A Project Review of Voices of 9/11: A People’s Archive
Title: Voices of 9/11: A People’s Archive
Reviewer(s): Anthony Wheeler
Digital Project: https://hereisnewyorkv911.org/
Review Began: March 1st, 2022
Review Concluded: March 8th, 2022
Data and Sources
The Voices of 9/11 archive was originally established by Ruth Sergel at here is new york: a democracy of photographs. The archive contains over 500 video testimonies (about 120 hours of content) recorded in 2002-2003 in New York City, Shanksville, PA, Washington D.C., and the Pentagon.
Processing
According to Sergel’s website, the responsibilities for recording the oral histories were divided by region. The New York City booth was directed by Pamela Griffiths. Documentary photographer, Andrea Star Reese brought the booth to rural Shanksville, PA. Laura Doggett and Vicki Warren directed the booth at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and eventually within the Pentagon. In 2011, the entire collection was opened to the public online. Lastly, the site states that the project is “jointly held by the New-York Historical Society and the September 11 Digital Archive which has initiated a long-term plan to donate its entire collection to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation.”
Presentation
The website, which underwent a redesign last year, brings you to a landing page that feels as though extends for miles. As the user is met with a project description, as you scroll down it slowly reveals (via fade-in effect) an extensive list of photographs from the participants interviewed and indexed into the archive. Clicking a photograph will bring up a filmed oral history with that participant, without leaving the home page, enabling you to jump across interviews with ease. If the user clicks the Participants button at the top, you can explore the interviews by alphabetical order and see which interviews were associated with others’. Lastly, the site features an Artist Statement, which speaks to the sensitivity of the work.
Digital Tools Used to Build It
WordPress, Vimeo, Google Analytics, MySQL Database, Google Tag Manager, Javascript Libraries
Languages
- English (interviews may be in another language, i.e. Spanish, Mandarin, etc, but an English transcript is provided)
Review
As a New Yorker, there is a certain experience associated with September 11th that is unique. Many of us can recall where we were when the towers were struck, despite being as young as 4-5 years old. People within the city were devastated and processing a level of trauma typical American civilians had not yet come to encounter. Even people who lived outside of the city panicked as they awaited for loved ones who took the train into town for work to return home. As one of the greatest community-felt traumas in American history, how does one approach capturing the memory of the experience without exploiting the survivors? In approaching the Voices From 9/11: A People’s Archive, I was worried that I would find a level of sensationalizing, but I was very wrong.
While a relation is not confirmed, I am still going to infer: the project’s website URL, hereisnewyorkv911.com, is bringing E.B. White’s Here Is New York to the forefront of my mind. I teach a section of this narrative to my undergraduate English students at the New York City College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn. In short, White talks about how New York City looks and functions differently for every single person. Something random but unique acts as the first brick laid for everyone’s version of the city, eventually leading up to the overall relationship we have with the city (for better or worse). Using this in the URL feels like more than just a literary reference, but a political act. Placing these testimonies in correlation to White implies the deep impact the events have on the way many of these individuals experience the city, and deal with the residual traumas.
Now to dig into the archive itself. The phrase “a people’s archive” is powerful in the way it is forwardly expressed in this work. I say this because the team made it a point to outline that each individual retained complete ownership of their own testimony as well as the right to use (or not use) it in another way. They have an open contact form, encouraging participants to get in touch with them if they had any questions regarding obtaining a copy of their contributed files or if they wanted the content removed completely. The oral history collection process was incredibly ethical in that they gave speakers complete and utter autonomy over what they said, how they said it, when to record/stop, and how long they wanted to be heard.
Each video has some metadata indicating who the person is, what role they played on September 11th (survivor, witness, first responder, family, and more), where the video was filmed, and the video number which tells us what order the videos came in. Additionally, transcripts/translations are also made available for accessibility purposes. One very interesting feature, however, is that if a testimony has a connection to another person’s testimony within the collection, it will be tagged on the page under “Related Testimony” (see Kathy Dillaber’s oral history screenshot for reference). What makes this significant, linking us back to White, is that it grants us the ability to experience these memories through the lens of different personalities that ultimately processed/interpreted a similar or identical experience in a starkly different (or similar) manner.
The archive has gained a lot of traction over time, having been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), and the New York Historical Society. In 2011, the entire collection was migrated onto the web and placed into the public’s hands. On the precipice of the archive’s 20th anniversary, the project also became the basis for a documentary titled Memory Box; Echoes of 9/11 (available to stream on Peacock), directed by Bjorn Johnson and David Belton. As a token of their appreciation, the production company responsible for the creation of Memory Box (Yard44) gave the site a new pair of shoes (a redesign) in just the past year, bringing the collection to the interactive identity it exists as today.
The only area I feel compelled to critique is the way the archive was not made available in languages other than English. As a New York City-oriented collection, which includes non-native English speakers (and non-English speakers), I feel as though not making the archive accessible to those individuals is counterintuitive to the mission of the project and a little thoughtless. There are transcripts for English, but not for Spanish or other commonly spoken languages in the city. For example, there is an entire category of participants labeled “Chinatown,” given the proximity of Chinatown to the Twin Towers, and some of these participants needed to be translated. What if these individuals wanted to hear others’ stories to experience some kind of catharsis or solidarity? It’s slightly exclusionary, but I understand it can be a large undertaking translating. That being said, there were also not a lot of non-English speakers, so I don’t see it as as much of a lift as it may be assumed to be. Overall, it was very fascinating and deserves a lot of credit for the way it captured such a widespread, dynamic, tragic memory of the people.