Every once in a while, a project comes along that stops you up short with its ingenuity and its value. The Steamship Historical Society of America’s Image Porthole is such a project.
The society has restored and posted on the Internet 40,000 photographs taken throughout the era of powered boating. (
READ MORE) Some of them are truly remarkable. Altogether they tell a vital story of a past, with its mass migrations and growth of international markets, that links directly to this global world we live in today.
Unfortunately, much of that story is undocumented, because many of the images have no words to accompany them. So in a stroke of genius, the society has decided to use the tools of the Information Age to shed light on the era of the steamship. On May 22, National Maritime Day, the group launched the Image Porthole project.
All of the photos are posted on the society’s Web site (
www.sshsa-db.org) available for inspection – and more importantly – comment. Visitors are asked to help identify what is happening in the photos or to provide any information that might add context to the image.
In effect, it is a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of boating images. By engaging the globe, the SSHSA is making an already extremely valuable archive nearly priceless. Sure to come with identifying information are stories from the contributors, bits and pieces of history rescued from oblivion and shared in a way to enrich us all. •