The Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project: Archiving as Testimony, as Evidence, as Creative Practice

Abstract

Founded in 2014, the Syrian Archive is a collective of human rights activists dedicated to curating visual documentation of human rights violations and other crimes committed during the conflict in Syria. Working within the context of the Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project and building on a series of interviews which took place between 2018 and 2022 with 40 photographers and videographers based in Syria or in the diaspora, this article explores the main motivations behind Syrians’ documentation of the uprising/war since 2011. It articulates the potential of this crowd-sourced archive of the uprising-war across three main spaces: its testimonial and historical, its evidentiary, and its creative value. Across all three spaces, the Digital Memory Project, and by extension this article, advocate for the creation of a space where reflections on the value of crowd-sourced archives can happen in their authors’ own voices, rather than on their behalf.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The cities mentioned against the names of videographers quoted throughout this article correspond to the places where they documented the uprising and built their archives, and are not their current location in or outside Syria. The dates given indicate when they were interviewed.

2 https://www.npr.org/2012/02/01/146235292/30-years-later-photos-emerge-from-killings-in-syria?t=1599922343301; accessed June 2023.

3 https://web.archive.org/web/20130522172157/http://www.shrc.org/data/aspx/d5/2535.aspx; accessed June 2023.

4 https://syrianarchive.org/en/about; accessed June 2023.

5 We have found Ristovska’s concept of “eyewitness video content” quite useful for the argument that our contribution is attempting to make, and so have used it throughout the article when referring to the crowd-sourced audiovisual material produced by Syrian photographers and videographers interviewed as part of this research, and more widely the Digital Memory Project.

6 https://syrianarchive.org/en/memory; accessed June 2023.

7 See Taylor (2003) on archival memory; Appadurai (2003) on the role of archives in the production of community memories; and Garde-Hansen (2011) on the relation between digital media, memory and archiving.

8 “The umbrella term ‘human rights archives’ thus encompasses bureaucratic records that were created during the abuse itself; documentation created by human rights activists and lawyers after the fact for use in trials, tribunals, and truth commissions; stories recorded by survivors, victims’ family members and communities to memorialize the dead and forge collective memory of past injustice; and, increasingly, forensic evidence such as DNA samples and satellite imagery that establish scientific facts about large-scale violence. All of these records are subject to and made meaningful through archival intervention via appraisal, selection, description, digitization, preservation, and outreach.” (Caswell 2014, 208)

9 In reference to Anna Reading’s account of “server farms, or global memory factories,” the large-scale industrial complexes which provide the infrastructure to sustain corporate social media companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, described by her as “large memory-hungry factories” (Reading 2014, 749).

10 In reference to Andrew Hoskins’ borrowing of Paul Virilio’s concept of “residual abundance” to attest for the paradoxically “exhilarating and overwhelming” availability of archives as made possible by new media technologies, making it unimaginable in both scale and in its accessibility and searchability (Hoskins 2011, 24).

11 It is important to draw attention here to the 2013-founded archive The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (https://beta.creativememory.org; accessed June 2023), as well as to the contributions of the SyriaUntold initiative (https://syriauntold.com; accessed June 2023) for creating a space for Syrian cultural and creative actors (writers, filmmakers, photographers, novelists, etc.) to share their own testimonials of the Syrian uprising.

12 https://syriaaccountability.org/; accessed June 2023.

13 http://sn4hr.org/; accessed June 2023.

Additional information

Funding

Dima Saber’s contribution to this article was partly supported (2019–20) through the “Resistance-by-Recording” project based at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. The research was made possible by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, reference no. P14-0562:1.

Notes on contributors

Dima Saber

Dima Saber writes on media depictions of conflict and on the role of archival records in identity building processes, in such countries as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Palestine. She was recently attached to the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (Birmingham City University), and is now at Meedan, leading Check Global, providing software, media literacy training and capacity-building opportunities to various organizations in over 40 countries. E-mail: [email protected]

Abdul Rahman al-Jaloud

Abul Rahman al-Jaloud is a co-founder of the Yemeni Archive, who has worked as a regional advisor at WITNESS, establishing networks of human rights activists and citizen journalists. He has also done research on Syria for several institutions, such as the Carnegie Middle East Center, Princeton University, and NHK World Japan. He founded the Syrian Digital Memory project, now based at the Syrian Archive. E-mail: [email protected]