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.

THE EVENTS OF 1982

The authors: Tell us about Hama.

Hakawati: I was four years old. I don’t know much about Hama. I know what my mother and my grandmother told me. My father never spoke about the massacre, and I never asked… I am convinced there are things I remember seeing with my own eyes, but maybe I have made some of that up, from the stories I have heard. The people of Hama call it the valley of anguish. I don’t know if the name only stuck to it after the massacre, but until the 2011 revolution, I always thought of Hama as a city of mourning. The people of Hama are very reserved and self-contained. It is not that they don’t trust other people, but it is probably because of the exclusiveness of the massacre. It was theirs. My grandmother used to say that during the 27 days of the massacre, she thought the same thing was happening everywhere else in Syria. She lost five of her sons in the massacre, half of her children. She thought the same death was shared by all Syrians. It somehow made it easier. It was only after she went to Aleppo a few years later, and that she started to talk about it with other people, that she realized it was only in Hama, that no one else knew what happened there. It was a big shock. She never left her house after that until she died in 2008. There was a weird habit in Hama; if people spoke about the massacre, they would do so only behind closed doors, and the massacre would be called a massacre, the martyrs, and the disappeared, political prisoners. In the street, or in the presence of someone from another city, the massacre became “the events of 1982,” and no one ever mentioned the victims. Fear, I think. Ever since Hafez al-Assad, the only identity all of us Syrians shared was fear. (Hakawati, Hama/Aleppo,¹ May 2020)

Barely any tangible trace remains today of the Hama massacre, aside from the testimonies of those who survived it. A few pictures of the destroyed neighborhoods surfaced online in 2012, but their origin and authors remain unknown;² these are the only visual records of the assault by air strikes and tank rounds, and the 27 days siege imposed by the Syrian Arab Army over the city. There is no consensus on the number of people killed either—estimates vary from 1,000 to as high as 40,000 victims, as per a report by the Syrian Human Rights Committee.³ The 1982 massacre has somehow slipped through the remnants of Syria’s contemporary archival memory, and this probably explains the obsession with Hama which overshadows the conversations we started in 2018 as part of the Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project with Syrian photographers and videographers who have been documenting the Syrian uprising and war since 2011.

But despite its omnipresence, the city of Hama was not the first reason Syrians started to film in 2011. As Hakawati—a Syrian artist and filmmaker from Aleppo—puts it, the events were happening much too quickly to offer space to think about the past. “We could only think of what we were experiencing in the present,” he told us in May 2020. As time went by, the hauntings of the Hama massacre found their way into the narrative that Syrian photographers and videographers make of their records today: “a revenge over history,” they say, “so that 1982 never happens again” (Mohamed Zidan, Aleppo, Feb. 2020).

After a brief introduction to the Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project, this article considers the main motivations behind Syrians’ documentation of the uprising and war since 2011. It articulates the potential of this crowd-sourced archive of the events across three main spaces: its testimonial and historical, evidentiary and creative value. The analysis is based on three rounds of semi-structured interviews with 40 Syrians aged between 21 and 65. The first round took place in 2018–19, and included 15 interviewees from Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Daraa, Ghouta, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor. The second round of interviews took place in 2020, and it included 10 interviewees from Aleppo; and the third in 2021–22 included 15 interviewees from Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and Ghouta.

The interviews occurred online and (except for one) were all conducted in Arabic. They were recorded with the consent of the interviewees, who have also agreed to their names being used here. The sample included respondents with different affiliations (individual freelancers, members of activist groups, independent media centers, and Local Coordination Committees; also freelancers contracted by international mainstream organizations such as Reuters and AP). This work does not include any pro-government views or perspectives, however.

The interviews were designed with three interconnected parts. In the first part, we asked questions about purpose and value: why they started to film and when, for which audiences, and if/why they thought it was important to keep documenting the uprising and war. The second part considered film and image-making as practice, with questions around how they filmed, what cameras they used, and where they stored their archives. In the third part, the most relevant one for this article, we looked at the mnemonic value of these archives as articulated by their own creators. We asked questions about history, collective memory, and the way that they thought their fellow Syrians (and the world) would remember the revolution in the years to come.

