Joshua Brown

The September 11 Digital Archive Saving the Histories of September 11, 2001

After September 11 everything was different. This phrase became the mantra employed to justify nearly every action taken by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania — whether the circumstances had anything to do with the attacks or not. The repetition of and rationale for misadventure behind the “9/11 made everything different” trope quickly became a cliché, a dismissible simplification that unfortunately obscured some of the events’ actual and unique attributes. One of those attributes, one difference demarcating September 11, 2001, from previous epochal historical moments, was its status as the first truly digital event of world historical importance: a significant part of its historical record — from email to photography to audio to video — was expressed, captured, disseminated, or viewed in (or converted to) digital forms and formats. Moreover, the impact of all that digital activity extended beyond downtown Manhattan or northern Virginia, or even beyond the United States, becoming worldwide in scope. And yet, if any form of historical evidence was vulnerable to destruction, whether because of sins of commission or of omission, it was the eminently disposable and ephemeral forms of communication composed of ones and zeroes. The fate of digital evidence was not the first item on historians’ agendas following September 11. While still confronting both the palpable and the psychological effects of the attacks, academic and public historians grappled with the role they should play as they made tentative efforts to identify the historical significance of