A decade and a half ago, when I was learning to be a "historian" at Radford University I took a class called Hist 295. Dr. Ferrari who did her best to show me how to use libraries, court house documents and other repositories to find the crucial and raw primary material that makes history work. Yet, I remember what she really emphasized was the need to find those personal documents, the letters or diaries, the notes in the margin of a book read long ago. That was the fodder that makes history alive, personal and real.
Last night while walking the dog around the frog ponds I had what I am sure is not a new Epiphany. In this digital world, where or how will the historians putting together the lives of Americans mine to construct that personal and private world. Where do we deposit our tweets, wall posts, emails, texts and the other dimensions of our lives to that others may glimpse into our world when we are gone? I can remember writing long and dramatic emails to friends during the whirlwind of love when I was a young man. How and where would I attempt to find those now. More importantly how would the historian of the future find them without the passwords and permissions required in this digital world?
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