Internet drives Year of the Bay project
By Paul V. Oliva
An African American family poses next to their new 1956
Dodge overlooking Hunters Point shipyard. A Chinese girl drum corps stands next
to a captured Japanese sub in 1942 in San Francisco's Chinatown. Police drag a
man out of a Sausalito houseboat under a sign that reads, "Peace with
a lease!"
These people are all part of the history of San
Francisco Bay.
But who are they? How did they come to be photographed? And
what other photos, movies, sounds and stories of the bay can be unleashed from
the closets and computers of the hundreds of millions who have lived or visited
the basin that defines the Bay Area?
That is the great history experiment of 2013. It's called
the Year of the Bay project, and anyone can participate.
Historians and technology types are turning to crowdsourcing
to allow anyone connected to the Internet to add details to existing materials,
as well as upload their own stories and items. Everything can be geo-tagged to
a map location. And it's all collected via a single website accessed through www.yearofthebay.org.
Leading the charge
The project director is Jon
Christensen, who is also a historian at Stanford University's Center
for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
"2013 is the year of the bay," he said. "It's the 150th anniversary of the San Francisco port, there's the America's Cup, there's the new span of the Bay Bridge. We wanted to create a way for everyone to participate in celebrating and understanding the history of the bay ... to bring together the diverse history of people, and communities, and their relationship to the bay, all sharing their story."
Christensen's own bay story begins when he first crossed the
Bay Bridge as a young man coming to Stanford. He looked out over the natural
and built environment, and it "was an epiphany of the beauty of it."
He has swum in the bay, run along it, kayaked on it, driven and flown over it,
and spent hours gazing at it. The bay has never failed to deliver "ecstatic
moments" for him.
Yet assembling and bringing to life the countless stories
and experiences others have had presented a daunting challenge.
It's a new world for historians like Christensen with
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Historians have gone from a lack of
information and boxes of attic-style out-of-context material to a stunning
stream of online photographs and digital sources with contextual and geographic
data that an archivist would have spent decades to assemble.
That's why the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation decided to fund the project, with the
technology platform provided by a London-headquartered startup
called Historypin.
A crowdsourcing test
It is one of the first major experiments in the world using
crowdsourcing to create a socially, geographically and temporally accurate
historical archive of such an expansive topic.
Anthea
Hartig, executive director of the California
Historical Society, said she's excited too see what unknowns may surface as
part of the project. "We don't know yet what crowdsourcing
can do."
Traditional materials she can access are often not marked
with names of people or contextual details. Then there are the unknown things
hidden away in attics and memories. And then there is history continually
being made.
She particularly hopes people will provide context, where
different people have divergent views of the same point in time and space,
creating differences in "historical memory."
"The bay holds us. People will want to help us create a
history of the bay as it was - and as it should be," Hartig said.
"People will be surprised to learn hidden surprises, what was there, and
layer on top of what we do today."
At the same time, the Year of the Bay project aims to give
people a voice about the future via a more inclusive environmental history.
"We have some major choices to face about the future of
the bay," Christensen said. "Sea level rise, development and
conservation. ... Some developed areas face the prospect of heroic efforts to
protect property, or cede space to the bay. How do we do that? What will
people support?"
Much has already been contributed to the site from Hartig's
organization and other project partners, including the National
Archives, the Bancroft and the San Francisco Public libraries, Chinese
Historical Society of America Museum, FoundSF and The Chronicle.
A century's sweep of photos, video and story snippets are
arrayed like so many memories across Grandma's table and pinned to a map in
their respective locations around the bay and coast.
See an error? Suggest a correction. If you know people in a
photo, recall the event or have your own item, submit it.
You can also upload a collection of items, or create a
narrative tour that connects items by time, space or subject. Contributing is
as simple as creating a Google account or signing up with an existing one.
Interested in seeing things in person? Save the date for an
exhibition at the California Historical Society on April 7.
As Hartig says, you'll be "looking at history ... and
making history."
Paul Oliva is a sailor on San Francisco Bay. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com
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