History Matters, along with the National Trust and a bunch of other UK organizations have put together ‘One Day in History’.
The idea is simple: on October 17th you log on to the History Matters Website and upload your ‘blog’ diary of that day. These mass entries will then be collated and kept as a permanent record in the British Library of a snap-shot of an ordinary day in the UK in 2006. Why Tuesday October 17th? For no reason. It is ‘a day of no particular significance’. Why do it? Because history matters. And this is one way in which the distributed nature of the web can be harnessed, and it’s temporal nature bypassed. These ‘Mass Observations’ have been collected in the UK since 1937 (and are currently archived at the University of Surrey) , but this is a unique way of taking them to a totally new dimension.
Pepys will be rejoicing…
Sign up now.
Technorati Tags: History Matters, London, Pepys
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3 responses to “One Day in History | “A Day of No Particular Significance””
‘No particular significance?’ October 17th is the World Day to Overcome Extreme Poverty, first commemorated in 1987 and officially recognised by the United Nations in 1992. Our Church Action on Poverty group are planning an event to mark it. So no surprises for predicting what I’ll be blogging about….
i like that idea. the concept of capturing a moment in time from many different voices
I enjoyed reading your post about One Day in History post. You managed to capture the essence of what the National Archives were trying to do with the History Matters campaign which is why I’d like to invite you to take a look at a new website called “Map My London” which has just been launched by The Museum of London: (www.mapmylondon.com).
Map My London hopes to change the way the history of the city is gathered and displayed. It would be great if you could take a look at the site and see if you would be interested in getting involved with uploading your impressions and memories of the London, to help us create an emotional memory bank for people to use for years to come.
You will be able to upload your experiences about the city onto the Map My London site under headings including “Love and Loss”, “Beauty and Horror” and “Fate and Coincidence”. The site will support contributions in the form of text, digital photographs, video clips and sound recordings and the best thing is that you will be able to have a link directly to your own personal map to put onto your blog.
If this is something that you think that you’d like to get involved with, please visit http://www.mapmylondon.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the website.
Well done on the cool blog – I’ve got it bookmarked, so you might see some more comments from me in the future 😉
Kind regards
Rax, Museum of London