Has This Every Happened to You? (A Problem You May Have Experienced, and a Potential Solution)
By the summer of 2015, over 71,000 people had watched it. The video appears to be haunting, archival footage–a documentary? a newsreel?–of work in a Parisian studio, circa 1918. But this is no ordinary studio. Instead of making busts of famous poets or rich patrons, the artists are sculpting new faces for soldiers gruesomely mutilated by World War I.
Art, politics, medicine, movies: this is the sort of source that brings the past alive in all its power and complexity. It's the kind of thing researchers would love to explore and teachers and students would love to use–indeed, already are using–in today's classrooms. But there's a catch.
Like millions of other new historical sources now available on the Internet, we don't know enough about this film to really use it in scholarship, teaching, or public history. Who made this source, when, why–and for what audience? Is this digital copy authentic, has it been edited? Where is the original now, who owns it–how can we use it or cite it? Will it be there tomorrow?
In the Fall of 2014, students, faculty and staff at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began to imagine a new digital publishing model for historical sources, so that
That's where SourceLab, a student-led digital publishing initiative established by the Department of History at Illinois, comes in. We make reliable, critical, free editions of web-based material, reclaiming the best the Internet has to offer for history teaching and research. More than that, we're building basic bibliographical and editorial skills–along with newer, digital publishing techniques–back into undergraduate education.
To learn more:
