November 1, 2001
The Home Front: Documents play supportive role in tragedy
Since Sept. 11, Americans and people living throughout the world have been adjusting to new realities and new questions. Can we build terror-resistant buildings and cities? Does mass communications aid terrorists, or deter them? Need we sacrifice our civil liberties as the price for security? Do international studies programs help us respond to global threats? How can we go on with our daily lives in the face of such horrific losses? For the rest of fall quarter, University Week will explore such questions in a weekly question-and-answer column with faculty and staff in such fields as law, architecture, communications, information sciences and international studies. Please send comments or suggestions to uweek@u.washington.edu.
University Week: You recently went to New York City and visited your parents, who live five blocks from the World Trade Center. How does that part of Manhattan feel to you now?
David Levy: One thing I noticed was the smell. My mother describes it as burning rubber. It was painful to see the devastation at the actual site, but frankly it was also encouraging to see how the city goes about its business. The weather was gorgeous, and anybody who knows New York knows those fall days when it’s clear and cool. So it was jarring, because on the one hand there’s the knowledge that something horrible happened here. On the other hand, it’s this crisp fall day.
UWeek: You also viewed New York through the filter of your academic interest – the creation and use of documents in human society. What documents seemed most important to you in New York?
Levy: Bellevue Hospital has hundreds of feet of wall space devoted to the handmade “missing” posters that were put up right after the attack. It’s been named the Wall of Prayers. I found other, smaller memorials, some including well-wishes from schoolchildren. On Broadway, I saw this poster signed by a fifth grade girl named Alison from Silver Oak Elementary School in San Jose.
UWeek.: Those sound like signs of humanity. Wouldn’t it be chilling to think of New York now without them – if human beings were somehow prevented from producing documents?
Levy: The story I tell about documents is that they’re little creatures – “talking things” – that we make and send out into the world to do certain things for us. So you could ask, “What about this poster from San Jose? What is this thing for?” Well, clearly, it’s a surrogate for an individual, a girl named Alison, who could have come to New York and stood on that corner and said, “New York, I hope you get better.” Functionally, the poster is kind of a surrogate for Alison; her parents are probably just as happy that she sent it to New York instead of standing out on a windy street corner herself. All over the city are these little “talking things” proclaiming their love and their concern.
UWeek: That’s quite a novel way to experience a walk in New York – as being surrounded by love and concern!
Levy: The missing posters, too, are serving as surrogates – first as a substitute for people running around to different hospitals saying, “Have you seen my loved one, my wife, my daughter?” But then, once people have begun to realize their loved ones aren’t coming back, these posters stand there as reminders. They are, each one of them, a kind of testament to a life that’s no longer there.
UWeek: You’re saying that a document is functional, and not just a symbol of something else?
Levy: It certainly can be a symbol, too. Remember the news stories that talked about all the fragments of documents that rained down from the towers? It’s clear that those fragments symbolize the lives lost. Newspapers understandably won’t show body parts or cadavers, but they will show these fragments of documents, which stand for those lives. And these shards, these pieces of paper, not only symbolize the destruction of the individuals, but of all the practices, all the human activities that these documents were somehow supporting. After all, documents are our agents in endless activities, bureaucratic and otherwise. So that in all the procedure manuals and forms and so forth blown all over the city, we see the huge web of human activities that were somehow being enacted within and through the World Trade Center. All those practices got blown up too.
UWeek: It might be quite shattering to encounter one of these fragments.
Levy: That brings up the most meaningful part of my trip. There’s a storefront on Prince Street where a couple of artists decided to set up a kind of democratic gallery of images from the tragedy, called Here is New York. They’ve announced that anybody who wants to bring in their photographs, please do. They’re scanning them in and printing them out on archival-quality paper and hanging them. People can come in and actually buy them for $25 each, all proceeds going to charity. There are images of all different kinds – the rescue workers, the towers burning. But what really caught my attention was the number of photos that actually have something to do with documents. One shows a dusty, deserted street with documents scattered around, and in the middle of the street a man is standing reading a piece of paper! Another of the most moving pictures is a closeup of a missing poster, but the missing poster has been rained on, so the face of the loved one has now been lost and the text is disappearing. It’s a sad commentary on, first, the loss of this individual, and now, the loss of the memorial.
UWeek: It sounds like this gallery gives New Yorkers a place to vent their emotions.
Levy: All day long, people are coming in bringing their pictures, and all day long, people are quietly, in a reverential way, looking at these images. I didn’t find any other place that seemed to be such an active memorial. At a time when people are asking, “What can we possibly do?” here’s something that people are actually doing. They’re doing it by bringing in their photos, and by buying photos, and by volunteering to work there, and by coming through and being with other people.
UWeek: In your book, you’re interested in the full gamut of documents, from a rare Shakespeare folio to a humble tuna-sandwich receipt. Does New York cause you to rethink any conclusions?
Levy: A lot of what I was trying to say is that all of our documents, all of our written forms, are precious. You can analyze them functionally, and say, “This thing is helping me pay the telephone company,” or whatever. But when you look closely at any one of them, you can see that it’s a window onto our culture and our lives. And, in a funny way, each one is precious. So, for example, some of the images in that gallery in New York are closeups of documents that got blown out of the World Trade Center. Some of them a person would never have thought to photograph before – there’s a singed ledger book that’s actually, in a way, quite beautiful. All documents have this almost numinous quality, I believe, but it’s only in rare moments like these that people are likely to see that. It’s like the preciousness of human life. It’s only understood at certain moments. But that preciousness is always there.
Levy, a professor at The Information School, earned his doctorate in computer science from Stanford University, studied calligraphy and bookbinding and worked as a research scientist in Silicon Valley at Xerox PARC. His book, “Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age,” has just been released.
