Digital Histories of Disasters: History of Technology through Social Media

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?”