[SIGCIS-Members] Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing

[Dave Walden]

At 07:08 AM 10/8/2014, you wrote:
>Though we are lucky enough to be able to talk to many people that 
>experienced the events, first hand, I have found that interviews 
>done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the 
>difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened.  Many people 
>"remember" what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so.

I think it is likely such people often remember their own evolving 
stories of what happened more than what has frequently been reported 
more generally.   (For instance, in the Internet domain I know better 
than many of the frequently reported oversimplifications of how 
things happened, but I also probably over estimate my role in my head 
and my stories told to interviewers).  However, since so many people 
are still around from electronic digital computing history, a scholar 
might interview several of them, note inconsistencies, and get them 
to talk to each other to sort it out.  They are not unlikely to have 
contemporaneous documents in their cellars or attics, which they can 
go get to prove their point and perhaps discover their incorrectness.