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Dan Cohen (back) and Jim Sparrow are project leaders for the Sept. 11 digital
archive.
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Sept. 11 Digital Archive Captures the Unheard Voices
By Michelle Nery
After the first plane struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, the nation
and the world paused in disbelief. When the second plane hit the center and then
another struck the Pentagon and another crashed in Pennsylvania, thousands desperately
tried to contact their loved ones by phone. When the phone lines failed, people
turned to the Internet, and a tidal wave of e-mails rushed through phone, cable,
and DSL lines to New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania from all over the world.
Six months after the attacks, these e-mails, web logs, personal communications,
and reflections have been and continue to be recorded in a digital archive created
by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and
the American Social History Project at the City University of New York thanks
to a shared $700,000 grant to each institution from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The foundation is a philanthropic, nonprofit institution established in 1934 by
Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., a former president and CEO of General Motors Corporation.
"Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of Sept. 11,
2001," says Dan Cohen, one of CHNM's project leaders. "In the process,
we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing
people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience,
providing a historical context for understanding those events and their consequences,
and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons
we learn from this project."
"Our web site is the only Sept. 11 web site that is completely interactive,"
says Jim Sparrow, another project leader. "You can record your personal story,
save and annotate your e-mails and images, view those of others, and find other
online resources related to Sept. 11." Sparrow's pioneering Blackout History
project, which reconstructed the dramatic social responses to the 1965 and 1977
blackouts in New York City and beyond, established the format and methodology
for using the World Wide Web as a research and historical forum on which both
the Exploring and Collecting History Online Project, also funded through Sloan
foundation, and 9/11 Digital Archive are based.
CHNM invites members of the George Mason community and their family and friends
to contribute to the site at 911.gmu.edu or www.911digitalarchive.org.
"We are encouraging people to submit their e-mails, digital images, and home
videos to tell their own story," says Cohen. "Our emphasis is on grassroots
collecting and particularly capturing the voices that haven't been heard before."
Many people have already contributed their stories, e-mails, and images to
the web site, including Sam Myers Jr. who contributed his story, which he wrote
on Sept. 12. "My wife Jennifer and I live in Washington, D.C. We are very
shaken up and still pretty scared after the attack on America on Tuesday. It is
hard to put into words what Tuesday was like. It was unbelievable, something like
watching a very scary movie. I still find myself thinking it was a dream, and
when I realize it wasn't, I can barely hold back the tears."
Zachary Schrag, contributed his story, which he recorded early in the evening
of Sept. 11. "I don't know what happens next. Tomorrow, I face my students
- my first overhead will be a picture of the White House, gutted after being set
aflame by the British in 1814. I wonder about the future of Washington and New
York."
Several people contributed images of the events as they unfolded around them.
Simin Farkhondeh, contributed Image #45, which shows the towers burning and smoking.
His simple photo caption says, "View from Hudson Street near Franklin, 9:30
a.m., September 11, 2001. On my way to our Tuesday morning staff meeting this
is what I saw." He also contributed Image #46 of a vigil, which he annotated
as, "Gathering and vigil at Union Square, New York City, September 13, 2001.
It was impossible to stay home alone. The gatherings at Union Square were a blessing."
"The event was a broad national experience, and we want to capture first
person and bystander experiences," says Cohen. "The immediate scope
of the project is to preserve and later contextualize the events so that they
can be taught." The archive will also use these events as a way of assessing
how history is being preserved in the 21st century and as an opportunity to develop
free software tools to help historians do a better job of collecting, preserving,
and writing history.
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