Nsyght. Nsyght has been around for a few years now, and it does a whole lot of things for and beyond Twitter, but the service's newest feature is what really moves the needle for me: The ability to filter and search the archives of the lists of people I'm following. I can see what Chris Grayson's Augmented Reality Peeps list has said about Google over the past few months, or what the members of the Enterprise Irregulars said about the much-tweeted #Workday analyst demo event earlier this week. Hello, useful!

The service isn't perfect, and founder Geoffrey McCaleb says it takes a few minutes after a user creates an account on it for his work-around of the Twitter API to archive a backlog of all your followed accounts.

It appears the archives are going back about two months right now, and it sure would be nice to see them go back further. Google's new Realtime search today went back to February of this year. Times prior to that may forever be known as the Dark Era, before anyone other than Twitter was caching the firehose so that it could be searched.

For a bootstrapping team that says it can't afford the price Twitter charges for its Firehose, this is pretty good. I was unsatisfied last night, but woke up in the morning feeling refreshed and ready to search the archives of the lists I was subscribed to. The system is far from perfect, but it's also far better than anything else I've found to fulfill this function. Thanks Nsyght!

Elena's Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration's day-to-day operations. It's hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency.

Full Text Search is a Start

Some of the emails are amusing, others enlightening, others still are both. This is a fun interface for looking through these texts, but the limitations are quickly evident as well. Full text search works well when it's your own email you're searching through, but when you don't know what language someone else uses to discuss certain topics, full text search feels inadequate. If a site like this incorporated collaborative user tagging of emails into topical buckets, that would make it all the more interesting. It would also be in character for the Sunlight Foundation.

It's interesting, for example, to read that the policy focus Kagan recommended the President consider regarding race and crime was "systematic underprotection of minorities (segregation of safety)." That does sound more politically palatable than focusing on inequities in sentencing.

As a public service, Elena's Inbox is quite helpful. As Kagan faces debate and questioning over her nomination, the site will offer a very easy way to see what she said about topics 10 years ago, and how she said it, while in a position of substantial political power. That's certainly a historically unprecedented degree of transparency around a Supreme Court nominee.

TechFlash reported this week that Classmates.com has an "ambitious plan" to digitize high-school yearbooks and offer them on the site.

In addition to yearbook scanning, the company plans on developing apps for both Facebook and the iPhone, as well as getting in on the business of class reunions.

Goldston told TechFlash that the company is looking at a "major reunions initiative that will allow us to be more involved in the planning and selling of tickets, travel-related revenues, and the creation of reunion-specific products and services that we can sell to our users."

We found ourselves wondering where exactly Classmates.com is going to get all of these yearbooks. Will schools have a collection and willingly hand them over to the site for use? Or will the have to pay some sort of royalty? Even more importantly, will they be scanning in clean, unadulterated copies of yearbooks or are we going to be able to see all the silly, dirty and downright mean things we all wrote when we were in high school?

We know that when many of us graduated high school, we weren't yet aware of the fact that everything we said and did could end up permanently enshrined on the Internet.

Perhaps our saving grace here is the fact that Classmates gets only a fraction of the traffic of Facebook or Myspace and is largely kept behind a pay wall.

The site is currently quite slow, thanks to some heavy demand right after launch, but we got a chance to test the site while it was still running smoothly. One nice aspect of the project's web site is that it was built with open standard and modern web development techniques in mind.

As these projects typically take years to come to fruition and have to conform to pretty stringent accessibility and long-term storage standards, their web sites often also look like they were developed five years ago. Here, however, the Codex Sinaiticus team did a good job at making the text accessible to the general public (with translations into German, Russian, and Greek), as well as students and scholars who need access to more detailed information and images taken under different lighting conditions.

As is also typical for these projects, however, there is no way for the public or other scholars to directly participate by fixing potential errors in the transcription or translation, for example.

Get More Info

The project website also has more information about how the book was digitized, and the philosophy behind the development of the site.