Memorialising through Video Archives of Disaster

In the days, months and now years since the 3.11 disaster, amidst the flurry of news and photos, texts and tweets, one type of data has often been overlooked: the human voice. Our project, which began as volunteer work in Tohoku, has collected and archived more than 500 hours of unstructured oral narrative video (tohokukaranokoe.org). This paper will discuss the always delicate and sometimes problematic nature of collaboration between local residents and outside archivists in the development and presentation of digital memorialization.