Save What You Can: Tending Katrina’s Community Archive

Abstract: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Michael Mizell-Nelson (1965–2014) teamed up with colleagues at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to develop an online archive—the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB)—to help the city tell its own story. The HDMB team accepted anonymous entries to the database, resulting in a collection of raw, honest, and often darkly funny stories. While not comprehensive, the HDMB allowed people to remember, collect, and save what they could in the face of overwhelming loss. Unlike most archives, it is filled with the voices of people from all walks of life who were touched by the disaster. Growing to contain tens of thousands of items (some available publicly and others archived privately for use by researchers), the HDMB is a mildly chaotic and incomplete, yet vital, record of a city and its recovery.