Filmmaker and friend Carlos Pedraza surprised me this morning with a flattering spotlight on the Haiti Digital Bibliography:

Many, many thanks to Carlos for the support, the help, and for spreading the word. The HDB has been an odd and, at times, spastic endeavor thus far, but it has been interesting to note the different (and sometimes not) angles at which writers and analysts have gone about addressing the Haiti earthquake(s). From the headlines alone, you can see the vital role modern technology has played in the course of events.

To contribute a link to this ever-evolving list of digital sources about the Haiti earthquake and its aftermath, please drop an URL to haitilinks @ gmail . com. To donate to relief efforts in Haiti, take your pick.

Check out Carlos’s ongoing film projects at Blue Seraph Productions and his cultural analyses and coast-to-coast adventures on The Cosmic Sitcom.

Banner by Carlos Pedraza used with permission. Aerial photo of downtown Port au Prince, Haiti. Source: United Nations Development Program on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

I’m no doctor. I’m not a reporter. I give what I can. I organize stuff.

I threw together a blog the other day. It’s just a (semi-chronological) jumble of headlines right now, but with it I’m compiling links to build a bibliography of digital resources about the Haiti earthquake and its aftermath. Quoting myself,

In an effort to preserve a small slice of what happened and how the world responded in the days after the tragic earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, I’ve set up this site to compile a bibliography of digital resources about the event and its aftermath. Though a comprehensive list of all digital materials on the web would be impossible, I hope this currently random jumble of headlines can be organized into a bibliography that might later prove helpful to those who seek documentation and understanding of what happened in these frantic few days.

It’s not food or water or medical supplies. It’s just what I’ve got.

If you’d like to add some links or help write some citations, send me an email at my usual address or at haitilinks @ gmail . com. The task is big, but it’s not hard. And maybe it might prove helpful to someone some day.

Lengthy for online reading, but worth the eyestrain:

“The Book Mechanic: A modern sensibility binds Terry Belanger to old, rare volumes”
by Andrew Witmer

Some years ago, Terry Belanger found a striking way to reveal the reverence that many citizens of the digital age continue to feel for old books. . . . [He] brings an old volume to class, speaks about its binding and typography, and then, still discussing the book, rips it in half and tears it into pieces. As his horrified students watch in disbelief, Belanger tosses the shards into a nearby trash can and murmurs, “Bibliography isn’t for sissies.”

. . .

Eschewing the false opposition between technology and the book, Belanger has brilliantly made the rapid development of new digital technologies one of his leading arguments for the preservation of rare books. . . . He believes that books do certain things well and digital technologies do other things well. The two should coexist without trying to eliminate each other.

I want that job.

When I went to bed last night, I had planned on spending Monday morning writing up a progress report to let you kind folks know what I’ve been up to; but while I slept, Tehran exploded.

Communication is my vocation, not politics. I don’t intend to go on a spirited rant about the questionable Iranian elections, and I’ll be honest: I don’t know enough about Mousavi or Ahmadinejad or the situation to do so. I know enough to know whom I feel is the lesser of two evils, but I know too little to truly understand by how much. I’m under-informed. I’m not proud of that.

Yet for the past few hours I’ve been glued to the internet, watching events unfold—often in real time—as reports about the situation in Tehran have filtered in. Not from the cable news bureaus and web portals, of course; most of them are too busy hawking features on careers with “bad reputations” and tripe about “Speidi” (both of which I refuse to link) to give such news items precious column space.

But while mainstream headlines are still reporting the same one widely confirmed death of a protester that occurred hours ago, a resident in Tehran* is tweeting—right now—about ISP outages and men on motorbikes creating mayhem around the city. Students under siege* in the university posted updates before finally finding their chance to flee their dorms. Everyday citizens with camera phones and digital cameras are uploading videos documenting daytime injuries and nighttime chants to youtube. Writers Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic) and Robert Mackey (The New York Times) are compiling eye-witness reports, analyses, photos, and videos of the events as they unfold, while actor and author Stephen Fry and dozens of others are broadcasting proxy IP addresses to make it possible for locals in Iran to communicate around government filters and censors.

These aren’t old friends bombarding you with chain letters and braindead Facebook quizzes; these aren’t 140-character updates on Junior’s latest bowel movement or Aunt Sophie’s cats. These are real people in real time sharing the real life crises that they are living through, and doing so with the help of social media sites and strangers from around the world.

Not every report or source will turn out to be credible: for the last 36 hours, Mousavi’s Wikipedia page has been revised more than 50 times, many of those changes reflecting pro- or anti-Mousavi stances (as well as others’ attempts to neutralize the language). In the middle of a hurricane, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Independent observation is needed; the mainstream media needs to wake the hell up.

But hundreds of thousands of people came together in Tehran today; they formed a crowd five miles long and peacefully made a statement. They aren’t faceless multitudes. Whether you agree with them or not, these are people fighting to be heard—and because their own media will not speak for them, they have found a way to speak for themselves.

I am disturbed to read of the violence and fear, and I really hope things settle down. But I am just in awe of our ability to globally communicate like this. It’s amazing. I’ve got no excuse to know so little. Somehow, some way, information is getting out there, and information is powerful.

*Although such citizens have been well documented elsewhere, I prefer to err on the side of safety and paranoia and have therefore removed links to their Twitter pages.