The role of Digital Humanities in a natural disaster

As part of the New Directions in the Digital Humanities series this week, we had a very inspiring presentation from Dr. Paul Millar, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Cinema and Digital Humanities at the University of Canterbury (NZ). The talk focused on the CEISMIC project, with which Millar and his team intended to 'crowdsource' a digital resource to preserve the record of the earthquakes' impacts, document the long-term process of recovery, and discover virtual solutions to issues of profound heritage loss. (P.S. This entry was cross-posted on the DhWip blog.)

In the months since a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit New Zealand's Canterbury province in September 2010, the region has experienced over ten thousand aftershocks, 430 above magnitude 4.0. The most devastating aftershock, a 6.2 earthquake under the center of Christchurch on February 22, 2011, had one of the highest peak ground acceleration rates ever recorded. This event claimed 185 lives, damaged 80% of the central city beyond repair, and forced the abandonment of 6,000 homes. It was the third-costliest insurance event in history.

As part of the project, a number of inspiring community-oriented digital resources have been made available, including:

• Quakestories http://www.quakestories.govt.nz/: It allows anyone to share stories and photos of the Canterbury earthquakes, e.g., "Shelves were crashing to the ground and books spewing everywhere. Everyone was bent over and..."
• Quakestudies https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/: A digital archive built to store all types of content related to the Canterbury earthquakes. It has been developed with companies, government organizations, websites, and individuals to help them preserve their content. The resource will be made available in the coming weeks.
• Whenmyhomeshook http://whenmyhomeshook.co.nz/: A website dedicated to helping Canterbury schoolchildren overcome the recent earthquake by providing a platform where they can openly share their personal earthquake stories.

In particular, Quakestudies is going to become a massive federated archive, containing content sourced from the research community and peak agencies involved with the earthquakes. All of this information will be "looked after in perpetuity and be available to approved researchers either now or in future years." As it is being indexed using a number of approaches (including semantic web technologies, says Millar), it will make available a number of exploratory pathways into these materials—many of which it is not yet possible to foresee.

This is certainly an inspiring example of the use of digital technologies to support a large number of people. In particular, it is remarkable how the entire initiative was promoted and coordinated by a team of dedicated people at the University of Canterbury who managed to become a key reference point for the community in such a difficult time.

From DDH, we certainly want to send our best wishes to the project, and we're looking forward to using Quakestudies!

Related resources

• The September 11 Digital Archive: http://911digitalarchive.org