Tragedies on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake can leave us reeling, overwhelmed by too much information, and so much of it bad news. We can be left paralyzed. Technology has helped us more easily speed dollars to relief efforts but Haiti’s lack of infrastructure has made it difficult to supply that aid as quickly as the devastation there requires.

My friend, Kellie Walsh, is helping out by sorting through the noise to find some signal, by providing a Web site (thanks, WordPress) to document what’s happening as it happens so that context doesn’t get lost later when, as she puts it, “after the details and memories have grown hazy.”

Her site, Haiti Digital Bibliography, explains her aim, an important one in a world where we suffer not from too little information but too much.

In an effort to preserve a small slice of what happened and how the world responded in the days after the tragic earthquake … 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.

You can help her effort, contributing information and/or helping organize it. You can also donate money to various relief efforts. I’ve added links to three in the ad space throughout the Cosmic Sitcom, thanks to Kellie’s direction.

ABOVE Aerial photo of downtown Port au Prince, Haiti. Source: United Nations Development Program on Flickr.
Used under Creative Commons license.