Future of history

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, Vol. 1 Reason and Common sense

People have always used the available medium and technologies to record and preserve their lives. Valuable projects such as PhillyHistory attempt to update the medium for preserving information to leverage the immense benefits of digital and networking technologies on the availability and organization of information. A recent Radar O'reilly post noted the location mapping, time stamp, and general categorization as an attempt to add structure to the information and provide context.

The phillyhistory.org project also demonstrates the value we humans place on the record of our existence. Scanning and tagging all of these pictures and moments from the archive is a significant and costly effort. Digitizing and networking these unique pictures from the archives of this historically significant city yields large benefits that continue over time.

Soon everyone will have a networked life story, whether they shape it themselves or if it is shaped solely by the world’s view of the individual. Consequently the Human Historical record will benefit and future historians will possess previously incomprehensible volumes of details about how people lived their daily lives and how they intersected. Revisionism will still exist but will be much more difficult to accomplish. The interpretation of history will be more substantial than the research, at least in terms of referencing primary sources.