June 17, 2009

Open Video Conference: human rights in an open video culture.

Lots of great stuff on tap at this week’s Open Video Conference (June 19-20, NYU). My WITNESS colleagues Sam Gregory and Sameer Padania will speak on the panel “Human Rights, Indigenous Media and Ethics in Video: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities:”

“Key elements of an open video culture are the capacities and opportunities for participation, fair use of existing media and transparency.

However, from a human rights perspective, issues of consent, representation and revictimization emerge in an open and networked online environment of reworking, remixing and recirculating video and other imagery. How do we go about “incorporating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” into the “terms of service” of both open video culture and broader online video? How do we introduce ideas around consent and human dignity into the broader ecosystem? How do we respect cultural worlds where transparency is not always a desired outcome, as certain images should not be seen by outsiders, by the uninitiated, or by opposite genders? What can be learnt from the experiences of remix culture, fan fiction and political use of remixing to-date?”

Participants:

Faye Ginsburg is Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History and Kriser Prof. of Anthropology at NYU, and is currently finishing a book entitled, Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media in a Digital Age.
 Sam Gregory is Program Director at WITNESS, and a producer, trainer and advocate who works with human rights defenders worldwide helping them to incorporate video and related online technologies into their campaigns.
 Sameer Padania manages the Hub , the global online channel for human rights.
 Jonathan McIntosh is a pop-culture hacker, video remix artist, citizen photo journalist, new media teacher and activist. His social justice photography has been featured in magazines, newspapers and documentary films around the world, all licensed through creative commons. He is also the co-editor of the Political Remix Video blog.

And: WITNESS Archive programmer & digital consultant David Rice will speak on Saturday at the “Metadata Roundtable II: Best practices” session:

“Metadata may seem a dry subject, a matter behind the scenes that mainly interests geeks. However, the people who work to untangle it are often motivated by farther reaching passions and goals. Metadata allows for better indexing, search, and navigation. It allows for exciting new tools for discovering, watching, and monetizing online video. In this roundtable, we will discuss the immense benefits of open metadata standards embraced across the industry, which include but are not limited at: higher government transparency, increased learning opportunities, improved delivery and collection of moving images online, and helping titans from Hollywood and the advertising industry to step into the digital realm with confidence. Join us to learn how sexy metadata can be!”

Moderator: Devon Copley, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
Participants: Brian Chirls, Three Eyed Labs
 Ben Dean-Kawamura, Developer, Participatory Culture Foundation
 Mario Pena, SafeCreative
 David Rice, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

I believe registration is still open….

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , ,

May 27, 2009

Human rights archives/archivists at SAA 2009

From the ICA Archives and Human Rights blog, for archivists of human rights collections:

Dear colleagues,
Hello, my name is T-Kay Sangwand and I’m the new Human Rights Archivist at the University of Texas Libraries. I am writing to see if any list members will be attending the Society of American Archivists annual meeting taking place in Austin, Texas, USA this August of 2009. I would like to organize a Human Rights archives/archivists gathering (probably a happy hour) during the meeting if there is enough interest. I think this would be a good opportunity to continue the discussion that began with the Human Rights Archives and Archivists listserv members at the 2008 SAA meeting in San Francisco and perhaps open the possibilities for future collaborations.

If you will be attending SAA and would be interested in such a meeting, please contact me at sangwand@austin.utexas.edu. If you know of other colleagues that may be interested, please feel free to forward them this email as well. Thanks and I look forward to meeting you all soon.

Best,
T-Kay

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , ,

May 15, 2009

Why isn’t everything digitized yet?

A few weeks ago Indicommons featured an excellent blog post  by Deborah Wythe,  Head of Digital Collections and Services at the Brooklyn Museum.  She poses the question many of us frequently hear:  Why isn’t everything digitized yet? She then proceeds with a nicely articulated description of some of the challenges, then quantifies them:

“The scale of “getting everything digitized” is just mind boggling. In our small archives at the Brooklyn Museum, we have about 1,600 feet of documents, photographs, negatives, ledger books — just about any analog format you can imagine, covering the Museum’s history from 1823 to the present. Here’s the math: at an estimated 3,000 documents per foot, that’s 4.8 million items. Even if you could scan, describe and process 30 per hour (highly unlikely), that’s 160,000 hours of work, or 20,000 eight-hour workdays.

