Creation of MemoryArchive, September 1, 2005, by Ian Roberts
From MemoryArchive
Who: Ian Roberts What: The Creation of MemoryArchive When: 9/1/2005 Where: American University, Washington, DC
The events depicted herein are merely the subjective memories of the subjective experiences and perceptions of the author.
It can be hard to determine whether or not you are experiencing something historic. This is particularly true when you’ve never been a part of anything that can be called monumentally historic. In the moment, it’s nothing more than the present; a mundane part of life that must be briefly tolerated in order to (hopefully) move on to the historic moment you’re really looking for. The birth of what would become the MemoryArchive, the first online bank of all sorts of memoirs, was precisely that. Little known to me, or most of the people in the room I think, was that we were embarking on a project whose scope would go beyond what any of us could have imagined at that moment.
Being a history minor, I decided it was finally time, at the beginning of my sophomore year, to take a history class. The class was officially called “Russian Studies: Contemporary and Historical Views.” As was my understanding, the class was of a revolving topic based in Russian History. The description on this particular topic had been rather vague itself, so I didn’t have a real good idea what I was getting into. However, I needed a history class and Russian history in particular had always interested me, so I decided to take the chance.
I arrived to class a few minutes early, as I try to do on the first day of class, just to make sure I’m in the right place. I wasn’t the first to arrive, but there were still plenty to come. As I sat there and more people filed in, nothing especially noteworthy passed through my mind. There were no vibes in the atmosphere to tell me that something would spark in that room on that night. There was just…nothing. Everything was absolutely ordinary.
Just as my watch hit 8:10, the scheduled start time, the professor walked in. How could I tell he was the professor? They just always have that professorial aura around them; nothing unusual there. I was soon to find out his name was Marshall Poe, an occasional academic and contributor to the Atlantic Monthly. As I would gather later that night and in class periods to come, he had a wealth of knowledge on a number of topics, but Russian history seemed to be his main focus. He had written at least one book on the subject, and had taught classes on it before. So, as far as I was concerned, he was qualified to teach us the topic. But, that wasn’t his intent.
His introduction to this idea was a bit long and convoluted, as he had a tendency to rant on other subjects here and there. Over the course of the next hour or so, he went on about how he was not particularly interested in teaching Russian history; how it had a tendency to seem to him, and I’m paraphrasing here, mundane. The way he explained it, it seemed as if doing so almost would have been a chore to him. This surprised me; I had figured that his area of expertise would have engaging for him. Maybe it was the prospect of teaching a bunch of half-sleeping students who needed to fill requirements that turned him off. Whatever the case, he wasn’t interested in doing the usual lecture class. He had another idea.
The part of the pitch that really appealed to me was something to the effect of “no books, no lectures, no papers, and no notes.” I may have been interested in Russian history, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to sitting through 3 hours of class every week, taking notes so that I could write papers and cram the night before the final. I liked Poe’s idea already. I think that from this point he could have said most anything and I would have been on board. As the introduction went on through long (albeit mostly funny) anecdotes, he ended the suspense and finally got around to precisely what it was he wanted to do. He wanted to put together on online bank of Russian history; more specifically, a database revolving mostly around essays and memoirs from historians specializing in Russian Studies. In addition to these professional essays would be personal memoirs, submitted Wikipedia-style (that is, anyone anywhere in the world could submit whatever they wanted to our site), from people who had actually lived through some of the big events in recent Russian history; Stalin’s purges, WWII, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. Rather than simply tell us important named and dates, he would have us collect memoirs from people who had lived it and experts who had studied the subject relentlessly, as he apparently had. Through this process, we would learn Russian history, but I think more importantly to him, we would help establish something completely original and historic: a full online database of primary sources on Russian history.
