September 11 Digital Archive
BY LINDSAY IRVINE
History, though sometimes preserved in stones, is not static. History is a living organism that changes as we understand and incorporate traumatic events into our lives and our world. The human imagination has commemorated these events in numerous ways across countless generations, but most have been lost in the sands of time. The popular experience of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, however is being collected and preserved in the 9/11 Digital Archive.
The 9/11 Digital Archive is a joint undertaking by historians at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and City University of New York’s American Social History Project. The Archive launched just six months after the attacks, partnered with the Smithsonian Institution’s “Bearing Witness” one-year anniversary exhibit, and now boasts more than 150,000 stories, documents, audio clips, photographs, and digital art pieces.
The Archive is available online to the public, but it is also an important resource for scholars interested in the public’s experience of, and response to, 9/11. Scholars may argue how strongly the media shapes public thought, but television was a powerful force in the average 9/11 experience. Upwards of 20 percent of contributors say they turned on Good Morning America, the Today Show, or other morning television programs and rather than hearing the hosts’ friendly banter were confronted with harrowing images of an historic event. We may not remember Bob Edward’s radio announcement clearly, but the live images that CNN and BBC World News beamed around the world were seared into our memories.
Television brought the terror attacks into living rooms around the world and the terror attacks changed the tenor of international political discourse. The physical targets are in New York and Washington, D.C., but the Archives composition reflects the international nature of the attacks. According to codirector Tom Scheinfeldt (Mason), citizens from more than fifty countries have contributed their 9/11 stories and fully one third of the Archive’s visitors are international. Few American-based websites have such high international exposure.
The Library of Congress has committed to preserve the Archive, which will be its first digital acquisition, as a unique repository of the popular 9/11 experience. The eventual transfer of the Archive from the universities will guarantee public and scholarly access to the Archive in perpetuity. Never before in human history have so many primary sources of the common man’s experience and response to tragedy and trauma been available in one place. This is grassroots history, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes hateful, always real, recorded as it develops.
Lindsay Irvine is the Publications and Projects Assistant at George Mason University’s Center for Global Studies (http://cgs.gmu.edu). The 9/11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org) at George Mason is housed in the Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/).