THE SYRIAN ARCHIVE DIGITAL MEMORY PROJECT: AN ATTEMPT AT (RE-)HUMANIZING THE WAR NARRATIVE

What is to be remembered, and what forgotten? Who takes ownership of memories by presenting credentials to speak authoritatively about the past—are they the most direct victims of human rights abuses, or society at large? What conflicts over memory emerge when opposing interpretations are offered? Who seizes the power to shape the memories of human rights abuses? (Keiser 2018, 86)

Founded in 2014, the Syrian Archive is a Syrian-led collective working to support “human rights investigators, media reporters, and journalists in their efforts to document human rights violations in Syria and worldwide through developing new open-source tools as well as providing a transparent and replicable methodology for collecting, preserving, verifying, and investigating visual documentation in conflict areas.”⁴ Sandra Ristovska (2019) argues that the Syrian Archive succeeded in acquiring a unique position among those operating in and alongside the human rights "landscape," both inside Syria and in the West, by assuming the key role of “mediator” between those who create the “eyewitness video content,”⁵ and those who advocate for human rights claims in international fora. She sees this role as a mode of political involvement: by creating an open-access information infrastructure for human rights videos, the Syrian Archive is enabling the circulation of narratives about justice, accountability, and future reconciliation.

Almost a decade since its inception, the Syrian Archive team is working on reorganizing their “violations database” into a usable, productive and outward-facing archive, as a way to sustain the preservation of this content by making it more accessible. They intend to do this in close consultation with those who shot these videos in different Syrian towns: "Making sure the victims, who have been caught in the line of fire, are able to tell their own stories is a prerequisite to achieving any form of transitional justice, and to ensure proper engagement with the history of this uprising in the years to come" (Hadi Al-Khatib, April 2019).

The Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project aims at exploring ways in which the coupling of eyewitness footage with multi-source oral testimonies can create a space where the Syrian uprising’s “living archival memory” (Hoskins 2009) is enacted, and its “collected memory” built (Garde-Hansen 2011). The “unearthing,” as they call it, of these individual memories would allow them to “investigate the meaning(s) of a so-called Syrian Digital Memory of the 2011 uprising and its subsequent war.”⁶ The two authors of this article, one of whom is also co-founder of the Syrian Archive, have been leading the Digital Memory Project since its inception, including jointly designing the interview methodology and sampling criteria, undertaking the analysis, and ultimately developing and publishing the project’s main output, the Syrian Archive Oral History database.

The project methodology builds on an important legacy of Holocaust studies, the recognition of the centrality of oral testimonies in historic and mnemonic processes (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014), thus displacing the focus of historical inquiry from solely considering facts (what has happened), to looking at the ways things are experienced, and how they will be remembered (Assmann 2006). As such, the Digital Memory Project has two aims: first, it stems from a desire to address one of the main shortcomings of the debates taking place in the West on the need to sustain and better organize crowd-sourced content from Syria. While this content is seen as the only viable documentation of human rights abuses in the Syrian conflict (Kayyali and Althaibani 2018; Martin 2017; O’Flaherty 2018), and its value is recognized for its potential contribution to transitional justice and to postwar reconciliation efforts (Al-Khatib 2020; Al-Khatib and Kayyali 2019; York 2019), these conversations tend to happen for the most part on behalf of the Syrian photographers and videographers, rather than engaging with them directly. The Digital Memory Project seeks to operate differently by leveraging the audiovisual material collected from videographers to create a more comprehensive resource. This approach aims to influence discussions about the value of crowd-sourced archives in society, as well as the affordances of digital technology in shaping collective narratives to support transitional justice and enhance peace-building processes.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, the project advocates for the recognition of Syrians as being victims and survivors of a genocidal war waged by a dictator against his own population, thus making the collection of their oral testimonies an “essential step in the (re)-humanization of the narrative of the Syrian conflict, and in any postwar reconciliation effort” (Syrian Archive team, pers. comm., April 2020). Throughout the years of the uprising and war, hundreds of Syrian citizens worked on documenting daily events, violations, and unfolding atrocities in their own cities. They are often treated as journalists or frontline archivists, but in reality were direct witnesses to these events, and more often than not victims of indiscriminate shelling, forced disappearances, and arrest by conflicting parties. Ciorciari and Heindel (2015) argue that “victim testimonies” can provide vital insights for the advancement of mass crimes processes, by contributing a “truth-telling function” to judicial processes and a crucial source of evidence in litigation, thereby playing a fundamental role in the stages of recovery and transitional justice.

