Cyber memorial for Sewol

By Kim Ji-myung

“Sae-hyeon, this is Dad. I will never forget you. I am so sorry that I was not there to save you.” ― A note on a desk at Danwon High School, Ansan, South Korea.

This is a message from a suffering father sent to his dead son, one of more than 300 victims of the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014. The high school lost 250 students and 11 teachers in the worst peacetime disaster in Korean history.

In April last year, a group of college professors opened online project “teachsewol.org”. A more direct translation of the Korean title would be “Sewol classroom”. It aims to serve as an arena for chats and discussions among teachers and students on the accident.

Professors from the Catholic University of Korea, Kaywan University of Art and Design, Seoul National University, Sookmyung Women’s University, Postec, Hanyang University and KAIST joined the editorial committee.

“We created this website to discover the facts about the accident and to locate the people responsible through political, social and legal processes. But what is equally important is to continue the efforts to understand the meaning of this mishap.”

This initiative seems to have been inspired by two precedents, including the naming of the site, one in the United States and one in Japan. “In 1965, professors and students spent long hours discussing the war in Vietnam,” one of the professors said.

This Japanese site https://teach311.org/ was an outcome of the daunting tsunami that engulfed Japan on March 11, 2011. “Teach 3.11 is a multi-language collaborative project that helps teachers, students and scholars locate and share educational resources related to understanding large-scale disasters, such as the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters in Japan,” the site states.

For the collection and research materials related to Sewol, graduate students from science, sociology and law have volunteered. KAIST sponsors the project while the social enterprise Cause & Company offers technical support.

The teachsewol.org team has a long list of work to do. Teachsewol.org is an archive where dispersed materials will be collected and arranged into a textbook for schools. Anyone can use it in the classroom. The editor-professors also plan to share materials and research results.

They say teachsewol.org is an online project that creates an open curriculum for high school teachers and college professors who would like to teach, learn and discuss the issue.

Questions they have raised include "What does it mean to count lives with numbers?" "What is the redemption for the damage they suffered?" "If we call the Sewol ferry incident a traffic accident, what are the assumptions?”

Prof. Jeon Chi-hyeong of KAIST said, “Teachers suffer sorrow, rage and frustration equally with students. The site will be a forum for confessions to all those that have lost their ways.”

Of the many tragic accidents in history, those innocent victims of the Sewol case will remain long in the hearts of people all over the world. And I would like to express my admiration to those visionaries who began teachsewol.org.

As a student of digital humanities, researching the recent projects for a virtual gallery or a museum, I would like to propose another site for Sewol ― an open digital museum for Sewol.

“The National September 11 Memorial Museum serves as the country's principal institution concerned with exploring the implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events and exploring 9/11's continuing significance."

This is the statement you face first when you visit 9.11’s memorial museum online. Of course, there is the physical museum at the very site where the Trade Center was destroyed. The purpose of the online museum is the same with teachsewol.org.

Compared with teachsewol.org site, the digital September 11 museum may have more visitors because it is in English, and “museum” seems to be more open to a wider range of people than classroom or teaching site.

A study of collective psychology pointed out that people perceive a death of historical significance such as that of a president or a large-scale disaster like Sewol and a tsunami in two different ways.

One is to take it as a historical death, as an event of the past, shared by all, trying to interpret the meaning. On the contrary, another is to feel the loss as a current death. It is to feel the agony of loss as a contemporary, and let the anger and sorrow dominate over objective reasoning.

Another expert pointed out that an accident involving massive casualties in history is retextualized and experienced through media coverage. Any event can be narrated by three kinds of observers ― a witness, a commentator or a mediator.

The reporting by media will be part of the testimony of the event, and sometimes dramatize, justify or provide shared interpretations and understandings of significance. As a result, the event can become a medium of social consensus and integration.

Someday, the Sewol Memorial Museum I am proposing may stand tall as a beautiful pavilion in the air, with numerous rooms and galleries, with unlimited space to display documents, photos, and videos. Changing or updating its contents will be a piece of cake.

And the people of the world may visit and listen to the sad stories and lessons thereof, through serious scientific research documents about the tragedy that happened in Korea in 2014 ― if only the texts are given in English.

The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is heritagekorea21@gmail.com.