The New York Times Glenn Collins has this piece today about documentary producer Steven Rosenbaum’s 7,000-gigabyte video archive of the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Rosenbaum assembled from a host of sources 500 hours of video related to the attacks, the largest collection of “raw visual data” on the catastrophe.
But Rosenbaum is in financial straits and might have to sell off the collection piecemeal unless he finds a permanent donor, partner or buyer that would keep it intact. Any partner would have to help him pay off $500,000 in debt that he incurred through his now-defunct company CameraPlanet, although Rosenbaum isn’t looking to make money.
“This collection is about five years of my life,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. “It’s not about money. We don’t have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video.”
The scholarly value of the archives is immense, researchers say. The University of Illinois has already offered to help organize the content for future historians.
We’d like to work with the collection to develop the kind of software that can be useful to search historical data,” said Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science there.
In the past, historians often had to sift through meager records. “Scholars of the future will have an overwhelming task coping with e-mails, videos, newscasts, radio broadcasts and written accounts generated by historically important events like 9/11,” Dr. Burton said.
If financing can be found, Dr. Burton and scientists at Urbana-Champaign, a leading supercomputing center, would like to work with Mr. Rosenbaum’s collection “to store it, preserve it and develop the kind of software that can be useful to search this data,” he said, “to develop tools that can take e-mails, newscasts and videos, index them and search them by topic and time, so they can be evaluated.”
For now, however, only samples of Rosenbaum’s collection are viewable at Google Video.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:01 AM|Comments(1)
Have they tried Project Rebirth yet? Cameras aimed at ground zero site from multiple locations, running constantly I think. Also has a newsletter, with emphasis on architecture, site photos, comments. Sounds like the kind of group that might want to incorporate all that video. Then, of course, there's the Lib. of Cong.
Just some thoughts.
Laura
Posted by: Laura at May 31, 2006 1:49 AM
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