Debuting the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters

The project jumbles the conventional division of scholarly labor in which something happens, and then people comment on the something that happens, and then other people collect those comments and put them in a library, and then archivists catalog them. This raises the question: “What does ethnography mean in a digital, virtual world like this?“ [Dept. of Anthropology chair Theodore] Bestor asked. Access to tens of thousands of tweets, for example, provides “an incredible sense of how people are interpreting a disaster as it happens. … What do you grab? Who do you hug?”

—from Harvard Gazette coverage of the rollout of the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters , a project of metaLAB and Harvard’s Edward O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. The live version of the site was unveiled at an event last week featuring Reischauer director Andrew Gordon, Theodore Bestor of the Anthropology Department, and Kyle Parry, metaLAB’s project manager for the Archive. Gathering a vast array of media produced in response to the tsunami and ensuing catastrophes at the Fukushima plant and beyond, the Archive provides robust tools for exploring coverage of the disasters and telling stories about their impact. Kyle articulated the strength of the Archive’s comprehensive approach to collection: “It doesn’t limit you by forcing you to come up with the right keywords.” As another participant pointed out, “The collection has the potential to move beyond a collection of records to be a public forum.”