This study investigates a form of cultural production defined by the gathering of crisis-related media into public web environments. While it is clear that the many varieties of “digital crisis archives” can exhibit novel features—like rapid exploration, geotemporal visualization, and public curation—it is less clear what kinds of effects these features can have, by what means, and with what bearings upon research and memory practices around the crises they concern, and with what implications for thinking around media and memory more broadly. To pursue these questions, this dissertation aligns close readings of three instances: “ARLIS,” a collection of over two thousand long inaccessible government and nonprofit photographs related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), digitized in 2009 and uploaded to the image sharing platform Flickr in 2010; the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, a multimedia archive of “born-digital” media and user-contributed stories and imagery centered on Katrina (2005); and the Japan Disaster Archive, a “networked” archive that aggregates over one million items related to the triple disasters in Japan in 2011, and invites users to add to and curate these media. Each investigation concerns questions specific to the archive—“dynamics” of photographic assemblage in ARLIS, “modes” of visitor interaction with the Memory Bank, and “variable characteristics” in the participatory micro-publications of the Japan Disaster Archive—while also seeking out lessons for understanding the larger “genre” of the digital crisis archive. The study suggests that the ways these archives can intervene in post-disaster practices extend well beyond accumulation and dissemination. Digital crisis archives are insistently multivalent, and can serve as sites for imagination, interpretation, and collaborative learning as much as for organization, preservation, and goal-driven research. Getting at the inner workings of these new capacities depends on reference to fields we do not typically align, and carries ramifications for how we think about more traditional medial responses to disasters, particularly digital photographic ones. Throughout I argue that crucial to these archives’ most distinguishing capacities—and to the ways in which they can variously confound and contradict—are permutations of documentary assemblage, visitor interaction, and active participation. / Film and Visual Studies
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/23845456 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Parry, Kyle Thomas |
| Contributors | Gaison, Peter L., Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, Schnapp, Jeffrey T. |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | embargoed |
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