Sponsored by the Chugoku Shikoku Internet Council (a group based in Hiroshima), the A-Bomb WWW Museum represents a memorial, assembling a diverse set of materials--e.g., first-person accounts, photographs (spanning the period from 1945 to the present), interviews--associated with the events of August 6, 1945. The materials approximate a "thick site" to the limited extent that they offer a multifaceted account of a single incident, capturing the impact of the bomb in terms of the physical (e.g., the effect on the human body, the infrastrucuture of the city) as well as in terms of its performative dimension (e.g., how it persists in oral tradition, as passed on to future generations).
However, the site also possesses an explicit agenda for the present, advocating an antinuclear stance, and in this sense it functions as an archive, with its elements carefully selected for maximum ideological impact.
Fluctuating between these two poles, the site also works on a third level, offering a metacommentary on the nature of collective memory, considering what it means to write history. In terms of its priorities, the "memorial" takes precedence, a fact empahsized both in its structural design and in its relative proportions, the amount of space devoted to particular topics.
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