Center for Digital Discourse and Culture

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is pleased to announce our Front Pages Collection, an archive of newspaper coverage of the April 16 tragedy. The hundreds of front pages posted on this site were given to the Center by a thoughtful individual in the aftermath of the shootings. Together, they capture a wide variety of responses to, and representations of, the events and aftermath of April 16 from around the world. The collection is organized by geographic location. It can be accessed at: http://april16archive.org/frontpages/

We are pleased to announce that our April 16 Archive has been successfully upgraded to the current version of the Omeka platform. Developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, Omeka is a next-generation online display platform for museums, historical societies, scholars, collectors, educators, and more. The April 16 Archive was running on a pre-release version of Omeka for more than a year, so we are pleased to be on the current version. In addition to improving the site layout and adding some new features, all of our nearly 1900 digital objects have been transferred to the new archive. We hope you will consider visiting the archive, and perhaps even contribute to it.

One year ago today we launched the April 16 Archive. Since then, the archive has expanded to include well over 1700 digital objects. To date we have recorded more than 23,000 visits to the site and over 170,000 page views. On the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, we recorded nearly a thousand visits to the site. In coming months, we will be adding many more objects related to the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, creating a new archive of thousands of newspaper front-pages related to the the events and aftermath of April 16, and upgrading to the newest version of the Omeka platform. In the meantime we hope you will visit the archive and share your files and stories. And if you would like assistance with archiving a large collection, please contact us at admin@april16archive.org.

We are pleased to announce that our April 16 Archive now includes more than 1500 digital objects, moving us closer to our goal of 2000 objects by the summer of 2008. Recent additions include numerous materials related to the tragedy at NIU, including photos from from the February 18 candlelight vigil held here at Virginia Tech. We also continue to archive college media coverage of April 16, all of which is accessible via our Collections page. And for ongoing media coverage about the archive, visit our News page.