The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster struck at a time of dramatic change in media and communications. The ways in which news of the disasters reached audiences around the world; the communication tools adopted by affected populations in the aftermath; our methods of recording and commemorating March 11th, 2011--all of these reflect the magnitude of that change. Through presentations on such topics as international media coverage of the disasters, citizen radiation mapping, and digital archiving, this panel event seeks to provide valuable insight into how our evolving media and communications landscape impacted the way people learned about, responded to, and remember 3/11.

Speaker Bios

Molly Des Jardin is the Japanese studies librarian at University of Pennsylvania. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.Before coming to Penn, she served as the archive development manager on Harvard’s Digital Archive of Japan's 2011 Disasters.

Jamie Matthews is Lecturer in Communication and Media at Bournemouth University. Jamie's research interests center on media coverage of crisis and its influence on public opinion. He has published on discourses of counterterrorism policy, news sources and audience perception. He is currently researching international news coverage of the 2011 disaster in Japan.

Jean-Christophe Plantin is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, affiliated with the Communication Studies Department and the School of Information. His research investigates information systems and visualization technologies and their use for civic participation. He is the author of Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography (Wiley, 2014).

Cosponsored by the Japanese Studies Interdisciplinary Colloquium