What is SourceLab?
It seeks to equip undergraduate students students with the skills, tools and organizational support they need to create trustworthy, critical editions of materials that already exist on line and in the public domain. Through an internship program, participating students earn course credit toward their degrees–which helps them graduate–as well as author credits on the resulting publications, which they can add to their résumés. Most importantly, our alumni gain practical, transferable experience in helping the public solve one of the biggest problems facing history today: it's everywhere and nowhere all at once.
On the one hand, a source whose origin, nature, and evolution over time you don't understand is the very definition of a bad source. And you can't build good history from bad sources. You can't trust the judgments about the past you make from such artifacts, until you understand their own history better.
Yet as wonderful and prolific the new historical record being assembled by the Internet is, it seems almost fiendishly designed to produce just such 'bad' sources. Millions–billions?–of digitized artifacts occupy the no-man's land of our World War I film. Their initial digitalization has radically de-contextualized them, stripping them of any information about who made them, why, for what purpose, and how they have come to be preserved today.
In effect, the Internet has provided a solution to one traditional goal of historical publishing–getting people access to sources they need to understand the past–while sidestepping or even ignoring another: providing people with the context they need to understand these sources.
So in SourceLab, we're working on fixing this, figuring out innovative ways to prepare the Internet's riches for use by anyone interested in history, inside and outside the classroom.