At this point, while I was intrigued with the idea, I was still slightly apprehensive. He knew well that such an idea had the chance of being a little upsetting to the powers that be at the university. Worst-case scenario: they would catch word of our little project, shut the thing down, fire Poe and not give us our history credits. After all, what we were embarking upon was tough to sell as a history class, at least in the way the school was likely to think of it. While this particular scenario was admittedly a little far-fetched, the possibility of upsetting the university was strong enough that they concerned a few members of this class. A few people raised their concerns regarding the school’s role, how the class would be graded, how we would go about this, and what the hell exactly it was we were doing. Poe recognized our concerns and answered them rather expediently, reassuring most of us that we would still be graded upon performance, as in ordinary classes, and that he would guide us through the process of creating the database. The school be damned, we were doing something historic. But few seemed entirely convinced and the idea went to a vote. When asked who was in favor, a few tentative hands, including mine, went up. They came slowly, but they went up, little by little the affirmative vote grew until it comprised the vast majority. A handful remained unsure, but they said they were willing to give it a shot for the time being and would decide after the first week whether or not they wanted to drop it. So the decision was made. MemoryArchive, as it would soon come to be known, was born…even if very uncertainly.
Following the vote, Poe said that we could take a brief break, after which we would come back and discuss group assignments and how we would go about the project. After returning from the break, I saw that a handful of people, mostly people who had voted against the idea, had left, never to return. Over the next week or so, more would leave for various reasons.
When the entire class (or, what was left of it) returned, Poe explained that the workload would be divided into groups. Among others would be an IT group, to set up the site; a marketing group, to get the word out; and a “Content Group,” responsible for the content that goes on the site and marinating that content. It was this latter group that interested me most. At the time when the site was still dedicated to exclusively Russian history, this would have been a good outlet for me to still satisfy my Russian desire for history and still participate in what we were doing. As it turned out, there were a number of other people who were thinking along the same lines as me. All in all, we ended up with the largest group in the class; some 8 people, which over the next week would whittle down to 5 as more and more people left the class.
The Content Group was commissioned to brainstorm how the site should be set up and what should be put on it. Later that week, the majority of the group (those who could make it) met to discuss the undertaking. The assignment was, admittedly, somewhat daunting. Not only were we doing something that was completely original and thus had little in the way of reference; but the assignment itself was also kind of vague. All we had to go on was “set up a layout for the site and decide what will go on it,” or something roughly similar to that. So the Content Group sat around a few days before the next class and started throwing out every idea we had come up with over the previous few days. And despite the odds against us, we laid down, what we thought, were some pretty good ideas. The basic scheme we originally had in mind was that the site would be divided into two general categories, a Russian history database and a memoir bank. Granted, this had been what was discussed in class, but we were the ones who chose to strictly separate the two. The first category was pretty self-explanatory; it would be a catalog of people and events in Russian history which could be added on to by anyone, ala the Wikipedia method. At the time we hoped it would be frequented by Russian historians, who would have ample knowledge to supply to the site. But in general the database would be open for anyone to submit to.
The second part was a little more complex. The memoir bank would be a place for people who had seen these events, or at least the most recent ones, to submit their memories and experiences of having lived these events first hand. In addition, we would have, under this section, a kind of message board, onto which anyone (historians, first-hand accountants, civilians, etc.) could post their opinions and thoughts on historical events and discuss them with one another. In this way we hoped to add a third dimension to the process of understanding Russian history: interaction with it. Not only could a user, with little no knowledge of an event, read about the event from an objective point of view and then read a first hand account of it, but they could partake in a discussion of said event and hopefully gain yet more understanding of the event.
So we took this idea of a two-part and three-pronged history set and ran with it. We took it to the next class and presented it to Poe. And in devastating fashion, he shot it down. It seems that over the previous week, while we had been planning our own version of the site, inspiration had struck him yet again. This wouldn’t be just a Russian history database. It would be a straight memoir bank, for all peoples and all history. In fact, the Russia element had been dropped completely. Rather than limit ourselves to memories and information on Russian topics, it would encompass all peoples all over the globe. And rather than bother with supplying a database of objective historical information, which had suddenly become a much bigger task, it would focus strictly on the memoirs. So as good as our ideas may have been, they were now mostly moot. Our job from here on out would be to monitor the incoming memoirs for content, significance, and general structural stuff. After all, we had make sure the content being put up wasn’t total garbage. In addition to this change came an interesting change in the class overall. Our former Russian Studies class now had nothing in particular to do with Russia. While it raised my apprehensions once again, it was brief. By the end of the next week, I had fully squared myself with not studying what we told we would be. And the school be damned; what were they really going to do at this point, especially if what we were starting really was going to be big?
