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Abstract
This essay considers how the dead are being memorialised and geographically sited (‘brought home’) on the Internet through the use of online databases that allow collaborative construction of content (wikis, Wikipedia in particular). As my case study, I describe how Wikipedia is both altering and reinforcing more traditional forms of memorialisation in a particular small American city (Bangor, Maine). I argue that while traditional memorials like gravestones and bronze statues are not being supplanted by the Internet, online memorialisation is in fact extending the boundaries of and adding depth to existing physical communities, creating and giving presence to a virtual diaspora of the deceased.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For a discussion of the garden cemetery (also called the ‘rural cemetery’ or ‘park cemetery’), see Curl (Citation2000); Linden-Ward (Citation1989); Sloane (Citation1991).
2 For a discussion of Facebook and memorialisation, see Ebert (Citation2014).
3 Thomas A. Watson, Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Thomas-A-Watson/134,945,936,538,525?fref=ts#] accessed 1 June 2014.
4 I’m of course relying here on memories of my own acculturation into this community from childhood through early adulthood, which occurred in a specific time span, from the early 1960s through the 1980s. I retain contact with friends and relatives there to the present day, however, so have never been entirely out of touch with the city and its self-narratives.
5 I have written about Bangor before in order to make a different argument about collective urban memory and the situation of being or feeling remote as a lever for regional and international engagement. See Clancey (Citation2004).
6 The stone was actually set by a committee then planning a live re-enactment of the shooting, partly as a way to draw publicity to that event, which was in turn a fund-raiser for a consumer advocacy organisation (Marker dedication for Al Brady’s grave, Citation2007)
7 This was Father John (or Johannes) Bapst. The town he was run out of was Ellsworth, south of Bangor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Bapst (accessed 1 June 2015).
8 And even Hamlin had been subjected to violence of a sort. Dropped from the ticket by Lincoln in the latter’s very last election, he thus narrowly missed the presidency itself. One can’t be sure that his statue, in the minds of those who commissioned it, was not also about redressing a felt local humiliation.
9 List of People from Bangor, Maine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Bangor,_Maine. Accessed June 1, 2015.
10 This information comes from utilising the ‘View History’ button on the above web page, and that of its parent page on Bangor, Maine.
11 As of the time of writing, the New York Times no longer allows such free access to its digitised obituaries, but the brief accessibility of that database through Google earlier in the century was apparently crucial to the production of many Wikipedia bio-articles. The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/ ) and the Political Graveyard (http://politicalgraveyard.com/) are still active, although Wikipedia now discourages their use in the construction of ‘notable people’ articles, preferring that authors rely on print sources.
14 List of People from Bangor, Maine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Bangor,_Maine. Accessed June 1, 2015.
15 The historian was my friend James Vickery and his book was ‘An Illustrated History of Bangor, Maine’ (Bangor, 1969) reprinted 1976 by the Bangor Bicentennial Committee as Bangor, Maine: An Illustrated History, 1769–1976. Like any good historian, Vickery certainly had more in his notes than he published in his book. It’s even likely that his hard-won knowledge from print sources included much information about ‘the diasporic dead’ which the genre of ‘local history’ could not accommodate. On the other hand, his print sources were limited to those originating in Bangor. Local newspapers sometimes picked up and reprinted obituary notices from larger papers in Boston or New York of former citizens who died elsewhere, but that was a highly irregular process of transmission.
16 The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/) and the Political Graveyard (http://politicalgraveyard.com/). Similar searchable databases exist for theatre performers, sports figures, artists, authors, etc.
17 See People by City in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_by_city_in_Japan (accessed Nov. 5, 2012); People by Country and City.
18 I am also an occasional contributor of articles to Wikipedia, as well as a regular reader, so am writing as a person acculturated into that community and the sub-community of people who regularly visit the ‘List of People from Bangor, Maine’ site. I also fit the profile of a diasporic reader.
19 Private communication, 14 September 2012. According to the wiki search engine that quantifies edits to a particular page, Buskahegian is responsible for about 20% of edits since 2010 to ‘List of People from Bangor, Maine’, the highest percentage of any user. He/she has also been responsible, according to his/her own Wiki page, for writing almost half of the posted biography pages which link to ‘List of People from Bangor, Maine’, and extensively editing many others, from as early as 2008. User:Buskahegian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Buskahegian; https://tools.wmflabs.org/usersearch/usersearch.py?name=Buskahegian&page=List+of+people+from+Bangor%2C+Maine&server=enwiki&max=500 (both accessed 12 June 2015).
20 SarekOfVulcan was among the longest continuous ‘tenders’ of local notables. He was one of the earliest contributors to the ‘Famous Bangorians’ section of the Bangor Wiki page in 2004 and was still making edits to ‘List of People … ’ as late as 2013. User:SarekOfVulcan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarekOfVulcan (accessed 11 June 2015).
21 User:Namiba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Namiba (accessed June, 2015).
22 User:Clasqm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Clasqm (accessed 1 June 2015).
23 User:Hayford Peirce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hayford_Peirce (accessed 1 June 2015).
24 Hayford Peirce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayford_Peirce (accessed 1 June 2015).
25 Larry S. Neilson, Battleship USS Maine (1895–1898) http://www.cityofart.net/bship/maine.html (accessed 2 November 2012).
26 The Spanish-American War Centennial Website. http://www.spanamwar.com/ (accessed 2 November 2012).
27 A number of similar memorials listing in stone the names of veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam have sprung up around Bangor since the 1990s, most prominently in and around the private Cole Land Transportation Museum.
28 That Lin’s memorial and many subsequent ones that followed her design predated Internet databases does not detract from the argument that such databases have sustained and deepened this insistence on naming everyone, because they do make it seem possible. The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington has itself fostered a number of wall-themed online sites which provide even more information about each person and reorganise it in various ways, such as TheWall-USA.com and VirtualWall.org.
29 While Hamlin’s statue is decontextualised, Chamberlain stands in the middle of a park landscaped to look like ‘Little Round Top’, the portion of the Gettysburg battlefield where he made his famous stand. The battlefield was depicted in the 1993 film Gettysburg, four years before the dedication of the ‘Chamberlain Freedom Park’. The other film featuring Chamberlain was God and Generals (2003). Hamlin, as far as I know, has never been a character in a feature film.
30 Mount Hope Corporation and Cemetery. http://www.mthopebgr.com/ (accessed 2 June 2015).