Collegiate Times

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech began a digital memory bank in remembrance of April 16, 2007.

A digital memory bank is a "repository of material to which people contribute their ephemera and related digital objects that help people remember events," said CDDC member and political science professor Jeremy Hunsinger.

"The CDDC is one of the world's first university based digital points-of-publication for new forms of scholarly communication, academic research and cultural analysis," Hunsinger said. "It also supports the continuation of traditional research practices, including scholarly peer review."

President Charles Steger said the lives of those lost are, and will be, honored in various ways on campus.

"We will continue to memorialize in many ways, including the permanent April 16 memorial, various programs and scholarships in their memory, community service and most importantly, by carrying on the noble process of education and academic inquiry all of them sought at Virginia Tech," Steger said. "People chose to remember the lost loved ones and colleagues in so many creative and positive ways, whether that was through quiet reflection or special ceremonies, or whether it be through dance or other forms of artistic expression; each way (is) uniquely special."

Steger added that people handle their grief and emotional trauma in unique ways, so we should never presume to tell anyone the appropriate stages of recovery for the loss that Tech experienced two years ago.

"What we experienced is something that no other (school) should experience again," Steger said.

Brent Jesiek, former member of Tech's CDDC and current assistant professor in the school of engineering education at Purdue University, is the founder of the April 16 digital archive at Tech.

"The archive itself features a wide variety of approximately 2,000 digital artifacts," Jesiek said. "The most common types of items include digital photographs, news stories from a variety of media sources, but especially college newspapers, blog posts written in the aftermath of April 16, digital artwork, and official memos, documents and reports. One of our main goals was to collect as many items that were available nowhere else or that would be likely lost with the passing of time."

Jesiek added that all materials can be found on the April 16 archive Web site.

"More recently, we have launched our 'April 16 Archive: Front Pages Collection,' which features hundreds of snapshots of front pages from newspapers all over the world, published in the immediate aftermath of April 16," Jesiek said. "It also includes some front pages from the one-year anniversary of the tragedy. It is browsable by region, country and newspaper."

Hunsinger said he hopes the memory bank will be continually added to for years to come.

"This project has several stages," Hunsinger said. "I think the archive will likely last many years in its current manifestation."

Jesiek said his idea to create the digital memory bank came on the evening of April 16 after he wrote a blog post documenting his reaction to the tragedy.

Documenting "got me to thinking about how many other people were posting similar items, and what would happen to these valuable bits of history," Jesiek said. "An evening or two later, a conversation with some friends at The Cellar turned to the topic of starting a 'digital memory bank' to help collect and preserve memories of the tragedy, including the sorts of items that many of us were reading, viewing and creating."

Steger said the support he has seen on campus from day one has been the defining element of the April 16 tragedy for the Blacksburg community.

"There are some people who continue to struggle, and we must do everything we can to support them," Steger said. "We must continue with our teaching, our research and our outreach. We honor those who died by continuing to fulfill the promise the education affords each of us."