Title: From Inbox to Archive: Reading 9/11’s Digital Traces
Date & Time: Monday, November 17th, 2025
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
PCN 2012 6445 University Blvd
Light refreshments provided. Please RSVP.
Sponsored by the Department of Educational Studies and Department of History
Abstract: On the morning of September 11, 2001, online spaces lit up: colleagues checked in by email and BlackBerry, and by 9:51 a.m. a Yahoo! Groups listserv (“wtctalk”) was live. Those exchanges, preserved in the September 11 Digital Archive and the Internet Archive, offer a timestamped record of collective sense-making throughout and after the attacks.
My talk shares what a historian can learn from reading that corpus at scale two decades later, both from a historical and from a technical perspective. I’ll introduce the archive and my book-in-progress, show what the messages reveal about emotion, rumour, and coordination across the day, and unpack the practical and ethical hurdles of working with early-2000s born-digital materials. These include issues of inconsistent metadata, a wide variety of digital formats, privacy, and my current struggles with whether or not I should “re-publish” this data. I’ll close with concrete design lessons for anyone building “living archives” or “documenting-the-now” projects today, so they’re usable by researchers twenty years from now.
Speaker: Professor Ian Milligan is Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis at the University of Waterloo. His main research focus is on web archives and digital resources as these affect the historian’s craft. He has published several books and articles on this topic (including Averting the Digital Dark Age, Johns Hopkins Press, 2024 & History in the Age of Abundance, MQUP, 2019). He also published a book, Rebel Youth (UBC Press 2014), on young workers in the New Left during the ‘long 1960s.’ Professor Milligan is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.