The pressure-cooker bombs that exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last April 15 shattered bodies and lives. But their impact was felt far beyond the blast radius as the shock spread and authorities set out to find the perpetrators. The ensuing manhunt put an already traumatized city on lockdown.
One of the two suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was captured on April 19. The other, his brother Tamerlan, was killed.
Three days later, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon found herself talking about Boston’s ordeal with a group of graduate students at Northeastern University, where she is a professor of English. She is also a co-director of the university’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, a recently created center for digital humanities and computational social science.
Although her students had not been physically harmed by the bombing, they all felt the shock of it. “One person had been woken up in the middle of the night by the car going by and one of the bombers throwing a bomb out the window,” Ms. Dillon says. “It was striking to me how much this event had affected people’s lives and how much everybody had a story they needed to tell in the aftermath of the event.”
The answer, Ms. Dillon decided then, was to find a way for anyone to share his or her story. She and her colleagues at the NULab created Our Marathon, an online community archive, and invited members of the public to contribute first-person accounts, photographs, and videos describing how the bombing had affected them. “No story is too small for Our Marathon,” the site says, in what could be a mantra.
The Boston effort is the latest in a series of digital community archives that have sprung up in the immediate wake of traumatic events. Prominent examples include the September 11 Digital Archive, devoted to the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, created after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005.
Like other digital, crowdsourced archives, Our Marathon faces challenges (which can also be seen as opportunities) that nondigital collections don’t have. It was set up to be a repository for born-digital, often evanescent material (social-media posts, for instance). It relies on people’s willingness to contribute their stories; a crowdsourced collecting project works only if the crowd participates. And its organizers want it to be not just a repository but a place where members of the community can find comfort and solidarity through storytelling—an impulse behind the creation of many digital memory-bank projects.
The organizers also hope that Our Marathon will serve as a resource for researchers, filling in gaps left by news-media coverage. During and after the April 15 bombing, TV and newspaper reports focused on the big stories: the suspects, the dead and injured, the responders.
“The event itself touched so many people in so many ways, and those people’s stories don’t show up in the news,” Ms. Dillon says. “The transportation structure was completely closed down; people were under the shelter-in-place order. It had huge effects, even for people who weren’t injured or didn’t know somebody who was injured.”
Moments after the bombs went off, the news began to spread online, and reactions began to flood social-media channels. The Our Marathon team started setting up a collection site soon after Ms. Dillon had the idea.
“Archiving real time is a challenge, but it’s something we felt was necessary in this case,” says the project manager, Ryan Cordell, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern.
Quickness Is Crucial
They realized that they had to act quickly; the site went live on May 16. Born-digital content, especially the kind people create on the fly via social media, can easily get lost if it’s not captured early. Memories are also fleeting, and while some of the injured will suffer physical and emotional effects for years, others’ experiences fade. Six months later, “we’re starting to get to a point where the general public is starting to move on,” Mr. Cordell says.
The Our Marathon team customized Omeka, an open-source content-management system designed for digital collections, to provide the technical base for the project. Building it has been another communal effort. Several project partners, including the local NPR affiliate WBUR, The Boston Globe’s GlobeLab, and the Digital Public Library of America, have helped collect content. Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the provost’s office have contributed about $50,000. Graduate students from Simmons College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, along with volunteers from Boston University and Tufts University, have pitched in with data curation.
“That’s been enormously gratifying but also a managerial challenge in its own right, trying to make sure that people feel like they’re doing useful work,” Mr. Cordell says.
Our Marathon’s crowd-driven digital collecting parallels a citywide attempt to preserve physical artifacts related to the bombing. Rainey Tisdale, an independent curator, is coordinating that work, which has been a struggle. Boston’s cultural resources focus more on early American history, she says, and “there is no institution in the city with a mandate to collect contemporary history.” Several institutions, including the Boston City Archive and Historical New England, have gotten involved, but it’s been hard going.
Universities can play a significant role in furthering collective-memory work in their communities, Ms. Tisdale says. “We are not nearly as off the ground as the digital archive is. It was so wonderful that Northeastern stepped in and decided to do this. It’s amazing how much they’ve been able to accomplish in a short period of time.”
‘A Lot of Outreach’
Our Marathon plays to the NULab’s digital strengths, but a lot of the heavy lifting hasn’t involved technology at all. “The bulk of the work has been reaching out, forming partnerships around the city, trying to get the word our and encourage people to come and contribute,” Mr. Cordell says. “It’s definitely been true for us that just putting it up does not get people to come and use it. You have to do a lot of outreach.”
One successful technique was to approach individuals directly online. The team monitored the #bostonstrong hashtag on Twitter, for instance, and invited people who used it to contribute to Our Marathon. The collectors had to keep in mind that this was a subject that hit close to home, and that requests had to be handled with sensitivity. Some people were understandably reluctant to relive the traumatic experience so soon. Many others, though, accepted the invitation. “The vast majority who have contributed something have not contributed a story of horror,” Mr. Cordell says. “They’ve contributed a story of solidarity or healing.”
The site had collected more than 3,300 items as of last week: photos and first-person accounts from the finish line; images of stuffed animals and messages left at a makeshift memorial in Copley Square; notes from schoolchildren thanking first responders and medical personnel. There are screenshots of Facebook pages and photos of Boston Red Sox fans carrying the “Boston Strong” signs in the weeks after the event. There are images and memes shared on social media—"Boston Strong” icons posted on Facebook and Twitter, for instance.
Not counted in the contribution tally are thousands of captured tweets, says Mr. Cordell. They aren’t publicly searchable yet; the project team has to figure out how to create an interface so that users can read not just individual tweets but whole exchanges.
What happens in the longer term is an open question. Ms. Dillon says Our Marathon has “good infrastructure support” from the university and the campus library. “We will be able to store things here long-term, and it will be open and accessible,” she says. The organizers are looking for donors and are working with Northeastern’s development office to find more sources of financial support, she says, but they do not solicit donations on the site.
Organizers of online collecting projects—whether they are called digital memory banks or digital community archives or something else—share a longer-term challenge as well: how to keep the databases stable and usable as technologies change.
George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has extensive experience with digital collecting. It created Omeka and played leading roles in creating the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank.
When the September 11 archive was set up, “it didn’t seem like there were a lot of problems with it,” says Sharon M. Leon, the center’s director of public projects. “Except that, looking back 10 years, the site is held together with chewing gum.” Now it has to be moved to a more stable platform—in this case, Omeka—and that takes time and money. “That’s the fate of all the early projects,” she says, especially those that “were built without a sense of standards.” A grant from the discontinued Save America’s Treasures program, run by the National Park Service, is paying for the September 11 upgrade.
Digital collecting moves quickly; so, too, does technical obsolescence. The field has come a long way in a decade, Ms. Leon says, which should help newer efforts like Our Marathon. Such projects are “so much easier to do now than they used to be,” she says.
But money to set up a digital memory bank is often easier to come by than money to sustain it as technology advances. “We still don’t really have a long-term solution to preserving this kind of material,” she says.
Correction (11/18/2013, 11:25 a.m.): The original version of this article included an incorrect reference to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, of Northeastern University. She is Ms. Dillon, not Ms. Maddock. The article has been updated to reflect the correction.