“WHY WE ARCHIVE”: THE MNEMONIC VALUE OF CROWD-SOURCED AUDIOVISUAL CONTENT FROM SYRIA

The role of the archives in our societies’ ability to remember (and to forget), at different stages of development across history, has been the subject of much important work over the past two decades.⁷ Previous work by one of the authors of this article attempted a conceptualization of the notion of archives (Saber and Long 2017, 2019), by bringing together key texts from media studies and from archival studies to determine what is an archive and what is not (Ernst 2012; Faulkhead, cited in Caswell 2016; McKemmish 1996; Shepherd 2009). We borrow, for the purpose of discussion here, what Michelle Caswell (2014) refers to as “the umbrella of human rights archives,”⁸ to explore the main motivations behind the Syrian Digital Memory project photographers and videographers collecting this crowd-sourced audiovisual material, and the value they see in it, several years from the beginning of the Syrian uprising.

Amit Pinchevski (2011) argues that considering audiovisual archives as a medium of memory has the potential to offer useful insights into the contemporary challenges of engaging with the past. He suggests that archiving can be viewed as a form of social intervention; “a participatory social practice, which turns the archive as a whole into a collective project,” thus presenting “new opportunities for the construction of collective memory, away from and beyond the national and genealogical constraints” (ibid., 256).

The relation that Pinchevski draws between memory and archiving as a collective social practice lies at the heart of the Digital Memory Project, thus making crowd-sourced audiovisual content a key vehicle for the mediation of a Syrian collective memory, and for its constitution and preservation over time and space. An intrinsic part of this mediation is the recognition of the stories of the archivists themselves—their subjectivities—which, as Alessandro Portelli argues, only oral histories have the potential to force upon us, to tell us “not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, [and] what they now think they did” (Portelli 1981, 100). These three layers of interpretation are reflected in our structuring of the interviews around questions of motivation, practice and value.

Work on memory in media studies has predominantly focused in the last decade on the relationship between technology and memory (Reading 2014), emphasizing ways in which digital media and the widespread use of digital technologies have changed our perception of the present, in relation to the past (Hoskins 2018). From the concept of “digital network memory” (Hoskins 2009) to “collected memory” (Garde-Hansen 2011), and from “mediated memory” (Pinchevski 2011) to “globital memory” (Reading 2014), the interconnectedness of social memory and the digital (Synenko 2019) has fundamentally shaped our current understanding of the ways we remember in digitally networked times.

Joanne Garde-Hansen argues that “as we stand firmly established in the twenty-first century, our engagement with history has become almost entirely mediated” (Garde-Hansen 2011, 1), and central to this mediation is the question of the democratization of the archives. She suggests thinking of the relation between digital media, memory and archiving in four integrated ways: digital media producing an archive of history, heritage and memories; digital media as an archiving tool; digital media as a self-archiving phenomenon; and digital media as a creative archive (Garde-Hansen 2011, 72). All four components of this categorization are of use to understand the motivations of the Syrian photographers and videographers we will present below. But while digital media and the democratization of the archives have allowed alternative articulations of memory to emerge, the view that there has been a wholesale transformation of remembering by recent technologies has also been quite rightly challenged. As Keightley and Schlesinger explain, the potentialities of digital media remain embedded in terrains already structured by powerful institutions, social systems, and dominant ideologies (Keightley and Schlesinger 2014, 746). As such, the possibilities of digital media “for facilitating ‘alternative’ social memories and remembering practices are inescapably connected to the economic, political and representational inequalities in which they are being, or may be, performed” (Keightley and Schlesinger 2014, 747).

Working within the context of the Syrian uprising and war, YouTube is probably the most relevant example of a social media platform where memory is (re)-mediated through the creative editing of crowd-sourced archival media texts (Garde-Hansen 2011, 106), but which is predominantly structured by existing institutional barriers. The platform hosts millions of videos related to Syria (Rosen 2018), almost making it into a “factory” of Syrian memory.⁹ According to the Syrian Archive team, over 60 percent of the video content that forms their database is either currently hosted on YouTube or has been archived on their own servers from the platform. The rest of the content originates from other social media platforms, or has been directly shared with them through their own networks on external hard drives or other storage devices.

