Digital Histories of Disasters: History of Technology through Social Media.

Abstract

Digital Histories of DisastersHistory of Technology through Social Media Lisa Onaga (bio) and Hanna Rose Shell (bio) On 11 March 2011, a giant earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Failure of the plant’s heating and cooling system and an inability to properly stabilize the reactors post-meltdown led to the displacement of over 150,000 people. In its wake, three historians and sociologists of science and technology with ties to Asia came together to attempt to use social media as a way to create a community in response to the disaster and its aftermath. Together Honghong Tinn and Tyson Vaughan, along with Lisa Onaga, set out to make an online collective bibliography and repository for information and historical context for events surrounding the disaster. The goal was to provide a forum for educators to draw on a range of what might otherwise be overlooked sources. Teach311.org, the site they launched in April 2011, facilitates a collaboratively written digital annotated bibliography focused on sociohistorical dimensions of disasters. Along with providing access to a particular online resource, contributors summarize it or describe its relevance to understanding the 3.11 disaster or the sociotechnical historical study of disasters more generally. Thus an international network of academics, students, and translators, among others, produce content in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, and English. Together they continue to ask the seemingly simple question of “Why did the disaster happen?” Five years after Teach311.org’s launch, it has developed so as to consider the disaster in the context of both science and technology studies (S&TS) themes as well as the longer history of seismic and other disasters in Asia. The site also raises more general questions for the history of technology. It [End Page 225] prompts us to reflect more generally on new directions in what scholars are referring to alternately as digital history and digital humanities. What, for example, is the role of collectivity in the expanding directions of our field? What is, and what might be, the relationship between scholarship and bibliography with the capabilities of social media and digital journalism in mind? These questions were the inspiration for my conversation with Lisa Onaga, one of Teach.311’s three cofounders. What follows is an edited version of our conversation conducted over email in May 2015 and then a few months later at the 2015 SHOT meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. HRS: What led you to create Teach311.org? What about the impulse for collectivity? LO: It was the earthquake that occurred off the coast of Tohoku (northeastern) Japan on 11 March 2011 and the events that followed. I felt that we were bearing virtual witness to the disasters as they unfolded in Japan through broadcast and social media. I started to sense a distinction between the kinds of things people “knew” or how they chose to trust certain sources in order to “know” about the event and radiation effects. I found myself engulfed in a world of translation on social media platforms, in which individual moments of translation—constant and informal—gained significance when viewed in aggregate. That had a lot to do with how Teach311.org came into being. At the same time, I was especially impressed by the cooperative practices and solidarity that took place among bilingual journalist friends and colleagues as they used social media platforms like Twitter and effectively documented their experiences. I had known that social media technology played a prominent role in community formation and cultural production, but I never quite saw so many people motivated in a single moment like this in a language environment that I identified with. These things convinced me that there is a role to be played by science and technology studies students and scholars. For my peers, including Teach311.org cofounders Honghong Tinn and Tyson Vaughan, as we were conducting science and technology studies (S&TS) field research in East Asia, it began to seem apt to also find a way to respond in this social media environment to do something about the disasters. Technological failure, earth science, the porousness of the marine and terrestrial environments, media and technology...