2022-09-06: Why Care About The Past - Hurricane Katrina Edition
The 17th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the US Gulf Coast was just a few days ago (made landfall August 29, 2005). Since I am from Louisiana and my in-laws live in Gulfport, MS, near where the storm made landfall, this was a huge event in my life. I was living in South Carolina at the time and remember watching 24-hour news coverage of the storm's aftermath and scouring online resources to help find a route with working gas stations for my in-laws to safely evacuate to my parents' house in Louisiana. Most people might associate the storm with the flooding of New Orleans, but that actually didn't happen until a couple days after the storm's landfall to the east of New Orleans. In 2010, Michael Nelson and I wanted to build an example to show why web archiving is important, after he received a paper review asking if there was data to show that "Web users would like to get obsolete data or resources ", meaning archived webpages. Since at that time, ...