Negotiating Community Literacy Practice: Public Memory Work and the Boston Marathon Bombing Digital Archive

This study examines Our Marathon , which is a digital historiography website created in response to the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15th, 2013. As a participatory archive, Our Marathon is an example of community literacy practice. I explore the construction of community through the public memory work of the archive by examining two collections of archival artifacts: public submissions and the Boston City Archives content. This examination reveals the complexity of community construction, but also the influence of Our Marathon as a material support for the work of public memory. Highlighting the archive's negotiation between an intimate space for community participation in the wake of trauma, and its role as an open, digital archive with global reach, I demonstrate that tensions of this negotiation are useful to highlight the power of the archive as a location of public memory construction, and can suggest ways Our Marathon and other digital historiographic projects can better foster community participation and formation through the reflexive collection, preservation, and display of archival content.