Responding to 3.11: Preserving History in the Wake of Disaster

Responding to 3.11: Preserving History in the Wake of Disaster

Hiroshi Okumura, Helen Hardacre, and Konrad Lawson

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - 2:15pm to 3:45pm
International Room (1F), Sterling Memorial Library See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 6511

RESPONDING TO 3.11:
Preserving History in the Wake of Disaster

Hiroshi Okumura
(Overview of Documents and Japanese Disasters and case of Kobe Disaster, Community Outreach Center, the Kobe Univ.)
Helen Hardacre
(History and Overview,The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters Project, Harvard Univ.)
Konrad Lawson
(The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters Project, Harvard Univ.)

The symposium approaches the study and practice of archiving in a temporal framework, treating with the conservation of historical archives affected by the disasters and their aftermath, and the preservation of archives from future disasters, as well as documenting present conditions. It also explores ways that archives of the future might take a different form, like an archival platform that collects/organizes all aspects of non-material data on Japan’s 2011 and other disasters from World Wide Web and while preserving it.

To inquire into case studies and their overviews, Yale East Asia Library invites Professor Helen Hardacre from the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and Mr. Konrad Lawson, the project manager of the Digital Archive at Harvard. Both Prof. Hardacre and Mr. Konrad have been closely engaging with the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters Project at Harvard, a highly significant effort involving directly in archiving multi-lingual records on the disasters. http://www.jdarchive.org/explore/?la=en
The event also welcomes Professor Okumura Hiroshi, a distinguished historian of modern Japan at Kobe National University; he has been centrally involved in efforts to create an archive of materials related to the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. As head of the Kobe University’s “Community Outreach Center” (Chiiki Renkei Sentā), he has also spoken and written on a number of issues related to the preservation of historical materials after major disasters. Since 3.11, he has also been working on lessons from Kobe and comparisons between the two disasters, especially in relation to issues of archiving and preservation.

Program:

2:15-2:30 Introductory remarks by Haruko Nakamura (Yale University Library)

2:30-3:10 Overview of documents and Japanese disasters and case of Kobe Disaster by Hiroshi Okumura (Univ. of Kobe) *Presentation will be in Japanese followed by translated summary in English

3:10-3:30 Coffee break

3:30-3:50 History and Overview, Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters by Helen Hardacre (Harvard Univ.)

3:50-4:30 Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters project by Konrad Lawson (Harvard Univ.)

4:30-5:00 General discussion led by Daniel Botsman (Yale Univ.)

5:00– Reception

In conjunction with the symposium, there is a small exhibition featuring Japanese language materials on the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan in the East Asian Reading Room (Sterling Memorial Library Room 222). Visual materials on display have been selected from the Yale Library collections. The exhibit was prepared with the assistance of TSUNODA Takuya, a PhD student in Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University. The East Asia Library at Yale University is committed to acquiring a variety of resources on all aspects of the disasters of March 11th, 2011.

For More Information

sample data to avoid error during the import operation
Region: 
Japan