Digital Histories of Disasters: History of Technology through Social Media
Name
Shell_Digital histories.pdf
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347.41 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5d5e260184cee67452373d6ffd9ec4dd
Author(s)
Onaga, Lisa
Shell, Hanna Rose
Date Issued
January 2016
Journal
Technology and Culture
Publisher
Muse - Johns Hopkins University Press
Citation
Onaga, Lisa, and Hanna Rose Shell. “Digital Histories of Disasters: History of Technology through Social Media.” Technology and Culture 57.1 (2016): 225–230. © 2016 by the Society for the History of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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?”
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2016.0020
