My first day at the University of Nevada Las Vegas coincided with the day after the Las Vegas Shooting. 58 lives lost and more than 500 injured. Like those working before me, I reacted to the tragedy with an effort to collect. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Ed Summers, Nick Ruest, and a host of new colleagues.
There is a tendency to see digital, data, and/or computational work as critically and emotionally void. Just technical transactions. I can tell you the experience couldn’t be farther from the truth. Critical thinking driving efforts of this kind aim to support nothing less than the ability to make meaning of the things that happen to us. That’s more than pushing a button. I can tell you that working through and seeking to make sense of seemingly endless streams of human expression incurs an emotional debt that can be hard to shake. That’s more than pushing a button too.
I hope that we find time to give thanks where we can to those working in this space – not just for the tools and the data but for the critical thinking and the weight of the emotional investment they cost. To start with, I give thanks to the whole Documenting the Now team.
I leave you with a series of traces I call “tragedy glyphs”.
They are strewn throughout the Las Vegas Shooting twitter data collection.
More than 800,000 so far.
23 minutes and 9 seconds to run the course.
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