Salvation by Imagination

utnereader:

Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger are two Internet archivists who have put together a project called “Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.” Kahle explains: “[9/11] was a major event, that was really a television event. People understood this through television.”

The archive is a collection of 3,000 hours of television news from around the world from September 11 to September 17. The project is exhaustive and impressive, at times even overwhelming—seeing all the news organizations’ coverage in one spot. Watching Charles Gibson reference New York fashion week going into a break, on the other side of which would be footage of one burning tower, has an effect like nothing felt on the page. It brings you back to that exact moment. Read more …