Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.
The project started by hiring a National Geographic photographer to take over 2,000 high quality photos of the wall. The company then stitched them together, indexed the names, and pulled out information about each person from two major national databases: one for casualties and one for personnel. The whole process took about four months to complete and the end result is being provided for free.
If you want to find a particular name, you can run a simple keyword search. You’ll be shown key facts such as the person’s rank, grade, specialty, and casualty date. You can also search for names that conform to certain criteria such as enlistment type, race, hometown, casualty date, squadron, and much more.
The main intention of Footnote, which launched in January 2007, is to digitize original source content in its original form. Most of the content comes from the National Archives and therefore remains in the public domain, but the company charges a subscription fee for access to most of it.
CEO Russ Wilding says he also wants the service to become the “world’s shoebox” where people upload their own historical materials, and then annotate, manage and share them with others.
Expect Footnote to digitize other memorials from around the globe such as the ones at Ellis Island and Pearl Harbor.
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They have to not make this subscription based. If they can find another way to monetize it and make it free, this Web site has the potential to become HUGELY popular. A digitized Vietnam Memorial, for example, has the potential to be not only a memorial but a way to see/find how other people new this person. Leave a comment on your your dad, brother, friend’s name and it’s open for the world to find. You could potentially meet up with other people who knew him.
Socially-networked history. Beautiful idea, but it can’t be behind a pay wall or hard to access or it’ll never take off.
The Vietnam portion of the site is free - it is pulling underlying historic documents that requires a subscription. Although there are some other collections of documents that are also free - it looks like it is stuff that you would have to go to NARA to view.
The site is well designed and the Vietnam wall is particularly poignant, and will be more so if those that knew these men and women leave comments about them. Additionally, given the potential for comparison to Iraq (58K US casualties vs. 4K) this is a timely reminder of the costs of war.
I can understand charging for what they are charging for - but kudos to them for making the memorial part of the site free.
My first thought on reading this: You mean this information wasn’t already available somewhere online? I’ve been trained to assume that nearly any non-copyrighted information, the sum of human knowledge, can be found online already.
I expect to see news stories about the development of new applications that never existed before. But seeing a story about a piece of _information_ that wasn’t online yet . . . that’s a surprise, these days.
They have digitalized the name of 58000 assassins.
Charles,
You’ve been trained to EXPECT the sum of human knowledge to be online.
But in fact, only a tiny fraction is online today. It’s getting to the point where the majority of NEW information is made available online. But history has hundreds of years of documents, books, maps, newspapers, journals, paintings, government papers and more that still require a visit to its physical location.
Charles,
A lot of stuff is on Ancestry and HeritageQuest, but they are also subscription sites.
The reason that this has never been done like this is, that it would have been nearly impossible a few short years ago (like 2 or 3).
I know because I shot it. 1300 high res digital images stitched together, over 3 months by Darren Higgins. This project pushed the digital imaging kung fu pretty hard.
Everyone involved in this project believes in the power and importance of the wall.
Peter
The database of Vietnam War casualties that the National Archives makes public was given to them and is periodically updated by volunteers who are all military veterans. That Coffelt database is available at http://www.VirtualWall.org/docs/vwdbase.htm
The volunteers from The Virtual Wall (TM)http://www.VirtualWall.org
and other volunteers have been constantly updating, completing,
and correcting the database of Vietnam War casualties that was no longer being maintained by the Department of Defense.
The Virtual Wall has thousands of personal tributes to the fallen in the form of letters, photographs, and citations.
In 2001 The Virtual Wall partnered to take high-resolution photographs of the Wall, which can be browsed and zoomed at
http://www.ViewTheWall.com
Clicking on a name displays the database information for that person.
The Virtual Wall has operated for more than 11 years without accepting donations, fees, or advertising in order to honor the fallen.
I saw http://www.viewthewall.com after we had completed the work on Footnote’s effort. It’s a good idea and we hope to contribute to the conversation with our project.
As Peter mentioned above, stitching The Wall into a single 20GB image and then letting people click and add photos and comments to each name just wasn’t technically possible a few years ago.
(I’m not sure there’s even an image this big anywhere else on the Web. If there is, I’d like to know. Google Maps not withstanding.)
For the record, The Wall on Footnote accepts no advertising and we are already providing newly digitized images and documents from NARA’s vaults for free. http://www.footnote.com/documents/51218854/
We hope people will continue honoring the fallen by helping others share their stories.
// chris