Sept. 22, 2008
Individuals interested in news on disasters can get it directly from the source — victims, according to University of Wisconsin-Stout assistant professor Daisy Pignetti. Through personal experience and research, she has learned disaster victims use blogging to connect with other victims and to help spread the untold human story behind disasters.
Pignetti, who teaches in the English and philosophy department at UW-Stout, started blogging on the subject of Hurricane Katrina as she worked on her dissertation for her doctoral degree. She found that there were many ways blogging could be more useful than conventional methods of writing or conventional news sources.
“Journalists can only stay there so long. They had to move on to other stories,” Pignetti said.
Pignetti’s original intention was to simply study blogging and its uses. Then Hurricane Katrina struck. She found her area of focus when her childhood home, the one in which her parents still lived, was destroyed.
“No one was covering my neighborhood, so I was in denial for almost two months that anything had ever flooded there, but then we had about 10 feet of water in our house,” Pignetti said.
She sought information from family and friends in New Orleans, weather and citizen blogs, and traditional news sources. Blogging, she found, could shed light on things the major news sources could not, due to time constrictions. Blogs could be never-ending and infinitely detailed. They could also provide comfort by bringing people with similar experiences together.
“It has kind of a healing aspect to it,” Pignetti said. “Also, there’s the idea of getting the real story out there.”
Three months after the disaster, Pignetti went to New Orleans to witness the devastation, and six months after the event, saw her family’s house. She found many people with similar experiences, and she learned how blogging connected them. Through her own blog, Pignetti even found distant family members who were interested in learning how her family was doing.
“Three years later, a lot of people can forget about it, but the locals will never forget about it and I won’t forget about it, so where are the places we can go to find more information?”
Pignetti explores her frustrations and thoughts as a guest blogger at Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster and and in early posts (beginning summer 2005) on her personal blog at Doctor Daisy.
She also contributed an essay on the Publius Project blog titled, “Computers and Writing: Lessons in Literacy from the New Orleans Blogosphere and the Composition Classroom.” It is online here. The Publius Project is part of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Another one of her essays, “Big Easy Blogs: The Truth from Post-Katrina New Orleans,” was posted on PlaceBlogger. This essay has been cited by other bloggers.
Today, she is a member of NOLA Bloggers and the Hurricane Information Center.
For more information, contact Pignetti at pignettid@uwstout.edu or 715-232-5139.
