John Van Wyhe is a British historian based in Singapore that was founder and director of the world renowned Digital Darwin project. We had the opportunity to talk to him over Skype at 7am Singapore time, 7pm Colby time about his project and some of the stories, advice and lessons he learned from digitizing a database of hundreds of thousands of documents and other media forms. Before our talk, I only knew the basics of what his project was and what he wanted to accomplish by doing it, but being able to ask him questions and pick his brain allowed me to gain a real comprehension of what it would’ve been like to compile a database as large as the Digital Darwin project. I thought the scope and scale of the task he set out to complete was the most impressive, and it sought out to change the ownership of this information by opening it up to the world.

One aspect of the project that I hadn’t really thought of before was the copyright and ownership issues. I found the difficulty that he had to get the rights to use much of the work he needed quite interesting. Every document may have different ownership rights, and that needs to be factored in to the scope of the project as it can become very time consuming to obtain the rights to all the documents you may need for a project. I also really liked the simple objective of the Digital Darwin project, to make as much information about Darwin digitally available online as possible. It is one of the websites that makes the internet a better place for learning and sharing, how it was originally intended to, instead of arguably what it has become today.

Overall, I really enjoyed talking with Professor Van Wyhe and I learned a lot about how one would go about compiling and managing a project of such a large magnitude. Some of his lessons and guidance can definitely be applied into our projects for our class.