Crowd-sourced memory: BBC Domesday Reloaded vs Flickr

It is very hard not to like BBC Domesday Reloaded, which launched online earlier this month; it's the BBC's project to resuscitate the content buried in the legacy technologies used by the 1985 Domesday Project to capture a snapshot of British life for the benefit of future generations.

Everything about it conspires to make you feel warm inside: the BBC Micro, a collective public effort, the world when I was 25 years younger, the special nostalgia of technological lost causes (although to be fair I should point out that the original Domesday Project was apparently an early pioneer in demonstrating the potential of optical data storage) and of course the dedication of all of those who have kept the flickering flame of the project alive since then. Perhaps most admirable of all is the feeling that the visionaries behind the Domesday Project were straining at the limit of available technology and demonstrating a powerful set of problems that needed the invention of the Worldwide Web for their solution. It was as if they had dreamed of Wikipedia and Google Maps and woken up and set about trying to invent them from the ground up with contemporary tools. Too often it feels as though causation has flowed in the other direction. Things happen on the Internet just because they can.

Domesday Reloaded particularly piqued my interest because I have been increasingly preoccupied recently with questions of preserving personal content and data from the past. This is a professional interest - Unthinkable still has a project on the back burner to develop a prototype of our so-called 'Digital Scrapbook'. But that professional interest is driven by a more fundamental personal one, namely the question of how technology can play a part in enriching and extending my relationship with my family's past and future. This has led me into dusty boxes of old family photos and slides, and spending more time than I probably ought to following and documenting online leads on my genealogy. We certainly think there are some fascinating problems to solve here, at both personal and societal levels.

So how does the reality of Domesday Reloaded live up to all the inspiring stories and ideas around and behind it? I started by having a look at the places in Edinburgh where I lived and went to school in 1985. Then I looked for where I live now, and then more generally started poking around at London, my home on and off since shortly after the original content was generated. The results were a little underwhelming - the actual localities of personal interest to me were often missing, and where there was content there was surprisingly little. It was also frustrating not to have more serendipitous options to browse (tags in particular would have been nice).

On a whim I headed off to Flickr, and framed a few advanced searches (interesting photos tagged with Edinburgh and 1985, or with London and 1985, or Edinburgh and 1975 etc). On first inspection, a far richer photographic archive is available on Flickr than Domesday Reloaded, with more and better structured metadata to help contextualise it and move through it. Of course the data is also messier, with false positives, and vast hard-to-navigate clumps (there are a lot of car nuts out there). And a lot of the photos are tourist snaps by North Americans rather than British people documenting their own places. 

Yet it's very interesting is to compare two kinds of crowdsourcing. On the one hand there's the Domesday Project: analogue, clean, in the past looking at its present and curated and managed (because it had to be) by a whole interlocking system of authorities - from the BBC down through schools, Women's Institutes etc. On the other there's Flickr: digital, messy, in the present looking at its past, and crowd-curated (or folksonomic, if you will). 

What can we learn from the comparison?

1. It's not nearly too late to construct compelling and even comprehensive archives of the recent past.
2. Emergent structure and metadata are enormously powerful in improving the signal to noise ratio of digital content. (Most of the messy problems described above can and will be solved by better tagging and different filters.)
3. A more controversial idea: is people's intrinsic interest in their own world, combined with clever, flexible and commercial content-neutral platforms, a stronger mobiliser of collective effort than the expensive interventions of cultural institutions?

None of this is intended as a criticism of the Domesday Reloaded project, which remains in my mind a noble and worthwhile undertaking. The producers of the project would certainly seem to have made the best possible use of the resources to hand. (Though I make an exception for the rather web 1.0 approach that's being taken to adding new content from 2011, in the light of the above observations.) And the text content of the original project feels weirdly more unique and relevant than the pictures.

But broadly, if the content of the Domesday Project seems less inspiring than it should, it is maybe for an encouraging reason - that the web has got me used to better emerging digital solutions to the problem of collective remembering.