CTRnet Background

There are many collective human tragedies that result from either natural or manmade events, where communities are adversely affected. Communities have responded to such events in various ways, with thousands of examples of vigils, memorials, and archives demonstrating the desire to preserve the communal memory of a tragic event. Today people make virtuous use of social networking and other internet software to respond to tragedy, in creative and dynamic ways. The same desire to remember that caused previous generations to write letters or poems and treasure them, leads current generations to create and upload digital photos and videos. Such spontaneous ad hoc responses to grief, stress, and confusion demonstrate how desperately people need to communicate, record, and understand.

Yet, advanced intelligent information integration methods have not been applied to this domain, which we refer to as Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery (CTR). The impact of these events is felt over extended periods, requiring longitudinal perspectives to understand their complexity and inter-dependencies. Consequently, with the Internet Archive and other partners, we will begin to build CTRnet, an integrated distributed digital library network for providing a rich suite of CTR-related services. This digital library will include collecting and archiving, before it can be lost, as much information as possible – through uploading, crawling, harvesting, and connecting with Web 2.0. Such work must continue as communities work to recover and heal, and as documents become available that were involved in litigation, or result from studies, reforms, and reports – some only made available long after a tragic event.

Since shortly after the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, we have integrated digital library, data and text mining, information visualization, and social network analysis techniques to help with recovery after our nation’s most tragic school crisis. We will leverage our experience to develop a next-generation domain specific digital library software suite, the CTR-toolkit, building upon 17 years of work on digital libraries, as well as expertise in information retrieval, data and text mining, database management, human-computer interaction, and sociology.