Everyone has a 9/11 story. An estimated two billion people -- some just blocks away from the catastrophe, others halfway around the world – experienced the attacks in some form that day. The world responded via phone messages, emails, and texts, leaving behind a uniquely personalized record of the horrifying episode.

The only way to tell two billion stories is to use data from the very beginning, from articles to audio interviews.

The events of 9/11 are broadly considered the largest media occurrence in history. They occupy an unorthodox place in our collective memory, falling somewhere between history and current events. As the lead media designer for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, we were challenged to represent the reality of 9/11 as more than a static piece of history.

Throughout the exhibitions, the 9/11 Memorial Museum and our team made it our joint mission to share as many personal and journalistic accounts as possible. Together, we collected, categorized, and visualized thirteen years of memories. These stories and their metadata are at the core of museum’s collaborative storytelling philosophy. The result extends the museum experience into a platform enabling anyone to tell his or her 9/11 story.

We made a radical decision with the 9/11 Memorial Museum team and our colleague exhibition designers to craft an experience that transcends a singular narrative. Instead, it weaves personal history, as told by a wide sampling of those who experienced it, with a timeline of events. Together with this rich team of collaborators, we created a museum for everyone, using algorithms and visualization techniques to make the story of each exhibition clear and engaging for all.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum continues to be well attended, with more than 2.5 million people from all 50 states and 150 nations visiting in the eleven months since opening day on May 21, 2014. To date, more than 200,000 of those visitors have felt compelled to leave behind their own stories at one of the interactive exhibitions. This includes the 5,000 who recorded their thoughts and memories in the Reflecting on 9/11 recording booth, and the 13,000 visitors who have shown their commitment to the museum through memberships.

“The museum has done something powerful... It’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet.”

– Holland Cotter, May 14, 2014, The New York Times

Gathering, interpreting, and exhibiting the massive quantity of data for the 9/11 Memorial Museum exhibition was a seven-year odyssey, the longest engagement our studio has undertaken.

The effort began in 2007 in collaboration with the museum’s curatorial staff, when we erected a recording booth at the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s preview site. We obtained nearly 8,000 recordings of the personal experiences of those directly affected by the attacks, and ultimately used 425 unique speakers from 49 countries in more than 25 languages to create We Remember, the museum’s introductory exhibition.

In 2011, we launched Make History, which leveraged the museum’s growing online database of images, video, and story submissions from the period of collective mourning that occurred in the wake of the attacks to encourage individuals to leave their own stories.

Today, many of the permanent exhibitions collect data to keep the museum’s storytelling current and relevant. Two in particular bear mentioning:

TIMESCAPE:

This 34-foot projection visualizes news articles from 74 media outlets, starting on September 11, 2001 and running through the present day. The database is updated frequently to include the most recent articles, showing 9/11’s continued impact.

REFLECTING ON 9/11

In this exhibition, visitors hear from a diverse group of video interviewees as they confront difficult questions about 9/11 and its aftermath. While numerous business leaders, politicians and those closest to the events contributed, often the most compelling stories are from everyday people. Visitors can leave their own stories in audio and video form at the exhibition’s recording booth. We developed a content management system that museum staff uses to review that footage and continually add fresh content.

The creative use of data didn’t just enhance the 9/11 Memorial Museum: it’s the central nervous system of the museum. Each exhibition houses layered stories that visitors can explore at their own pace, in their own way.

The memorial exhibition, In Memoriam, includes a wall of faces of the almost 3,000 victims who perished on 9/11. The photos by themselves make for a powerful visual. But thanks to the exhibition’s vast archive of metadata, visitors can dive even deeper into the lives of each victim, and understand how victims’ lives intersected, whether they were firefighters, office workers, brothers, husbands or wives. In We Remember, a visualization of audio and text accounts of 9/11 are transposed onto a map of the world, using data collected on where each speaker was on the day of the attacks.

One of the most significant data-driven exhibitions is Timescape, which visualizes millions of articles written in and about the post-9/11 era. Using an algorithm based on research from Columbia University, and designed specifically for the installation, we found the similarity among articles by measuring how often key words appear. The resulting piece shows how the relationships of certain words, topics, and articles reveal deeper truths and shifting trends in the post-9/11 world, such as the long-term negative impact of 9/11 on the airline industry, which lost roughly 55 billion dollars and shed 160,000 jobs in the decade that followed.