We outline below the main motivations behind the Syrian photographers and videographers documenting the uprising and war since 2011, and the reasons they consider this content to be important and worth preserving today. We also describe, in their words, the potential their “abundant”¹⁰ archives hold for the preservation of a Syrian collective memory, for years to come.

TESTIMONIAL AND HISTORICAL VALUE

When Farouk Merjan first started filming protests in Aleppo he thought he was creating a personal archive; the intended audience of his videos were friends and family members, and he did not think he would publish this content beyond that immediate circle. As the events unfolded, though, both the intention and the public of his footage changed drastically:

I took part in the first protest on June 30th, during the “Friday of Anger” in Aleppo, in the Mashariqa neighborhood. I documented the protest with my phone so that my friends and relatives could see what was happening. My intention was not to publish it. Later on, I shared the video with the Aleppo Revolution Against Bashar al-Assad page, and the video went viral. From that moment on, I began to feel enthusiastic about documenting for other people to know what was happening. Because the protests in Aleppo were always very short—they only lasted between five and ten minutes—before the regime shut them down, people could not know, without these videos, how often the protests were happening, and the crimes committed against the protesters. The documentation of what I was witnessing then became my main objective. (Farouk Merjan, Aleppo, 2022)

Sue McKemmish argues that record-keeping is a kind of witnessing, “a way of evidencing and memorializing our lives—our existence, our activities and experiences, our relationships with others, our identity, our ‘place’ in the world” (McKemmish 1996, 175). The testimonial value of their archives as the only surviving record of those who were lost in the war is a common thread to all the conversations we had with the Syrian respondents:

Half of the media office people died documenting and collecting this archive. Our whole life is in this archive. Our youth. Most of them died in their twenties and thirties. That is why this archive is important… because it is the only record of the best years of our lives. (Hassan Abu Nooh, Talbiseh, November 2018)

These archives are also space-bound; they are the last remaining documentation of cities and neighborhoods that have been wiped out by the war. For Mohamed Zeidan, archives can survive what people and cities are likely to succumb to:

We all like to see pictures of neighborhoods in Syria in 1910 and 1920. This is why this content is important, as a testimony to our cities, and to immortalize our memories…. If people die, pictures remain; if cities are bombed, videos survive. (Mohamed Zeidan, Aleppo, Feb. 2020).

Perhaps the photographers and videographers with whom the historical value of these archives and their space-boundedness echo the most are those from Hama, specifically because of the hauntings of the 1982 massacre. Hakawati, whom we quoted at the beginning of this article, told us that his “archiving fever” started when he realized that he was losing his neighborhood, when he could no longer visit his family’s home, the place where all his childhood memories were formed:

This is when I decided to turn my camera on, and to never turn it back off again. Film everything, so we have something to go back to later on to remember. You know, in Hama entire neighborhoods disappeared after the massacre, for example, Kilanyia was entirely reduced to rubble, and they built on top of it a resort hotel, Afamia el-Cham hotel. Archiving was our way to make sure this does not happen in Aleppo. (Hakawati, Hama/Aleppo, May 2020)

Archiving thus became a new form of history making. According to Abdel Sattar Charaf, these archives are important for Syria’s history and for its collective memory:

I was born in 1984 and I don’t know much about Hama; all I know is that “walls have ears in Syria.” This archive is important because it documents the atrocities of the regime for history, so that all the generations who will come after us will know what happened to us. (Abdel Sattar Charaf, Eastern Ghouta, March 2019)

This view is shared by Wassim el-Homsi, who believes that the preservation of these archives is the only way to make sure history does not repeat itself. He explained that when they first started to film, elderly people in their own town would caution them against possible reprisals from the regime:

“Haven’t you learned anything from Hama?” they would ask us. But we would say that back then there was no media, so no one knew what was happening. Now the situation is different, our job today is to document this, and make sure everyone in Syria and the world sees it. The whole world will know what is happening to us today. This archive is our memory, as my mother says: “tomorrow, this is the story you will tell your kids.” Except, I will also be able to show them. (Wassim el-Homsi, Homs, March 2019).

In his foreword to the English edition of Pierre Nora’s seminal work Realms of Memory, Lawrence Kritzman writes that Nora’s work not only demonstrates the relation between memory and the creation of social identities, but also “dramatizes how one’s consciousness of the past is symptomatic of the disappearance of certain living conditions” (Nora 1996, ix). As such, the creation of the realms of memory, or lieux de mémoire, is the result of the absence of “real memory” and of our society’s inability to live within it. There are “realms of memory” because real environments of memory have disappeared: “Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience” (ibid., 1). Nora writes that if the expression lieu de mémoire must have an official definition, it should be this: “A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of memorial heritage of any community” (ibid., xvii).

One could then argue that by becoming the only record of loved ones and of home-towns which have been obliterated by war, the crowd-sourced archives that form the basis of the Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project have also become lieux de mémoire where Syria’s memorial heritage is being negotiated and therefore formed.

EVIDENTIARY VALUE

One of the aims of this article is to better understand what motivated Syrian photographers and videographers to risk their lives to document the daily experiences of the war. We explore below the evidentiary value of crowd-sourced archives of conflict, beyond their immediate, testimonial and historical worth.

In considering the relation between media and memory processes, Susana Keiser (2018) argues that using digital media tools to document abuses and to record individual memories in a search for the truth and for social justice are great examples of popular communication being used to frame human rights conflicts. She talks about “memory media in the service of human rights” (ibid., 86) to attest for the ways in which media could be used as a trigger for reflective social action against abuses and violations in times of war.

As previously argued (Saber and Long 2019), the reliance on mainstream and/or institutional media outlets to provide a “first draft of history” may prove problematic when the authority of the journalist as “witness” is undermined by a lack of access to events as they happen. In the case of Syria, and with the exception of only a handful of foreign journalists who were able to enter the country clandestinely between 2011 and 2012 and were either arrested or killed, Arab and international media did not have access to document the protests and later on the conflict, unless upon invitation from and under full control of the Assad regime. Eyewitness video content from Syria thus became, for the first time in history, the only available documentation of the unfolding uprising and war: “there were no reporters, no international journalists, no one; we were the only witnesses providing news stations with video footage as evidence of the regime’s crimes” (Abdul Moheimen Al Sheikh Naif, Aleppo, 2022).

In their words, this crowd-sourced footage, being the most accurate and only available record of the uprising and war, provided essential evidence of the regime’s crimes and had to be preserved at any cost, especially when the situation in Syria changed so quickly from peaceful protests to become a deadly armed conflict: “These archives are the only testimony of our revolution…. The only record of the peaceful beginnings which the regime and its allies want to make disappear from our memory and from history” (Adou Douma, Daraa, March 2019).

Kawthar Qashqous was one the few female videographers we interviewed. She documented the early protests at Aleppo University, then later on of ISIS violations, and she sees in this content an important first-hand evidence of war crimes:

I witnessed an incident of a student’s arrest in Aleppo University; he was dragged, insulted, and physically abused in front of us in 2012. This incident triggered a reaction in me, it made me realize that I needed to document the oppression we were witnessing first-hand. Afterward, I joined the Local Coordination Committee in the city of Al-Bab and helped document the arrests and bombings. My work became more intense when ISIS entered the city, marking the beginning of my real activism, documenting the violations, crimes and events. During that period I was documenting anonymously, but I know what I shot, and some of it is today the only available evidence of the crimes committed. (Kawthar Qashqous, Aleppo, Al-Bab, 2022)

The potential of their crowd-sourced archives to be used as evidence against the Syrian regime so as to hold it accountable for its crimes in years to come, thus became one of the main motivations behind Syrian photographers and videographers documenting the uprising. Ahmad Ramadan has been collecting footage from Syria for over ten years. Some of it he shot himself, before he fled Deir ez-Zor when the Islamic State took over that city and killed his father. Later on he fled to Turkey and started working through his media collective Al-Furat Post (formerly Deir ez-Zor is Slaughtered Silently). Since then his work has focused on archives. He helped set up the Al-Furat Anti-Violence and Terrorism Center, which is focused on sustainable development, women and children, and “most importantly the trial of war criminals in Syria.” Beyond his own personal archive, he has been supporting others to do the same:

Syrians work as servers and cleaners in Istanbul restaurants in the day, and sit with us on their laptops to work on their archives at night. We are seriously working on these archives as part of legal efforts to hold the regime of Bashar al-Assad accountable. It may take a long time, but even a hundred years from now these archives will be used to hold war criminals to account. These videos are very important, not only for international courts now but for future generations maybe a hundred years from now. There are countries that committed war crimes and are now paying the price maybe 200, 300, or even 400 years later …. This issue isn’t going anywhere, and it will not be forgotten. (Ahmad Ramadan, Deir ez-Zor, March 2019)

For Mos’ab el Achkar, every single video and every detail counts:

Look at the crimes committed in Serbia and Bosnia! Every day, war generals and criminals are put on trial when evidence against them is used in court. Every YouTube video is worth preserving so that one day we can put this regime on trial. (Mos’ab el Achkar, Hama/Aleppo, April 2019).

This view is shared by Artino, a Syrian freelance war photographer who covered the chemical attack on Eastern Ghouta for Reuters; then when things got too overwhelming and risky he fled with his family to Europe, where he is still attempting to build himself a life that is not haunted by what he calls the “trauma of the images of death.” He does not necessarily believe in transitional justice, but he does believe in the power of the Syrian eyewitnesses to push for these images to bring about justice:

Since I started documenting the revolution, I was hoping my pictures would be used to put him on trial, to face his crimes…. I was always thinking of the picture which stopped the war in Vietnam, I would look at the picture and say, when will my pictures do this? … The first time I was thinking about this idea of transitional justice it was in 2011, then in 2013 it changed, since the time the regime used chemical weapons on us, since I saw that many people were getting killed in front of me… I lost my feeling about justice. Still until now I don’t believe in this, I don’t believe in the whole Brussels thing, because if we leave it to them they won’t do anything, they will just continue their job… they will have more meetings. It will go to Geneva 100 percent. But it is us, our duty to do something about this. Even after he dies, we need to continue with this to bring justice for the families. Even if it is the great-grandchild of this guy who got killed in jail, I need to make sure justice will come to this child. (Artino, Eastern Ghouta, Feb. 2019 [interview in English]).

CREATIVE VALUE

We move on, in the third and final section of this article, to exploring another space within which the Syrian photographers and videographers involved in the Digital Memory Project see value for their crowd-sourced material, and we look at the contribution of these archives to the creative memorial heritage of the Syrian uprising.¹¹

In addition to seeing themselves as the custodians of the narrative of the Syrian revolution, these photographers and videographers also highlighted the significance of their archives for what could be considered as the creative memory of the uprising and war. This brings to mind Keightley and Pickering’s (2012) concept of “mnemonic imagination” through which they suggest moving beyond the association of memory with the past and of imagination with the future, to consider ways in which the past attains or regains significance for the present and the future by approaching remembering as a creative process. Looking at the relation between creative memory and painful pasts, these two authors explain that some pasts can resist creative remembering, and suggest looking at the concept of mnemonic imagination as a way to engage consciously with those sources of pain that continue to disturb us in our lives. They argue that by engaging creatively with some elements of our painful pasts, memory can become “a creative resource once again, thus reducing if not actually annulling the pain of the past and enabling us to turn toward the future in a less daunted fashion” (ibid., 167).

Of the millions of videos to be found today on YouTube, Majid el Khatib spoke about the importance of preserving the songs of the revolution for the generations to come:

It is important we keep all these archives for our artistic collective memory. For history, for ourselves, so we feel we have done all we could to preserve the memory of our revolution. If only for the songs of the revolution which are documented in these videos. These songs are where everything started, and a reason these archives should be preserved. (Abdel Majid el Khatib, Raqqa, March 2019)

Hakawati is a filmmaker. He says the one film he always wished he could make is about the 1982 Hama massacre: “As this film was never made, I want to use my archives to make films about the 2011 revolution” (interview, May 2020). For Hassan Abu Nooh too, these archives are important because they could be transformed into important documentary films about the Syrian revolution to help “immortalize it”:

