![Sample our Information Science journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5940/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Communication-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Based on the authors’ mapping of citizen-generated footage from Daraa, the city where the Syria uprising started in March 2011, this article looks at the relation between crowd-sourced archives and processes of history making in times of war. It describes the ‘migrant journey’ of the Daraa archive, from its origins as an eyewitness documentation of the early days of the uprising, to its current status as a digital archive of the Syrian war. It also assesses the effects of digital technologies for rethinking the ways in which our societies bear witness and remember. By so doing, this article attempts to address the pitfalls attending the representation and narrativisation of an ongoing conflict, especially in the light of rising concerns on the precariousness and disappearance of the digital archives. Finally, by engaging with scholarship from archival studies, this article attempts to address the intellectual rift between humanities and archival studies scholars, and is conceived as a call for more collaboration between the two disciplines for a more constructive research on archival representations of conflict.
Notes
1. Gov.uk defines ‘orphan works’ as ‘creative works or performances that are subject to copyright – like a diary, photograph, film or piece of music – for which one or more of the right holders is either unknown or cannot be found.’ Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/copyright-orphan-works.
As issues of ownership of digital media content will be discussed in this article, the emphasis on copyright in the ‘official’ definition above makes ‘orphan work’ a good entry for our analysis of the Daraa archives.
2. Caswell, “The Archive,” paragraph, 28.
3. The mapping of the Daraa archive is currently underway as part of the ‘Un/Framing Syria’ project, a larger research collaboration between author Saber, Dr. Michel Aaron (University of Birmingham), Rami Farah and Liana Saleh (film-makers, Paris), Signe Byrge Sørensen (producer, Denmark) and 0 × 2620 (technology partners, Berlin).
4. Wolfgang, “Aura and Temporality,” 5.
5. McKemmish, “Are Records Ever Actual.”
6. Yeo, “Concepts of Records (1),” 315.
7. Ibid., 331.
8. Ibid., 342.
9. Caswell, “The Archive,” 10.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. Shepherd, “Culture and Evidence,” 173.
12. Ibid., 183.
13. Yadan Drajy, interview and translations by the authors, July 2016.
14. Ibid.
15. McKemmish, “Evidence of Me,” 1/9 in online version.
16. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 129.
17. See note 13 above.
18. Koselleck, Future Past.
19. See note 13 above.
20. Frosh and Pinchevski, Media Witnessing.
21. McKemmish, “Evidence of Me,” 6/9 in online version.
22. Cook, “Evidence and Memory,” 101.
23. Ibid., 111.
24. Andén-Papadopoulos, “Journalism and Memory,” 149.
25. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” 129.
26. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 150.
27. Frosh and Pinchevski, Media Witnessing.
28. Harris, “Power and Memory,” 63.
29. Ibid., 77.
30. See note 13 above.
31. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, 31.
32. See note 13 above.
33. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, 32.
34. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, “Discover Oneself Existing,” 60.
35. Gilliland, “Participatory Archives & Human Rights,” cited in Caswell, “Defining Human Rights Archives,” 209.
36. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, “Discover Oneself Existing,” 75.
37. Ibid., 62.
38. Ibid., 57.
39. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives,” 71.
40. McKemmish, Faulkhead, and Russell, “Distrust in the Archive.”
41. See note 13 above.
42. Azoulay, “Archive,” 195.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 198.
45. Cifor and Gilliland, “Affect and the Archive,” 2.
46. McKemmish, “Evidence of Me,” 7/9 in online version.
47. Yeo, “Concepts of Records (1),” 342.
48. See note 13 above.
49. Ghani, “What We Left Unfinished,” 45.
50. Caswell, “The Archive,” paragraph 19.
51. Ibid., 54.
52. See note 13 above.
53. Hoskins, “Archive Me!” 14.
54. Ibid., 15.
55. Chun, Programmed Visions, 137.
56. Ibid., 138.
57. Caswell, “The Archive,” paragraph 25.