In 2016, I interviewed Alex Whitcomb and Sarah Hayes about TellHistory, a project that combined two things I had been thinking about for years: oral storytelling and cultural-heritage participation.
TellHistory invited people to contribute short video-based memories, then connected those individual stories through themes, timelines and maps. The idea was simple but important: a personal memory becomes more useful as public history when people can understand where it sits in relation to other memories, places and events.
What TellHistory was testing
The interview was less about a particular platform than about a set of participation problems that remain familiar: how to persuade people to contribute, how to lower the barrier to sharing a story, how to focus participation without over-directing it, and how to use social media to grow a community around a public-history project.
What interested me most was TellHistory’s use of structure. Video gave contributors a direct human voice. Themes created a reason to contribute now. Timelines placed memories in sequence. Maps connected them to place. None of those devices was especially novel by itself; the value came from using them together.
Questions explored in the interview
- What had the response been like?
- How had TellHistory built participation in a digital project?
- How did the platform work?
- How were recurring themes chosen to focus contributions?
- Who was contributing, and what kinds of stories were emerging?
- How was the contribution process made easier?
- How did social media support the project’s growth?
- What themes and stories were planned next?
- What was the larger goal for TellHistory?
- Who else had helped make the project possible?
The surviving audio above is the primary record of Alex Whitcomb and Sarah Hayes explaining the project in their own words.
Case Study at a Glance
Context: By 2016, inexpensive video, social platforms and participatory web tools had made it much easier for people to publish personal testimony outside institutional collections. Highlight the Supporting Passage
Challenge: Collecting stories is only part of the problem. Personal testimony can quickly become a stream of isolated content unless it is connected to historical, geographic and thematic context. Highlight the Supporting Passage
Practice: TellHistory gathered video memories and organized them through themes, timelines and maps. The project also used recurring themes to focus participation and treated social media as part of community-building around the collection. Highlight the Supporting Passage
Evidence: The surviving Voices archive includes the published 20-minute interview, original production audio and video files, and the podcast script. The surviving materials reviewed here do not provide a reliable quantitative evaluation of the project, so this record focuses on the design of the experiment rather than claiming outcomes that cannot be documented. Highlight the Supporting Passage
What this case suggests: Crowdsourcing becomes more meaningful when contribution and context are designed together. The challenge is not merely getting people to speak; it is creating structures that help individual memories become part of shared historical knowledge. Highlight the Supporting Passage
Supporting Documents & Surviving Sources
View the interview, archived project site & surviving production record
- The audio interview on this page is the primary Voices source record.
- TellHistory — Internet Archive.
- The surviving Voices archive also includes original production audio/video files and the podcast script; no reliable quantitative project evaluation has been recovered.
Archive Note / Provenance
View what survives & why the design still matters
TellHistory no longer appears to have an active public site, so the original project is now reached primarily through web archives and the surviving Voices interview and production files.
The useful idea was not “crowdsourcing” by itself. TellHistory tried to prevent contribution from becoming decontextualized content by linking individual testimony to themes, chronology, and geography so a personal account could remain personal while also becoming part of a larger historical record.
That concern now sits close to the method being built into Voices of the Past: preserve the original record, make relationships and context visible, and leave a structured way for other knowledge bearers to add what the archive does not yet know.
Critical Questions + Add to the Record
- Who gets to speak, and whose knowledge is heard?
- How do we make knowledge more accessible without losing its meaning?
- How do we preserve memory when the systems carrying it keep changing?
Application here: TellHistory tested how individual memories could enter a shared public record without losing their relationship to place, chronology, theme, and other testimony.
Did you contribute to TellHistory, work with Alex Whitcomb or Sarah Hayes, or preserve screenshots, links, or memories of the project? Add documentation, correction, or firsthand knowledge to this record.
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