Category: oral history

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Exploring a 9/11 Geographic Archive

Oral history as a primary source is being revived through initiatives like Story Corps and World Pulse and through improved storage capacity to archive and exhibit personal stories, making it less expensive for even the smallest and least funded groups. We are moving toward an environment where alternative narratives can be both manipulative (alternative facts, post truth) and expositive, as more and more under-represented groups get access to telling their story. So the ways that we share and interpret of stories in the future will be pretty interesting.

The story of the creation of the maps for first responders and emergency managers is sweeping and personal. I am currently exploring the creation of a 9/11 geographic archive. The archive will serve as a repository of artifacts and a history of participation by geographers, programers and spatial data technologists during the response to the World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001. Funding for the project was provided by the Fund for the City of New York as part of a grant to develop a Center for Geospatial Innovation.

More information and thoughts to come!

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Fall Projects in Digital Archives

This Fall I participated in two digital archives projects, where I served on the metadata team. The first was an oral history archive for dance journalist, Barbara Newman, who had a collection of interviews from the 1970s to this past year, in which she spoke with dancers, choreographers and others affiliated in the dance community. The interviews were primary sources for Ms. Newman’s book Grace Under Pressure. The website, Dance Dialogues, is a compilation of interviews from several of her books. I participated on the metadata team, where we ensured that our classmates’ records were properly tagged with our selected schema. I also digitized interviews with Mark Morris and tagged and uploaded interviews with Katie Wade and Robert Denvers.

The second project was for the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History with their Jews in America project. The goal of the project is to create a gateway to Jewish heritage artifacts at institutions across the United States. My team selected the Charleston College Low Country Digital Library, which has a rich collection of oral histories and papers from American Jewry in the Charleston region. We selected collections from LCDL that best fit the Jews in America vision, harvested metadata and URLs from the collection and delivered it to AJHS for inclusion in their database. I recently ran into Susan Malbin at the 2nd Annual METRO Conference, who told me that the Charleston team was one of two of the four class projects that would likely be included in the Jews in America repository. Congrats, Team!