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In this Time magazine article, Claudia Himmelreich reports on the methods being used to piece together over 600 million pieces of hand torn records of the East Germany Ministry for State Security (the Stasi). These records were destroyed in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991, 45 civil servants worked to piece the torn documents back together. They were able to reassemble over 90,ooo document, but they had only had gotten through 350 garage bags of documents, out of 16,000 bags.
But now, using technology called the e-Puzzler, scientists in Berlin hope to be able to piece together the rest of the documents. The technology uses a pattern recognition program. Here is how the author describes the process: “a computerized conveyor belt feeds up to 10,000 shreds of paper through a digital scanner. The e-Puzzler software then clusters the shreds according to search attributes like color, texture, typeface and outline — much like a person might start to piece together a puzzle. After processing the information, the machine displays a digital image of the reconstructed document on a screen.” Although the machine does not analyze the information in the documents, it makes it possible for historians in the present and future to study the documents. These records hold a substantial amount of information about both the organization and those that were targeted. Himmelreich writes that “almost two decades after German reunification, hardly a month goes by without a lawmaker, sports coach or newspaper editor being identified as a former Stasi spy. The information revealed in those reconstructed files could end careers, or allow people suspected of having spied to finally prove their innocence.” These documents can help Germany deal with the issues still surrounding it immediate past and hopefully help people understand their own pasts and give meaning to it.
New digital technologies like the e-Puzzler show what is possible within digital history today. Although these documents were essentially destroyed, there is still a way to piece them together to reveal what they hold. It must be remembered though that these are only pieces of paper with information on them. There still is the need for historians to analyze and interpret the broader historical meaning. It might take a few generations, however, before a sense of objectivity can be gain. For many people, the information in the documents has a personal connection to their lives.
This does provide an example, though, of how digital technologies make previous inaccessible information more accessible. It also shows how the past, present and future are all connected. The e-Puzzler is revealing history as well as making history, and in the future these documents could be used professional historians to tell a complicated and interesting part of the history of Germany and the world.
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