"Collecting Experiences" Exercise

The assignment is to write a proposal for a project that would collect peoples' memories similar to the websites created by researchers at the Centre for History and New Media , such as the Memory Archive and the Hurricane Katrina website. All of them are dedicated to collecting the personal stories of particular events, places, or activities.

Just for fun, and to see if I can do it, I am writing all of this in HTML.

As I have a personal interest in oral cultures, I would suggest creating a website for the collection of Aboriginal myths, legends, personal stories, all in the language of their people. There are several archives all around the world that have contained within their vaults, recordings of oral interviews with Native peoples over the past 150 years. A communal sharing space of oral tales and testimonies would give voice to a threatened culture, as well as an opprtunity for people to relate and share their family histories, personal tales, and outlook. Oral history, after all, is still history, and new methods of preservation need to be considered just as they are for textual records.

I applaud CHNM's efforts in trying to capture the memory of the people involved in historic events. It is a voice, a reservoir of memory. We may have had to give up the bards of old to change for the future, but the role of collective memory in a society need not be sacrificed. By creating a space for the oral tales of Aboriginals, we can ensure the survival of their culture and their language, though it may be in a medium far from traditional. This does not mean that we don't need the storytellers and the bards, we will always need the human element, but this could be an excellent backup drive.