I went to the 8:30 am paper session of the Digital Scholarship Conference and found the project “Our Marathon” very inspiring. “Our Marathon” is a crowd-sourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and even social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who planted the bombs; and the city’s healing process. (available at http://marathon.neu.edu/about)
I used to related digital humanities exclusively to history. After all, that’s what we have been doing throughout the semester — working with fragile historical archives. “Our Marathon” showed me that digital humanities can be used to analyze and represent recent events. And by digitizing them, we can “tell a wide range of story, build a lasting memory, and preserve the valuable record”, as the goal of “Our Marathon”.
Another aspect that “Our Marathon” inspired me is that it values the “peripheral” people very much. The research team believes that people might be affected even though they did not witness the bombing in person, and thus, “no story is too small for Our Marathon”.