The Need to Collect after Tragedy Strikes
In 2005, the U.S. saw the worst hurricane season ever recorded. According to the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Katrina stands as the most expensive and one of the deadliest as only the hurricanes in Galveston (1900) and Okeechobee (1928) killed more people. The storm displaced more than a million people, and Katrina was not the only storms to devastate the Gulf Coast states. Less than three weeks after Katrina, Hurricane Rita, struck Louisiana and Texas causing close to $10 billion in damages. Nearly one month later, Wilma became the third Category 5 hurricane of this season. Like prior American catastrophes such as the great 1927 Mississippi Flood, the impact of these natural disasters reverberates across the country in debates over relief funding, planning for future hurricanes, and also the ability of this nation to respond to a major crisis.
Stranded hurricane victims, failures of all levels of government, destruction by wind and water, and the massive displacement of Gulf Coast residents alerted us at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) that we were witnessing significant moments in American history. We also noticed how many people turned to the web for information, assistance, and communication with friends and family. Newspapers such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Houston Chronicle created online forums for their readers where people shared information about the status of their communities, while others created blogs and some shared photos on sites such as Flickr. The weblog indexing site Technorati reveals over 350,000 posts on Hurricane Katrina alone. How would the story of those storms be recorded and later told? How can we save the digital sources and ensure that the historical record is diverse and inclusive?
Building upon experience in creating popular history collecting projects, particularly the September 11 Digital Archive , CHNM set out to respond to these events and partnered with the University of New Orleans to create the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB): www.hurricanearchive.org.