I chose to do my blog on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection. This consisted of 14,000 images and 7,000 pages of texts. Based on the different material in this collection I would be able to view many different images and views of the fires and earthquakes. Not only would I be able to view images but also read what had happened during this time and how it hurt and affected many people. I would be able to see the destruction that had happen at the fault of San Andres. The damage led up to hundreds of miles long all through out the fault. Based on all this material we can conclude that this event was more then tragic. There are no words that can be said about how horrible this damage was all throughout the city of San Francisco. However, if I based my narrative entirely on this collection I would be missing a lot of things that have happened. Just like in the reading by Trouillout, there is silence that happens when creating these archives. People have to decide weather or not something is important or not to keep for history. The people that get to decide these things are people with power. Therefore, not all the information and facts about this situation have been documented. Only the things that one said was important made it into history. Just based off the information given, I do not know how many people died or how many acres of land got burned down. I also do not know how many were injured or what peoples’ thoughts were on this whole incident. All I know from this collection is that there were a lot of pages and texts written about the San Francisco earthquake and fire and the damage that was done was heartbreaking. I also do not know how this may have happened. Some sources that I would need to find in order to find other missing information would have to be books about this particular subject. I could go to the San Francisco library and see what kind of research they have in there. I would probably look through multiple old newspapers from this time period as well. Lastly, I could look it up online and do my own research for this particular incident. If I wanted to find out how many people were hurt or how many people died from this, I am positive I could find something online and with someone else’s research.
2 comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Mackenzie, I particularly like this blog post because you went into detail about what is missing within this archive. I certainly agree that throughout history people in power have often left out valuable details regarding certain events. Not only this, but I was also believe that during this time period it would of been hard to accurately record such catastrophic events due to a lack of resources. With this in mind, it is quite impressive to gather so much data regarding a single event that occurred over a century ago.
I really appreciate how you make meaning of the photos in the archive by touching on how the produce a feeling inside of the audience that “no words” can express. I think it is important to consider the difference between textual sources, like books, and non textual sources, like photos. I also agree with Teagan that it would be difficult to document this incident during the time. But I think you’re right that looking at news articles would be particularly helpful.