How to do a Collective Memory

In July 2007 on Created in Birmingham I coined the term “Collective Memory” to describe a blog post which collects all the writing, photos and video that are put online after a large event found by searching the Internet for mentions of that event. The first one was for an event called Rootsville where I found seven blog posts and 4 collections of photos, including my own. That seemed about right. A few weeks later was the Supersonic Festival and I did the same thing online this time the results were astonishing. Later in the summer I did the Moseley Folk Festival with decent but not extraordinary results and continued gathering the memories for other events in the city. The next year Chris did Supersonic again in 2008 and boom it was the same only more so. There’s clearly something about Supersonic that makes people need to record and share their memories.

But this isn’t just a fun and interesting thing to do. Capsule found the collective memory posts to be invaluable feedback on the festival, complimenting the more traditional audience research events like this do. They already had a positive record of communicating with their audiences through MySpace and Facebook but this blew the doors open because it gave them impartial, unmediated feedback and qualitative data they could use to get funding and support for the festival. It had real value for them.

So this year Capsule decided to do the Supersonic 2009 Collective Memory themselves. Since I’m on their steering group for Internetty stuff I sent Sarah the following links to get her started. If you want to use them for your own thing simply replace “supersonic” with the relevant keyword(s).

• monitorThis: A general search of the entire Internet including blogs.
• The Twitter search for #supersonic, etc with an added filter to include only those tweets with links. (Twitter’s advanced search is quite powerful in places.)
• Recent videos uploaded to YouTube and the same for Vimeo.
• A Flickr search sorted with most recent first. I suggested linking to sets where available and tags if not.
• Google News picks up the more formal articles and as such you can probably filter it down using words like “Birmingham” or “music”. Proper journalists tend to be more detailed and thorough in their writing than bloggers who might assume their readers know it’s in Birmingham or about music.
• I have no idea how best to search Facebook for publicly available stuff. I’m not sure Facebook is interested in people doing that. Facebook is weird. I need to do more research on it.
• If you spot activity in an area not covered by those searches do a new one. Maybe your audience is all on Bebo. Capsule’s aren’t but yours might be.
• And finally, open up the comments and let people leave links there, particularly for those areas of the Internet that aren’t easily searchable like forums.

Once you have all the info it’s up to you what you do with it. Prepare a report, curate it into something (Capsule could stitch all the audience videos into a massive replay of the festival from all different angles, if they had the time) or simply leave the page there as a monument. It’s up to you. The point is collecting all this is not hard and if not more useful then certainly differently useful than getting people to fill out questionnaires.

See also Chris Unitt’s guide to doing a collective memory from January. 6 months is a long time in this game but most of the tools still relevant and the spirit and methodology certainly is.