If you saved a 20 Mb master file (or even half that size) for each of those 4.8 million documents, that’s serious storage and backup, not to speak of long-term management and preservation. And that’s just for a really, really small repository!”

Put another way: digitization done right will expand access and hopefully provide a seamless and improved experience for the user.  But what happens on the back-end is anything but easier – it’s complex, labor-intensive, not well supported by market solutions (as Wythe notes), and is an ongoing problem-solving endeavor.  Wythe is speaking primarily of textual or static image media;  in general, collections of moving images multiply all of these issue by several orders of magnitude.

At WITNESS our archive has been building its own asset management system, designed to support ongoing video production and multiple distribution streams, as well as long-term preservation and access.   We began regular digitization of incoming media just about a year ago.  Our organization is small but our access and distribution needs are extensive.

Take one WITNESS project:  In 2006 we co-produced a video with partners Comissão Pastoral da Terra and the Center for Intl Justice & Law on slave labor in Brazil called Bound by Promises.  The video was produced in four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French and English) and 3 different lengths (for different audiences or purposes).   Each version (that’s 12!) is archived in multiple formats: a tape master, a digital master, a viewing copy with time-code, an mpg2 with associated elements for DVD creation (PAL & NTSC), flash for web; other iterations are created on an as-needed basis. There are approximately 150 camera original source tapes, each requiring at minimum a digital master and access copy; dozens of stills; photoshop and quark files for packaging; Final Cut project backups and XMLs; audio and graphics files.

Metadata includes the technical information about the files (or tapes): audio & video codecs, bitrates, frame size, duration, hardware and format source.

Descriptive and discovery metadata includes shotlists, transcripts and translations of transcripts, indexing, and summaries that describe, contextualize and make clear the significance of the content.

And of course, any use is contingent upon rights, detailed information on security and restrictions, ownership, and consents from subjects.

While storage costs continue to drop, digital storage that is reliable and provides redundancy or backup is a considerable financial investment.

And then there’s migration: the lifecycle of media becomes increasingly shortened and accelerated; paper is still a much more robust archival medium that files or magnetic media. At MIT6 a few weeks ago, Richard Wright of the BBC (podcast here) offered up a schematic comparing the storage media through the ages, from stone to digital.  In his estimation, each leap forward contains about 10 times more capacity while lasting 1/10th as long!  And metadata becomes increasingly key and difficult, because – for one thing – there is so much more content to manage.

So, Wythe concludes, we all need to make choices.  Agree.  We also need to promote more understanding of the complexities of our task and the  risk of profound loss if we fail at it.

Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , ,

May 8, 2009

Archives as Medium

I recently stumbled upon Essays: Archives as Medium , on the web site Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan (in turn part of Library and Archives Canada online.) From Lance Strate’s essay The Medium is the Memory:

“The archive as medium is an extension of collective memory, in the service of cultural continuity. Harold Innis argued for the importance of communication over time, which he felt was all too often overlooked in modern societies, which he characterized as space-biased. By this, he meant that we have been obsessed with the speed of communication, the instantaneous transmission of information made possible by electronic media and telecommunications technologies. We have focused our attention on communicating over distance, resulting in what McLuhan called the “global village.” And we have concentrated on the sense of power and control that these new capabilities afford us. We have come to value whatever is newest, to expect novelty and cry “boring!” whenever the steady stream of stimulation lets up; we have become impatient with the minutest of delays, and have come to expect a rapid turnover of content in all of our media.

“In the process, we have neglected, ignored, and even denigrated tradition, history, preservation and conservation. We have become present-minded, and lost sight of the fact that the present ought to be understood as a medium for maintaining continuity between the past and the future. Innis’s “plea for time” was a plea for restoring balance to our space-biased societies. Of course, time-biased societies, such as the feudal societies of medieval Europe, have certain inadequacies as well. But those inadequacies are not our own. And Innis’s aim was not for us to replace a space-bias with a time-bias, but to achieve equilibrium.”

