Abstract:

Through quilt texts, women expanded their domestic rhetoric into a public realm. The quilting tradition suggests a method for creating a collaborative and polyvocal technology. The Digital Story Quilt project adapts quilters' tactics, as defined by the author, to give voice to and provide a place for everyday stories and situated knowledge. Through the stories of Hurricane Katrina survivors, the author demonstrates the power of patchwork quilting to reach across geography and time to unite a community.

My husband's family is from New Orleans so we were literally thrown into the eye of the storm that was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Four generations of his family lived in the city and its surroundings for well over 70 years. And the destruction of the hurricane cast them from their homes -- just in time for some to avoid the devastating breech of the levies and the floods that left their homes uninhabitable.

In the days following the hurricane, I tried to keep in touch with relatives scattered all over the United States -- from Houston to Washington, D.C. to Nashville. I tried to find housing for displaced family and find relatives still unaccounted for who had stayed behind. I became frustrated at the technologies on the web for finding missing people. The technologies required too much personal information and didn't allow families to post pictures of missing relatives.

Instead of becoming paralyzed in this emotional aftermath, I went into action.

I had been awarded a grant to develop kiosk software for an interactive, digital installation based on my dissertation research at the Orange County Regional History Center in downtown Orlando in December 2005. But as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina began to unfold, a more urgent mission called me to adapt the kiosk software to capture the stories of hurricane survivors.The Digital Story Quilt for Hurricane Katrina Survivors and Family was born out of these horrendous events on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans and out of the grief, experiences, and courage of the storm's survivors.

Author Biography:

Michelle Barrett Ferrier, Ph.D. is associate dean for innovation at the Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University. Michelle's research interests include digital communities, online journalism, online education and digital ethnography. Her dissertation research, centered around the Digital Story Quilt project, examines the role of digital technologies in creating and sustaining digital identity and social networks.