So in the next week the Content Group, by now whittled down to the 5 members which would remain for the rest of the semester, went back to the drawing board. For this week we had been assigned to draw up categories for the memoirs which would soon occupy the site. By this time, a (very rough) MemoryArchive had already been put on the web by the IT group. So the job was made a little easier, actually being able to visualize what it was we were doing.
We had been instructed to start out general and try to get a little more specific. For example, make categories based on “Events,” or “Places,” and then narrow it down from there. So we did just that. We laid out general categories for “Events,” “People,” “Places,” “Things,” and “Eras/Year.” Then, each received its own subcategories. For example, under “Events,” we placed things like “politics,” “natural disasters,” and “sports.” Under “People,” (a category we envisioned being dedicated to run-ins with the rich and famous) we put types of people like “celebrities,” “social leaders,” and “politicians.” And thus it was for each category. Once again, the Content Group found itself putting together some pretty good work. But also once again, we were to find out we would be wrong.
It seems, according to Poe, we had gotten a little too detail-oriented. He explained that the way we were putting things together would be such that we could have very well kept dividing the larger categories into smaller subcategories ad infinitum. In retrospect, he was right; there were myriad subcategories we could have come up with that would have kept us busy for far longer than we had time for. And even assuming we could have gotten all the necessary categories, the site would have been so convoluted with categories, that no one would have been able to navigate it. It would have been a complete mess. Poe suggested that rather than outline specific subcategories, we just leave it open. He had found a way for people to title their entries in such a way that they would categorize themselves instantly, thereby leaving the site with only so many categories as it had memoirs for. This would be set up mostly by the IT Group, so we would be set up with another task. And once again, the Content Group would find out that all the work we had put so much time into and had been so proud off was for naught. But on the plus side, things were starting to come together, even if it had to be through trial and error.
Just to explain how the sub-categorization would work out I’ll explain here that it was also during this time that we started filling out the site with our own memoirs, just to really get it off the ground. As they went up, they created their own categories. For example, the first one I submitted was about a protest I had attended once. When I submitted it, it created a whole new subcategory under “Events” about “Protests,” which itself later became a subcategory under “Political Events.” Likewise, it also created subcategories elsewhere, such as in the “Places” category, where a subcategory for Washington DC (where the protest took place) opened up. So bit by bit, MemoryArchive was growing into a true and organized memoir bank.
As the weeks went on, MemoryArchive continued to get more and more organized through our trial and error technique. We would come up with an idea and Poe would either shoot it down, or say he loved it and ran with it. As time went on and we gained a further understanding of exactly what it was he wanted, we less frequently churned out the bad ideas and came up with really good ones that actually helped the site. I remember that for nearly the entire month of October, Poe was time and again delighted with how much we had been able to accomplish that particular week. The Content Group was on a role. Our monitoring skills were second to none and our own expansion of the site (mostly through the foreign language sections of the site, which had initially been a brainchild of ours), ensured that Poe was routinely pleased with our output.
Somewhere in this time period, either Poe or one of the groups (I can’t remember who exactly), managed to establish an association with Wikipedia, the pseudo-inspiration for the site. Our set-up became identical to theirs and we could officially use the “wiki” title. In addition, Wikipedia would provide a link to our site from their site to ours for their users. This was huge. In our eyes, we had established the spark which would truly make MemoryArchive huge.
However, despite our new affiliation with Wikipedia, and despite how well we were doing as a group, or how well any of the groups were doing, MemoryArchive was not exactly thriving. In fact, it was stagnating. Site traffic was enough that it seemed people were wandering in an out. If we were lucky, someone would post a very brief memoir about a random experience, and then move on. And with perhaps 100 to 150 memoirs at this point (most of them from the class itself), people saw us as nothing more than…a class project. Which, I suppose we were, but that didn’t mean that’s all we wanted to be. Things were not going so well.
