
The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime - dadt
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unprecedented-effort-preserve-million-letters-written-soldiers-wartime-180973336/
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avar
I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be
leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records.

I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent
as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising
revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when
their phone dies.

Yes some of these services allow salvaging the data of relatives, but most
people aren't going to be paying whatever's the future Google extra money
monthly to preserve grandma's multi-gigabyte E-Mail account. What would
previously be letters from the front stored in a box somewhere will be stored
alongside swaths of commercial E-Mail and spam.

~~~
GhettoMaestro
What is the value?

Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence
from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual
value.

If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It
does not respect the original author's intention.

(Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)

~~~
avar
It's a good question. The reason we know how devastating and inhumane wars
like say the Eastern front in WWII is in no small due to these sorts of
records, otherwise we'd mostly just have contemporary state propaganda,
statistics and the like.

Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps
future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so
many millions died.

I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy.
Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even
like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their
surviving immediate relatives.

But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is
long dead.

~~~
daveFNbuck
Living people are harmed by such disclosures if the idea that this might
happen to their communications in the future makes them less willing to
communicate openly and honestly with their loved ones.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Does the idea of a future historian poring over your e-mails make you less
willing to send those e-mails today?

~~~
daveFNbuck
No, but I don't think this will happen and I don't send emails that I'm
particularly concerned about others reading.

WWII letters were used as an example here. My grandfather was alive during
WWII. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are people sending emails
they'd much rather not have their grandchildren learn about after their death.

~~~
avar
The question isn't whether or not they'd prefer it when they were alive, it's
whether we should care now that they're dead.

I'm willing to bet you agree with this notion in principle, and would just
like to quibble about the time scale. Or do you think that if we unearthed
something that's clearly private correspondence on a clay tablet from ancient
Sumer that it should be kept private?

In this specific case, I'm willing to bet that if someone were to say "this
secret should be kept from my grandchildren after I'm dead" it's exactly the
sort of thing their living grandchildren would have an interest in knowing
about, and that interest should outweigh a dead person's privacy.

~~~
daveFNbuck
If we don't respect dead peoples' privacy, then living people won't expect
their privacy to be respected when they die. This can cause people distress
and result in changed behavior, which are real negative outcomes on living
people. Currently living people care about their legacies and don't want
embarrassing communications to become public after their deaths.

If you're really not concerned about the privacy of the dead and think that
time scale is just a quibble, would you be ok with a policy that nude photos
and 3d models of all dead bodies, together with personal identifying
information, be uploaded to a public searchable website as soon as possible
after death? After all, some people might be interested in seeing that.

Not many people are upset about the privacy implications of reading an ancient
clay tablet, so this is not as big a concern. The time scale thing isn't just
a quibble, it's central to how living people are affected.

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_whiteCaps_
There is a similar project for Canada:
[https://canadianletters.ca/](https://canadianletters.ca/)

I sent them all of my grandparents' correspondence from 1941 - 1945 which they
meticulously organized into chronological order, and digitized. They're
working on transcribing them now.

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AcerbicZero
My family recently found a USO record my grandfather had recorded from
somewhere in South-East China during WW2, which after digitizing myself we've
donated to a WW2 historical society. Documentation from these events are
critical to helping explain the context and the people who were actually
involved in these events.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Please consider submitting the digital version to the Internet Archive as an
item.

~~~
defen
Any more details about how/where to do this? My grandmother recently passed,
and as we were going through her things we found a large amount of V-mail that
my grandfather sent to her during WWII. I'd love to preserve it, although I
don't know if I'm ready to send the physical items anywhere yet.

~~~
toomuchtodo
For digital artifacts,
[https://archive.org/create/](https://archive.org/create/) (you’ll need to
create an archive.org account) is where items can be created.

If you only have physical artifacts, I recommend scanning at 600 dpi for
digital artifact creation prior to uploading to the Internet Archive.

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a2tech
In a semi-related vein the university of Michigan’s Bentley library contains
an amazing collection of letters from us soldiers to their families during the
brief incursion of the US into Russia.

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markvdb
Read "Letters from the war", by Heinrich Böll. It's a Nobel prize winner's
real daily correspondence as a young soldier in the Wehrmacht, with his future
wife.

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hi41
Wow. That amazingly beautiful cursive handwriting. Compared to that, mine is
like a chicken’s scratching on the dirt, as they say in India.

~~~
40four
Unrelated to the post, but I find it beautiful that a colloquial phrase 'they
say in India', has a sort of global recognition to me growing up in the United
States.

We used to call poor handwriting 'chicken scratch' for fun all the time when I
was a kid. I would know because my handwriting has always been horrible. I was
always jealous of people who had pretty handwriting :)

I'm sure this is a term people in many other countries would recognize, I
wonder what other coloquialisms have this sort of widespread recognition?

~~~
TeMPOraL
RE chicken scratch, we have a very similar saying in Poland - "pisane jak kura
pazurem", meaning "written like a chicken with its claw would".

~~~
milankragujevic
Similar thing in Serbian - "švrakopis" \- magpie's writing (švraka - magpie,
-o- connection, pis[ati] - to write).

> crabbed handwritting, cacography, chicken scratch

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%A1vrakopis](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%A1vrakopis)

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grepthisab
Can we run ML over these and create synthetic letters written during wartime?

~~~
jcims
Of course. It might be something that actually binds humanity together in
singular, syncretistic opposition.

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ptah
do these include letters written today by american soldiers in middle east?

