Blue Velvet is an online

ONLINE

ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....

 digital history

Digital history

Digital history is the use of digital media and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history, Cliometrics, and History and Computing...

 project about the city of New Orleans both before and after Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...

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The project was published in the fifth issue of Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular

Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular

Vectors is an international online journal produced by the University of Southern California's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Launched in March 2005, the journal's current issue is its fifth, titled "Difference". Through all of the issues, Vectors has featured over thirty scholarly new media...

, entitled "Difference." The full title of the project is "Blue Velvet: Redressing New Orleans in Katrina's Wake."

Creation and design

Blue Velvet was created through the collaboration of David Theo Goldberg

David Theo Goldberg

David Theo Goldberg, PhD was born and raised in South Africa, where he later received degrees in philosophy and economics from the University of Cape Town. He also holds a PhD in philosophy from City University of New York...

, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI

UCHRI

The University of California Humanities Research Institute , is a university system-wide research institute at the University of California under the University of California Office of the President and headquartered at the UC Irvine campus...

), and a graduate research assistant, Stefka Hristova. These two were assisted in the implementation of the site by the digital artist and designer Erik Loyer

Erik Loyer

Erik Loyer is a digital artist whose work examines identity and memory in the context of new modes of communications afforded by media technologies....

, currently creative director of the journal.

Blue Velvet was conceived as a multimedia presentation of a journal article which Goldberg had previously published, "Deva-stating Disasters: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans" and which had been noticed by Tara McPherson, one of the founding editors of Vectors. From the first meeting, the group became aware that "the writing had to be envisaged in a more creative and experimental form," both as a result of the kinds of material they planned to use and the architecture of the site.

The design of the site was the result of "intense weekly conversations over something like a year" and includes images, text, video, and sound files. The project is set to the composition "Apparition," written by Liu Sola

Liu Sola

Liu Sola is a Chinese composer, author, and vocalist.She has worked with James Blood Ulmer, Jerome Bailey, Wu Man, Henry Threadgill, Umar Bin Hassan, and Bill Laswell....

.

Content

The content of the project is available through two different presentations. The first presentation, the main project http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/5/bluevelvet/, is an interactive, linear presentation of text organized in the form of 24 "arguments." The second presentation is an interactive index http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/05_issue/bluevelvet/prjindex/ which allows the reader to navigate the text of the project independently. The project examines the effect of the hurricane on the city, and "underscores...that the tragic events that unfolded in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast were possible precisely because of years of neoliberal policies that underwrote the necessary conditions for such devastation in the first place."

Arguments and key phrases

The reader progresses through the project argument by argument by clicking on key phrases associated with each argument. This gives the reader access to the maps, images, graphs, videos and audio files as well as the text of each argument. The arguments and key phrases composing Blue Velvet are:

Argument	Key Phrase
New Orleans	Sociality
Preferences	Neo-conservatism
Liberty	Homogeneity
Activist Segregation	Segregation
Redlining	Redistrict
Conservationist Segregation	Race Neutrality
Racial Privacy/Privatizing Race	Born-again Racism
Catastrophe	Disaster Relief
Apparitions	Signs
Politics of Fear	Fear
Crisis Management	Vulnerability
Emergency	Immobility
Carcerality	Structural Racism
Exposure	Civility
Violence	Special Treatment
Skin	Condomization
Mis-recognition	Immigration
Surviving	Live free or die
Militarization	Redistribute
In-security	Security
In-Visibility	Pollution
Disenchantment	Privatization
Singing the Blues	Surgical
Re-Dress	Homogenized apartness