Sometime just before Thanksgiving, Poe decided that the only way to save the project would be to increase site traffic. And the only way to do that was put up some more memoirs. And this meant more than us submitting some of our own stuff again. No, we had to reach out further. He assigned the Content Group to scour the web for memoirs, in addition giving us links to other sites that hosted specific types of memoirs (like World War II, or September 11th) and post them ourselves. After getting the permission of the site host, we would manually transfer the memoirs to MemoryArchive. Slowly, over the next couple weeks, we managed to expand the project a little more. This helped minimally. According to the memoir barometer on our homepage, we had certainly increased the number of memoirs by a respectable amount. But site traffic remained poor, and getting worse. Through Thanksgiving, we actually saw a significant dip in traffic. At this point, clearly getting desperate, Poe assigned the entire class to scour the web for memoirs. To find anything and everything that could expand our site and increase interest among surfers. Again, it helped minimally. We got more memoirs in and site traffic experienced a brief surge, but all in all things remained dormant. Now, at the end of the semester, it was going to take a Big Push to get things going.
A few weeks before the end of the semester, as Poe was going over how he wanted us to really buckle down to make the site all that we could before our affiliation with the site was officially over, he gave us a further glimpse into why he had brought us all into this project of his. He explained that he was fully aware that American University was not likely to ask him back at all after his stunt. Having students build a website in a class initially dedicated to Russian history wasn’t exactly kosher. But the way he saw it, his was a most vital mission.
He mentioned that he was a part of a group that helped people with substance abuse problems. As part of this group, he heard amazing stories of people whose lives were destroyed by their addictions and dependencies. At some point in the midst of hearing these amazing accounts, it dawned on him that some of these, if not all, should be chronicled. That somewhere someone should establish a forum for people to, anonymously of course, post their stories for everyone—addicts, former addicts, and everyone else—to see. The internet is the largest forum in the world and thus is perfect for getting the word out about the horrors of addiction.
From this central, specific idea, Poe came up with MemoryArchive, a place for people all over the world to share their experiences: good, bad, and everything in between. These are the experiences that make up people’s lives. It is people’s lives that make up the history of the human race. What sense would it make to keep them all locked up with no opportunity to share them? How would we learn about each other and ourselves? That’s what Poe had decided to provide an answer to. That would be the mission of MemoryArchive.
And so the Big Push began. Reenergized with a sense of what the site was really about, we all worked our asses off over the next few weeks. We contacted friends and family, calling in every favor we had, to get people to post. We started submitting our own memoirs again. We pushed ourselves to the edge and beyond to save MemoryArchive. And, almost immediately, we began to see results. An amazing this began to happen. Over the weekend after Poe’s invigorating speech, site traffic not only increased, but the number of memoirs doubled. We were getting visitors, to whom none of us had direct connection, posting memoirs—good ones. At one point, one of my fellow Content Group members contacted me to tell me about a memoir that seemed to be from Michael Reagan, son of former president Ronald Reagan. Turns out it was legitimate.
Despite the fact that much of this turned out to be an extreme surge, site growth did continue. While not at the same pace as that amazing weekend, the site did continue to grow steadily. Nearing the end of the semester, we had 300 memoirs and counting. It had come slowly and toughly, but MemoryArchive was finally becoming something huge.
As I write this at the tail end of the semester, MemoryArchive is still in its relative infancy. It’s been live for maybe 3 months now and still does not have a truly worldwide reach. But it’s also still growing. Seeing the phenomenal growth it has undergone the last couple weeks, I am leaving Poe’s class with great confidence that MemoryArchive will, in fact, become something huge. It may be overnight several months from now, or it may take slow growth over the next few years. But I am convinced that one day it will be as big as Wikipedia is now. And while my official association with the project is now done, I will still keep up with it. I will continue to reference friends and family to it and may even continue to submit my own memoirs.
Whatever happens in the future, I will forever remember being a part of the birth of MemoryArchive. After all, it’s hard to forget a semester in which your Russian History course turns into a mad scientist’s memory databank scheme. It’s hard to forget putting an exceptional number of hour’s worth of labor into a venture you’re not quite sure will ever be worth the effort. In sum, I will never be able to forget Poe and his insane idea. As bad as that sounds, I don’t mean it in a bad way. As tough and as uncertain and, occasionally, back-breaking as it could be, it was a meaningful experience.
In time I picture myself surfing the web, coming upon a thriving MemoryArchive, and feeling pride that I was a part of its dawn. I helped start something huge.
