Peter S. Bearman and Mary Clark Columbia University
The project will collect the first wave of narrative oral histories from six samples of New York residents with varying degrees of contact with the World Trade Center. These oral histories are planned as the first wave of what would be three waves of interviews that would track how individuals' narrative accounts of those events are shaped over time by public narratives and come to conform to a standard narrative account. The project will also analyze differences in these narrative accounts across the six New York samples, comparing for instance, the stories from people who lost family members, stories from surviving rescue workers, and stories from the general population less directly involved in the World Trade Center events. The use of oral histories will provide broad textual sources that reveal not only what people know but how people (and society) construct narratives and create meanings for critical events such as September 11. Network and sequence analysis methods will be used to explore the structure of how the textual elements are put together into a coherent narrative, and how that structure changes over time and differs among groups.
