Boston Marathon Archive

Omeka developers sought for The Boston Bombing Archive: Our Marathon, a project under development at The NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. This archive will be:

a crowd-sourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and even social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who planted the bombs; and the city’s healing process. “Our Marathon” will allow the public to explore not only what happened during the event, but also how the event was experienced by Bostonians, visitors to the city, and those many members of the “Boston diaspora” who were far away but deeply engaged in the unfolding events. The archive will serve as a long-term memorial, preserving these records for students and researchers, providing future historians with invaluable, local windows into an important national event.

We will use Omeka and its Contribute plugin for the first stage of this project (gathering stories &c.). However, we hope to develop additional plugins that will allow the incorporation of new kinds of data into Omeka:

1. A social media plugin that will allow tweets (and perhaps other social media, such as Instagram or Flickr photos) to be fully integrated into the archive. We have already harvested the public tweets from the time of the bombing and its aftermath, but hope to be able to include this data in the Omeka database itself.
2. A plugin that would allow emailed (or perhaps even texted) contributions to the archive.
3. A plugin that would allow batch media contributions (and entire folder of photographs, for instance) from the public (i.e. people without administrative access to the archive itself).

Grants may be available for developers interested in building these plugins. Please contact the project if you are interested in contributing.