The installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates” in New York City was celebrated by a massive gathering in Central Park. As we walked through the Gates, snapping pictures with our digital cameras, we noticed hundreds of other people doing the same. It occurred to us that the kind of activity this artwork engendered, impromptu community building and prolific content creation, made it a perfect subject for our first networked book experiment.

We decided to see if we could build an archive, then edit and shape it using existing software. We accomplished the first part of this quite handily, gathering over 3,000 images through the Flickr network, 75 story links on our del.icio.us page, and 50 blog posts with 27 comments. But as we moved into the next phase of our project, editing the assembled archives, we quickly discovered limitations inherent in the software, which does not allow community participation in the organization of content. Programs like Flickr, created primarily as collection, storage, and sharing facilitators, do not set up useful editorial structures for understanding an archive. The problem of how to get the collective to find meaning in the collection is the focus of this paper which describes: our experience building a collective memory archive with social software; the limitations we came up against when we began the editorial process; questions the project raised about the role of the editor in a networked environment; and how social software might be modified to enhance the editorial process.

Abstract submitted for Computers and Writing Online 2005:

The installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates” in New York City was spontaneously celebrated by a massive gathering in Central Park. As we walked through the Gates, snapping pictures with our digital cameras, we noticed hundreds of other people doing the same. It occurred to us that the kind of activity this artwork engendered, impromptu community building and prolific content creation, made it a perfect subject for our first networked book experiment.

We decided to see if we could build an archive, then edit and shape it using existing software. We accomplished the first part of this quite handily, gathering over 3,000 images through the Flickr network, 75 story links on our del.icio.us page, and 50 blog posts with 27 comments. But as we moved into the next phase of our project, editing the assembled archives, we quickly discovered limitations inherent in the software, which does not allow community participation in the organization of content. Programs like Flickr, created primarily as collection, storage, and sharing facilitators, do not set up useful editorial structures for understanding an archive. The problem of how to get the collective to find meaning in the collection is the focus of this paper which describes: our experience building a collective memory archive with social software; the limitations we came up against when we began the editorial process; questions the project raised about the role of the editor in a networked environment; and how social software might be modified to enhance the editorial process.