lovehistory.net

As I worked my way through the readings this week and spent time interacting with the example websites, especially the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, all I could think of was something my (awesome) professor told my senior seminar class as we were preparing to write out first synthetic research paper: if it happened after you were born then it’s not history.

Now, I was an undergrad, and sometimes undergrads (who also at the time are 21 years old) get oversimplified constraints or definitions so that they can spend time actually working within the foundation that they will need to build in order to eventually have the estate full of weird and exotic time periods and methodologies that they will eventually reside in (also, I wanted to write on what Saved by the Bell said about collective notions of feminism, which may or may not have something to do with it). But still, the temporal space these archives/projects occupy, and how quickly historians and other cultural institutions/actors leaped to begin collecting and preserving these memories seemed new to me, in a way. They, unlike myself, realized how important and ephemeral internet created content can be, even when related to an event as huge as 9/11. It was an interesting contrast to include discussions of Pearl Harbor, another event people knew would be historically remembered and worked to preserve. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m shocked at how quickly these historians not only realized the events of September 11th were historic (we all did) but they then immediately acted to preserve that memory for future generations. And, in a way luckily for them, national memory has absorbed and lionized (or demonized), if not understood, the event just as quickly, and interest has continued to remain high, which aids the efforts of the archivists in their interests of expanding their knowledge base and promoting the site as a useful tool. It will be interesting to see how the archive is used by those scholars born after 9/11.

In contrast again, the historians involved in the Hurricane Katrina project similarly tapped into the sense that Katrina was a unique historical moment and moved to catalog it online, but what they failed to anticipate was how the seeds of memory of that event would germinate and be effected by the cultural response that participants (and potential users) were subjected to. I read through a few of the narrations provided in the archive, and the first one I read struck me because the woman recalled she had no idea how bad Katrina would be until she saw it on the TV the night before it hit – somehow the physical representation of the hurricane on the TV screen shocked her into action and she escaped with her life, but her livelihood was lost and she still hasn’t returned to New Orleans. As in the article, this narrative imparts a sense that survivors are still stuck in that moment of loss and have been abandoned to it by culture at large, which did not put in place structures of grieving and aid (for both the physical and mental realms) that were present in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (remember all those people lining up to give blood that unfortunately wasn’t needed?). Katrina, in a way, was forgotten.

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is the interesting disconnect between what a historian decides is worth remembering and society at large does. “Never Forget” is one of 9/11’s rallying cries, but what is it, exactly, that we are supposed to remember about it, assuming we should remember at all? Struggles over that narrative have played themselves out very openly in politics and culture. In contrast, I would argue Katrina’s most notable memory project is the HBO show Treme, which uses a blend of dramatization and fictionalization, actors playing characters and real people playing themselves, to attempt to sort out in this imagined version of what exactly a post-Katrina identity means for New Orleans. The show, a work of fiction at the end of the day, has been lavishly praised by New Orleans natives as a very realistic portrayal, but Treme exists in a world where, while people are grappling with the legacy of Katrina, the event itself has ended, and at the end of the day, while the city is still physically present in the show, those populating it are dreams of its residents or pastiches of the real things played by the real things. The show creators combine these elements in an attempt to formulate a new identity for the city, but it’s one formulated from the outside looking in, presented as an insider’s love affair.

The Hurricane Katrina project was also created by outsiders, but involved a great deal of community outreach, however, it does not provide an overarching narrative for users to tap into (like Treme, for example, which may explain part of its popularity among residents/participants) but instead invites them to share their own narrative. I was so taken by the passage where Brennan and Kelly explained “maintaining control over their personal story turned out to be much more important for our contributors than we had expected. Following the hurricanes, many residents of the Gulf Coast felt that their lives had been taken over by others acting on their behalf and so it was very important to many of them that they retained ownership over their personal histories.” The narratives I read did strike me as very visceral, and I can see why it would be hard to overcome sharing such a vulnerable personal history when you feel that A) You are still living the event and B) External forces are trying, actively or indirectly, to suppress or interfere with the narrative of the event that you are trying to construct for yourself out of your own experience. The questions expands from that of the individual level “What story to I want to tell myself? To others” to the larger question the archivists as “What of our findings to we share, and how?”

The idea that history is a current thing, that it’s being built now, is really important to keep in mind. These two projects themselves might not seek actively to transform their holdings into a more overt historical narrative, but in the future, because these historians realized the historiocity of the moments they document, scholars will be able to mine these archives for a wealth of sources to complete who knows how many different projects. So history IS now.

As to the other readings, the one that most captured my attention was the digital forensics reading. I won’t go into it at length other than to say I had never conceived how difficult authenticating a digital-born source might be, let own preserving it. I knew CDs decayed but I had never thought about how changing hardware and software technology might render sources obsolete and forever unavailable to future use. I am completely of two minds about digitizing sources. I think it’s great, and I think it should be done. Also, well, the future IS now. Most sources ARE digital born and now we must put together a framework to preserve these things for posterity. I’m glad to see this community already exists, even though it may never catch up to technology. But I also hope we are remembering to have some sort of analog equivalent for when the lights go out. That then begs that question as to what should be made physical again. This debate, it seems, can be circular and is never ending. The most important take away is that digital born sources are just as subjective and bound by physical laws of existence (i.e. they decay, become obsolete, etc.) as traditional sources are.