PDF of Our Marathon poster presented at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference in Lausanne (#DH2014). Poster by Our Marathon Project Co-Directors Alicia Peaker and Jim McGrath. The poster highlights Our Marathon's goals, public outreach, and use of Omeka. Best viewed in full screen mode. A community project hosted at Northeastern University, Our Marathon is a crowdsourced digital archive of stories, images, social media, and other content related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. For more information, please visit www.northeastern.edu/marathon or e-mail marathon@neu.edu

1. Archiving the Recent Past
How might digital humanists address the needs of their communities in the wake of
traumatic events like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings?
Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive is a
crowd-sourced digital archive of stories, images, oral histories, and
social media related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and their
aftermath. A community project hosted at Northeastern University’s
NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Our Marathon is both a memo-
rial to the victims and survivors of these events and an attempt to pre-
serve a digital record of recent history. We presently have over 7,000
items in the archive, with more being added every day.
Our Marathon & Omeka
What are the most effective digital tools and practices for the preservation of the recent past?
Community Engagement
How can crowdsourced projects engage and inform participants about the value of “small”
historical narratives present in their firsthand accounts, their metadata, and their
contributions to social media?
Our Marathon reached out to communities in several different ways:
n o r t h e a s t e r n . e d u / m a r a t h o n
Jim McGrath & Alicia Peaker, Northeastern University
“Share Your Story” Events Media & Other Partnerships
Physical Exhibits Social Media Outreach
Using Omeka, the Our Marathon team has:
• Created and inventoried Dublin Core metadata
while it gathers contributions
• Ensured that Northeastern’s Archives and
Special Collections (Our Marathon’s final home)
receives metadata
• Invited students to create exhibits out of the
archive’s materials
• Used Neatline to experiment with “maps” of memorial items left at Copley
Square in Boston