Dorset’s Digital Time Capsule launched
OVER THE YEARS the villagers of Drimpton have told many of their stories in a series of books. They have recounted their memories and shared their treasured photographs and documents.
Enthusiasts have delved into the more distant past by researching at the local archives and libraries, trawling through the paperwork stored there. In so doing we have given voices to our former neighbours, allowing them to step out of the shadows.
But we have come to realise how little these people actively left behind them, so leaving us many unanswerable questions. If only they had realised that we would be interested in them and their everyday lives all these years later.
Most of the core information we have on our 19th century villagers comes from the National Censuses. Every tenth year, beginning in 1801, everyone has been counted and it so happens that 2011 is another Census year; time for another mammoth collection of facts.
But we are more than a list of facts; facts do not give colour to our lives.
Unlike our Victorian villagers, we have so many more chances to document the realities of our lives and leave a record for the future.
Yet are we using them?
Paper is the stuff of archives, but today we are making fewer and fewer paper-based documents. Instead more and more of us live ‘digital’ lives. Many of us send emails, chat on social networking sites, text, twitter and blog. We are on our mobiles all the time. We photograph everything. We communicate all the time. But most of us treat what we send or receive like so much litter, and discard it at a click; never to be downloaded and stored away.
So Village Voices is inviting people in Dorset to consciously think about leaving something behind them in 2011 and so ‘speak to the future’. We have set up a website www.openarchive.org.uk which can be thought of as a Digital Time Capsule. It is currently an almost empty library or gallery. We are inviting anyone to contribute and so help fill its ‘shelves’ and cover its ‘walls’. You could put:
something you write
photographs & images
audio & video
anything that records current life no matter how small or important
anything that can be stored in a digital format.
At the end of 2011 the website will be closed and all the material passed for future archiving at Dorset History Centre.
We have the chance to create and pass on to the future a record of the present realities of life in Dorset. Let’s not miss it. We cannot predict what life will be like here 50 or 100 years from now, but we can be sure that the people will be living different lives. By making our ‘digital time capsule’ we can ‘show and tell’ our world to our future family members and neighbours, to people who we will never know.
WHAT CAN YOU SAY TO THE FUTURE?
Andrew Pastor is a member of Village Voices, the voluntary community group based in Drimpton, West Dorset. He is the author of the brilliant Who Were We?, reviewed here on Real West Dorset.