Documenting Aftermath
Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Documenting Aftermath
Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters
About this book
When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape.
Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Preface: Toward an Informatics of Disaster
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Making Sense of Earthquakes: Public Information Infrastructures and Postdisaster Event Epistemologies
- 2 The Production and Circulation of Earthquake Knowledge in 1868 California
- 3 Accounting for People after the 1906 Earthquake
- 4 The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake: “Public Information” for Alternative Earthquake Publics
- 5 Today: Government Disaster Response Meets New Media Platforms
- 6 Comparing Information Orders: Continuity and Change
- Selected Bibliography
- Index