A Digital Library for Recovery, Research, and Learning From April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech

• Published in: Traumatology (Tallahassee, Fla.) Fla.), 2008-03, Vol.14 (1), p.64-84
• Main Authors: Fox, Edward A., Andrews, Christopher, Fan, Weiguo, Jiao, Jian, Kassahun, Ananya, Lu, Szu-Chia, Ma, Yifei, North, Chris, Ramakrishnan, Naren, Scarpa, Angela, Friedman, Bruce H., Sheetz, Steven D., Shoemaker, Donald, Srinivasan, Venkat, Yang, Seungwon, Boutwell, Laura
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communities; Digital Libraries; Human; Internet; Learning; Libraries; Online Social Networks; School Violence; Technology; Trauma
• ISSN: 1534-7656; 1085-9373
• DOI: 10.1177/1534765608315632

The authors are developing a digital library to help during the long-term recovery from the mass shooting on April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech. Content comes from uploaded texts, images, videos, and other files, as well as pages crawled from the Web and information collected, with permission, from those working with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Flickr. The authors are applying data/text mining, social network analysis, and information visualization methods to facilitate systems science, providing key added-value services, especially to social and behavioral scientists seeking faster and easier ways to analyze, model, understand, and test hypotheses. The article also considers how technologies influence communications. The authors aim to support the university, local community, region, nation, and the world, as it seeks to learn from a tragic event.