Archiving the Recent Past

How might digital humanists address the needs of their communities in the wake of traumatic events like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings?

Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive is a crowd-sourced digital archive of stories, images, oral histories, and social media related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. A community project hosted at Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Our Marathon is both a memo-rial to the victims and survivors of these events and an attempt to pre-serve a digital record of recent history. We presently have over 7,000 items in the archive, with more being added every day.

Our Marathon & Omeka

What are the most effective digital tools and practices for the preservation of the recent past?

Community Engagement

How can crowdsourced projects engage and inform participants about the value of “small” historical narratives present in their firsthand accounts, their metadata, and their contributions to social media?

Our Marathon reached out to communities in several different ways:

n o r t h e a s t e r n . e d u / m a r a t h o n

Jim McGrath & Alicia Peaker, Northeastern University

“Share Your Story” Events Media & Other Partnerships

Physical Exhibits Social Media OutreachUsing Omeka, the Our Marathon team has: • Created and inventoried Dublin Core metadata while it gathers contributions• Ensured that Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections (Our Marathon’s final home) receives metadata• Invited students to create exhibits out of the archive’s materials• Used Neatline to experiment with “maps” of memorial items left at Copley Square in Boston