Thursday, August 25, 2011

Democracy Now: The 9/11 TV News Archive -- 3,000 Hours of Video News Coverage of 2001 Attacks Posted Online

The 9/11 TV News Archive: 3,000 Hours of Video News Coverage of 2001 Attacks Posted Online
Democracy Now

As the nation prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a pair of leading internet archivists are launching an ambitious project called "Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive," which catalogs 3,000 hours of domestic and international TV news footage from 20 channels from the week around September 11, 2001. Television news coverage of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath not only documented one of the most important events in mass memory but also influenced public perception. We feature excerpts of coverage from the global archive and speak with its organizers, Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger. Kahle is an internet entrepreneur, activist, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations committed to making a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years’ operation. "[9/11] was a major event that was really a television event. People really understood this through television," says Kahle. He adds that seeing "how people are starting to come to grips with it really shaped how we saw the whole event."

To Watch/Listen/Read

No comments: