Five years on, revisiting the digital archive created after the Boston Marathon bombing is still part of the healing process for Professor of English Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and the others who curated it.
Five years on, revisiting the digital archive created after the Boston Marathon bombing is still part of the healing process for those who curated it.
“It feels like you’re touching a wound,” said Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, one of the archive’s primary investigators. “It’s painful. While there are a lot of wonderful stories that came out of that event—stories of people helping each other, of first responders saving lives—you can still feel that visceral experience of shock, pain, grieving, and loss that people encountered.”
Dillon, along with many others, sprang into action after the bombing on April 15, 2013 that killed three and injured hundreds more. An English professor at Northeastern, she was part of a team of students and faculty who collected and preserved the stories of that day and everything that followed in a project called “Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive.”
