Archiving the Distributed Story: I Have No Idea

Posted on | June 26, 2009 | View Comments

My buddy Glenn Platt, a professor and program director at Miami (OH) University, and I were chatting the other day about distributed stories.

I feel confident that I know what a distributed story is, how you build a network to tell those stories and some tools you might use that don’t seem obvious.

More importantly, he asked me what would a distributed story look like. Having spent a year thinking about it, writing about and fleshing out my idea for it, answering it was no problem. Until the part about archiving.

Actually, this question has dogged me for about a week. I was chatting with Mary Jean, an English professor at Miami, Sophia, a PhD student from Colorado and some folks in Liverpool about this. Everybody expressed the same thought when I got to archiving: but how do you store that?

And the answer is, I don’t know.

Here’s the issue as I see it. If you’re creating a centralized feed, pulling in all this information from disparate sources, if you’re giving people tools to create their own feeds (and communities), if you’re writing stories and other pieces where you fill in gaps that you see, writing perspective and providing ongoing entry points into the stream — how in the holy hell do you store that in a way that can be accessed.

Let me explain.

The events in Iran are important now for two reasons: what is happening at this moment and because you can draw a line to the 1979 revolution that led us here. The two aren’t connected per se; however, they are connected historically.

And we know they are connected historically because we can access that information — that historical information — in a relatively easy manner.

I am not entirely sure how you archive materials from so many places — from a stream — in such a way that you can access it in the future. I know you can. I know it has to be done.

But that is the whole in my thinking at the moment.

How do you collect these, tag these, store these in such a way that interactive texts of the future, that historians looking back upon this time, that students a year from now can easily get to this information.

Glenn and I are going to work on this. I’m sure there are others doing the same.

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