Yes. And this again brings me to the question of access, and how we balance the present against the future in asking: who are our primary users? how do we weigh preservation against access? I believe that is a false dichotomy. They don’t exclude each other. The video documentation that is today used in advocacy or awareness-raising may be used ten years from now as evidence in a legal case, and thirty years from now to educate, to tell the truth about the past. Which is more important? To whom?

There’s much more, and the essays are all brief and readable.

Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , ,

May 6, 2009

Archiving Project: Burma Humanitarian Mission

This report is from Jenn Blaylock, NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program:

As my time interning at WITNESS Media Archive comes to a close I thought I’d share the details of the archival project that I’ve been working on with the archival blogosphere. Simply put, I organized and digitized a collection of over forty-six tapes for the WITNESS digital archive. The collection consisted of camera original MiniDV tapes used in the production of Fueling Abuse, a film WITNESS made in partnership with Burma Humanitarian Mission in 2001-02. Fueling Abuse exposes the oppression of Karen ethnic minority civilians in Eastern Burma, and draws attention to the dire situation in Burma, where the military junta is systematically uprooting villages and brutalizing the civilian population.

The collection of camera original tapes came to WITNESS unexpectedly. Normally partner organizations retain copies of their camera original tapes with originals deposited at WITNESS. However, a man in California found this collection of original tapes amongst the possessions of his recently departed friend. (Don’t worry this story has a happy ending.) Seeing the name WITNESS written in bold on the tapes he called the Archive to see if the tapes should be returned. After some discussion with WITNESS Media Archive staff, it was agreed that the tapes should be sent across the country to WITNESS. After the tapes arrived they were set aside for when time afforded inspection and identification. A couple of months later Burma Humanitarian Mission called WITNESS because they had lost their camera original tapes and wanted to know if WITNESS could send them copies from the Archive. As luck had it, the collection of tapes sent to WITNESS months earlier were in fact the BHM’s missing camera original tapes. After discussing with BHM, the Archive proposed digitizing the camera originals; these would remain in temperature controlled WITNESS Media Archive vaults, with a set of digital masters on WITNESS video servers, and digital surrogates sent to BHM on a hard drive.

This is where I came in. I was charged with the task of first identifying all of the tapes in the collection to see if there were any tapes that WITNESS did not have in their collection. Below is a breakdown of the collection and the type of content that I found:

The following is the tapes series for the Mini-DVs in the collection:
• 45 Raw Footage: consists of interviews, documentation of Karen Revolution Day, health care footage, BHM organizational planning, interviews with KNU and former SPDC soldiers.
• 4 Personal: cinematographer’s personal preparation for Burma mission.
• 2 Dubs: from other documentaries, footage filmed by a Karen villager.

While a lot of the process involved in this project was quality-controlling digitization of mini-DV tapes, perhaps the most interesting part for me was gaining intellectual control over the collection. This was like a giant puzzle that I had to solve. The first thing I did was I conducted a basic inventory and inspection of the tapes. They were in decent condition considering their age and the wear that they had to endure being carried around Burma for several months in a backpack. Most of the tapes were dusty, a few were crinkling and cupping slightly, but were otherwise in good shape.

I went through all of the database records relating to the Burma Humanitarian Mission project looking for original BHM tape numbers that matched the numbers that I had recorded off of the tapes. Many matched right away but others were more difficult. During field recording BHM created a unique numbering system for the tapes based on the day that the tapes were shot but when BHM processed the tapes they gave them new unique identifying numbers and to make things even more complicated, when the tapes were originally sent to WITNESS, they were given yet another number. Organizing and sorting out these sets of numbers took a lot of my time but eventually I figured out which tape was associated with each WITNESS record by using the summary information in the WITNESS database to match to the content descriptions on the tapes. For tapes that were particularly unwieldy I screened sections of them until I saw enough to make a match between the original and a database entry. There were only six tapes that I found in the collection that were not represented in the WITNESS database. Four of the tapes were personal tapes and two were dubs. One of the dubs and the four personal tapes were returned to BHM as they did not contain information related to the Fueling Abuse project. One of the dubs in the collection seems to have been shot by a Karen villager. The interviews are in Karen without translation and the material seems to be shot fairly soon after an SPDC attack on a Karen village. There are scenes of dead animals, burnt homes and surgery on a villager with a badly burnt arm wound. I added this tape to the WITNESS collection but was unfortunately unable to digitize it because it was in such poor condition. I digitized all of the rest of the BHM tapes using CatDV Live Capture Plus. A CatDV Live Capture Summary text file documenting the digital conversion, as well as a Microsoft word shot log accompanied the video clips that were sent to BHM.

