I’m Kurt Johnson. I’ve been working with Joel on the Ashes of Waco material since the beginning of October. I’m extremely excited to be involved in this project. I’m a recent graduate of the School of Information at the University of Texas, and I’ve been interested for years in many topics related to this undertaking, from information organization to digital preservation, from the variety and history of religious belief to civil rights and questions of government power (and abuse thereof).
My first task here was to go through the archive, box by box, and enter folder details into a searchable database. This process allowed me to familiarize myself with the collection’s contents. It was also something of a journey of discovery: I had some previous knowledge of the events that occurred outside of Waco in 1993, and was aware of various controversies surrounding those events, but I was unprepared for the ocean of history, facts and myriad interpretations of those facts, evidence, legal and governmental documents, transcripts, first-hand accounts and private correspondence, official and underground rhetoric, newspaper reports, theories, conjectures, and more that awaited me. It got pretty overwhelming at times, but the material is important and fascinating, tragic and at times outrageous, and gradually certain ideas began to take shape for me.
Recently, I began scanning representative documents and digitizing select videotapes in preparation for uploading to the internet. Our server space will not permit us to post everything we’d like to add, but we hope to be able to host a broad range of representative items. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, or requests, please feel free to contact us.
Over the course of this endeavor, we will be posting sample material to the blog. Here is a photo from a large batch I recently digitized:
The above photo was taken shortly after 12:10 pm on 4/19/93. The archive contains over 130 aerial photos from that day, starting before 11:15 am. These photos illustrate the gradual dismantling of Mt. Carmel over the course of the morning.
Comments