Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Featured on CNN

I was interviewed yesterday by CNN about a new project at the Center for History and New Media, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which uses digital technology to record memories, photographs, and other media related to the Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. (CNN is going to feature the project sometime this week on its program The Situation Room.) The HDMB is a democratic historical project similar to our September 11 Digital Archive, which saved the recollections and digital files of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world; this time we’re trying to save thousands of perspectives on what occurred on the Gulf Coast in the fall of 2005. What amazes me is how the interest in online historical projects and collections has exploded recently. Several of the web projects I’ve co-directed over the last five years have engaged in collecting history online. But even a project with as prominent a topic as September 11 took a long time to be picked up by the mass media. This time CNN called us just a few weeks after we launched the website, and before we’ve done any real publicity. Here are three developments from the last two years I think account for this sharply increased interest.

Technologies enabling popular writing (blogs) and image sharing (e.g., Flickr) have moved into the mainstream, creating an unprecedented wave of self-documentation and historicizing. Blogs, of course, have given millions of people a taste for daily or weekly self-documentation unseen since the height of diary use in the late nineteenth century. And it used to be fairly complicated to set up an online gallery of one’s photos. Now you can do it with no technical know-how whatsoever, and it’s become much easier for others to find these photos (partly due to tagging/folksonomies). The result is that millions of photographs are being shared daily and the general public is getting used to the instantaneous documentation of events. Look at what happened in the hours after the London subway bombings— photographic documentation of the event that took place on photo-sharing sites within two days formerly would have taken months or even years for archivists to compile.

New web services are making combinations of these democratic efforts at documentation feasible and compelling. Our big innovation for the HDMB is to locate each contribution on an interactive map (using the Google Maps API), which allows one to compare the experiences and images from one place (e.g. an impoverished parish in New Orleans) with another (e.g., a wealthier suburb of Baton Rouge). (Can someone please come up with a better word for these combinations than the current “mashups”?) Through the savvy use of unique Technorati or Flickr tags, a scattered group of friends or colleagues can now automatically associate a group of documents or photographs to create an instant collection on an event or issue.

The mass media has almost completely reversed its formerly antagonistic posture toward new media. CNN now has at least two dedicated “Internet reporters” who look for new websites and scan blogs for news and commentary—once disparaged as the last refuge of unpublishable amateurs. In the last year the blogosphere has actually broken several stories (e.g., the Dan Rather document scandal), and many journalists have started their own blogs. The Washington Post has just hired its first full-time blogger. Technorati now tracks over 24 million blogs; even if 99% of those are discussing the latest on TomKat (the celebrity marriage) or Tomcat (the Linux server technology for Java), there are still a lot of new, interesting perspectives out there to be recorded for posterity.