As I digitized the collection, I updated the descriptive information in the database: running time, title information, and geographical information. I also identified which tapes in the collection hadn’t been logged and logged them. While updating the catalog it became clear to me that several of the database entries had tapes that were associated with the wrong database record. I resolved this problem with a little more detective work. I reviewed the tapes for each of these records and determined the proper database record for each of the tapes.

Now that the collection is organized and Burma Humanitarian Mission has their digital copies, I leave the collection more accessible to future researchers, activists, and documentary filmmakers. Hopefully the digital files will eventually make their way onto the HUB to bear witness to the human rights abuses that have been happening in Burma for decades.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , , ,

May 2, 2009

Conference: Memory, Archives, Human Rights

In Copehagen, Denamrk, and Malmö, Sweden, June 4-5, 2009:  Archives, Memory and Human Rights.   “The purpose of the conference is to raise awareness about the relevance and importance of archives for supporting human rights and for documenting human rights violations.”

Highlights:

Louis Bickford, ICTJ: Archives and Transitional Justice: The Case of former Yugoslavia.

Zsuzsa Zadori, Open Society Archives:  Memory of a Genocide: Audiovisual Documentation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

in English; free; Program here.

-Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , ,

April 30, 2009

Citizen Archivists: MiT6 Notes, part 2

Another thematic thread from MIT6, MIT’s Media in Transition conference, highlighted by Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library, Prelinger Archives) at the 2nd plenary, Archives and History.

He shared (and shared on the AMIA listserv a while back, from whence I copied it) the following quotes from one Robert C. Binkley, published in 1935:

“The care of the records of contemporary civilization is a task so vast that neither the personnel nor the funds of our institutions of research can shoulder the burden. Many records will be preserved by amateurs or they will not be preserved at all.

“When the program for America is laid down and the high strategy of American policies defined, let there be included among our objectives not only a bathroom in every home and a car in every garage but a scholar in every schoolhouse and a man of letters in every town. Towards this end technology offers new devices and points the way.” (Yale Review, Spring 1935)

It only makes sense that as content creation and use become distributed and diffuse, its archiving must become so; if we have citizen journalists we need citizen archivists. There is nothing utterly new in this, individuals have collected creatively and astutely forever.

There are actually two pertinent concepts here, self-archiving and citizen archiving. Citizen archiving – well, Prelinger is one great example of this. It may be a form of collecting and or documentation, but with a subject matter beyond one’s self or family. Another is Clayton Patterson, who has spent decades documenting the East Village. An historian named Hank Kaplan donated his vast archives on boxing to Brooklyn College a few years back.

Self-archiving is just that. But as Rick and others suggested: there is a lack of consciousness, about the ephemeral nature of digital media, and about history and its importance itself. Our culture is very present-oriented; we do not place a high enough value on so-called ephemera. We lack tools.

Rick also posited that archives are in the dangerous place right now, a place where they where they potentially become obstacles to access rather than enablers. We are at a moment of disconnect between what users expect and what archives provide. Archives should reconceive themselves not (only) as repositories but as workshops, collaborative spaces. He also challenged archives to be open-minded about conceptions of use.

Alexander Halavais also addressed the notion of self-archiving, in a paper titled Knowledge Everywhere: The Distributed Memory of Social Media. P2P archiving is the way to go but we should be leveraging it; currently there are three main spaces: Internet Archive, Google Cache, and Coral Cache, the latter two of which are archives but are incidentally useful. The Wayback machine (”I love it it sucks”) misses a lot, and link rot and the various iterations of tinyurl etc are also a huge problem. Halavais is working on a plugin for WordPress (”blogchive”) for self-archiving blogs. I look forward to it.

-Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , , , ,

April 28, 2009

Immediacy & Persistence: MIT6 Notes part 1

I spent last Friday, Saturday and a bit of Sunday at MIT 6, the 6th biennial
Media in Transition gathering convened by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.