Unlike short videos, feature films are unforgettable. You could watch 30 seconds or a minute of video once or twice. But a film, if it is well made, if the scriptwriter is clever and wants to show the true story of the revolution, then you can produce a documentary film that will never be forgotten. You would go back and watch it again, even 50 years from now… We have sacrificed and dedicated our lives to this archive, now what? Films, cinema, this is why these archives should be preserved. (Hassan Abu Nooh, Talbiseh, November 2018)

Artino, whom we quoted above, started to document the uprising in Eastern Ghouta as an independent journalist, before joining Reuters and becoming one of Syria’s most outstanding war photographers. He recalls that the first YouTube channel he set up was when he was in Ghouta, in his mother’s hometown, a neighborhood where a community of Circassians lived. He started to make short films which document the everyday lives of elders who had family members elsewhere in the world but who did not know how to connect with them via social media networks. So he started to upload those films on a private YouTube channel, and share them with family members in the USA, in Russia, in Jordan, and elsewhere. “This is one of the projects I’m the most proud of,” he told us back in 2020. "I have made movies of weddings; the city was under siege, and I was filming Circassian weddings with people dancing. That is why I created the YouTube channel, it has nothing to do with anything, but it still is very important for our collective memory" (Artino, Eastern Ghouta, Feb. 2019).

Archives of conflict can have multiple purposes, from documenting war as an act of witnessing, to capturing everyday life as a defiant form of testimony. They can shed light on human rights violations, preserve cultural heritage, and bring together displaced communities around shared memories of people and places obliterated by the war. These all attest to the crucial need to better engage with and more actively preserve crowd-sourced archives in times of both peace and conflict.

CONCLUSION

This article has considered various facets of the often-complicated relations between photographers and videographers, and their crowd-sourced audiovisual material, within the context of the Syrian uprising and war. By examining the testimonial value of these archives we have argued that they have also become a space where a Syrian collective memory is being negotiated and formed. By considering their evidentiary value we have explored how digital tools can be used to document violations and catalyze social action against human rights abuses. In our examination of archiving as a creative practice we have emphasized the role it plays in shaping how communities think of both their past(s) and of possible future(s). Together these analytical sections have provided a comprehensive understanding of the complex interactions between digital media, crowd-sourced archives, and memory-making, notably in times of conflict.

Beyond all this, the article also advocates for a better engagement with the crowd-sourced archives that were produced by Syrian photographers and videographers over the last ten years to document the uprising and war. As argued previously (Saber 2020; Saber and Long 2017), the acknowledgment of the contribution of vernacular accounts in the writing of a history of an ongoing conflict challenges us, as media and archival studies scholars and as historians alike, to consider how to represent such material in the “archive proper” through meaningful conversations and collaborations between all our disciplines. But perhaps more importantly, this article also recognizes the need for academic research to engage in more proactive conversations beyond academia, conversations with the photographers and videographers who collected this archive, and with all the other stakeholders involved in the aggregation, verification and preservation of this material. These include international organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Witness; and independent Syrian organizations involved in human rights monitoring efforts, such as the Syrian Archive, the Syrian Justice and Accountability Center,¹² and the Syrian Network for Human Rights.¹³ But for these efforts to yield any serious long-term safeguarding outcomes, they also need to include the social media platforms themselves, as powerful arbitrators of what is to be preserved, and what could be indefinitely lost.

Such an approach—despite the challenges it represents in terms of access (linguistic, cultural, geographic), and in terms of funding too—would allow media and memory studies scholars as well as historians to attend critically to the question of the political economy of digital cultural memory (Reading 2014), and its relation to eyewitness archiving as a collective social practice in times of conflict.

We asked Hakawati what he thought had happened to the memory of Hama and its 1982 massacre:

Hakawati: It died, with my grandmother.

Authors: What about Aleppo’s memory?

Hakawati: It is here. In our hearts, on our hard drives, on YouTube, on social media, it is everywhere… But it is being bought, used, instrumentalized by mainstream media to serve their own agendas. The only way to properly preserve this memory is to involve those who have created it. (Hakawati, Hama/Aleppo, May 2020)

As the world and its media seem to have moved on from that war in Syria, and while some of our respondents are still documenting the regime’s everyday abuses from inside Syrian towns, we intend this article to be a first step in this direction.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

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]

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.