It was the first for me, and I found it really useful and stimulating. What was particularly heartening is the degree to which archives and archiving have moved into discussions of new media, social media, digital video, participatory culture and so on, as central rather than peripheral; and the growing recognition that archiving, and in particular digital and media archiving, pose very knotty problems that we have yet to solve.

In his welcome remarks, David Thorburn of the CMS characterized the new media landscape as replete with ‘exhilaration and anxiety.’ “We need to share anxieties, not let the utopians shame us into silence.” He urged attendees to keep in mind the theme of speed, immediacy, accelerated pace…the state of perpetual flux creates problems; future-oriented communities such as MIT sometimes have a tendency to lose sight of these.

I have been thinking about this question of immediacy a lot, in terms of our work here at WITNESS and my work as an archivist. I’ve worked for 20 years in archival contexts in which immediacy is paramount, in which the need to manage, evaluate and push out content were primary drivers of selection, description, and access. Archiving in these contexts is extremely challenging, requiring a high level of editorial, logistical and technical problem-solving. Here at WITNESS, the Archive’s major focus over the past 3 years has been on building a digital asset management system and archive precisely to open up access and provide this immediacy. Given multiple contributors, formats, languages, stakeholders and distribution channels, this is no small task for an organization our size.

Simultaneously, of course, as archivists we are concerned with persistence; we view the present as we imagine it in the future – ie as the past. As articulated by many at the conference, we are at a particularly critical moment. Ann Wolpert, Director of MIT Libraries/MIT Press noted the potentially huge gap between institutional archives (where policies and resources can be put in place and supported) and the records of ‘normal human activities’ which have less likelihood of accidental archiving in digital form. She remarked that she has little confidence her grandchildren will have access to the photos of today, whereas 19th century photos of her grandparents will still be accessible. “Bits won’t survive in a shoebox in the attic.” Unless we are truly intentional about digital persistence and preservation we are facing huge losses.

There is an emerging discourse within the sphere of human rights about the importance of archives and documentation. We have not yet seen the full potential of archives and documentation to serve advocacy, justice, good governance, and the essential memory and restorative work for societies in transition, but what’s clear is that the timeframes for seeking and receiving justice can be very long. Persistence, preservation, longevity are crucial not only to historical memory but perhaps to justice itself.

What persists in a culture is very much linked to power – political or economic. Media has become more participatory, diverse, bottom-up, unmediated and unfiltered, immediately accessible; but access needs to include the future too. We cannot cede responsibility to the powerful – governments or Google – to ensure the survival of the growing diversity of voices, stories, perspectives and creative works.

So are there answers? Well, admitting the problem is the first step I suppose. And Rick Prelinger and others had some interesting things to say about citizen archiving and self-archiving. I’ll write more on that and more in the next post. In the meantime, the conference site has abstracts and many full papers, and podcasts of the plenaries, well worth a look/listen.

Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

April 7, 2009

The past is not past

On March 26, a day after Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman Sergio Morales released the first report on the contents of the National Police Archives, his wife was abducted and tortured. If anyone doubts the relevance of records and archives to the present, not only in redressing the past but as factors in ongoing terror and repression, well, here you go.

Gladys Monterroso, a lawyer and journalist as well as the wife of Morales, was released the next day and is recovering.

Frontline Defenders has a letter you can sign and send, urging President Colom to investigate this crime, and to ensure the safety of the Morales family and all human rights defenders.

Antonio González Quintana, an archivist who has published frequently on human rights issues, has a blog post in Spanish here. Below is a translation into English courtesy of Gustavo Castaner of the UN Archives and Records Management Section (thanks Gustavo).

On the 24th of March in Gutemala City the report of the Attorney for Human Rights (Procurador de los Derechos Humanos) of Guatemala, called THE RIGHT TO KNOW, on the data furnished by the National Police Archives on human right violations committed during the years of the so-called “Inner Armed Conflict” was presented. The same day of the report’s presentation the digitized fonds of the archives were opened to public consultation, through SEREVIDH (Servicio de Referencias sobre Violaciones de Derechos Humanos /Reference Service on Human Rights Violations), of the Office of the Attorney for Human Rights (Procuradoria de los Derechos Humanos) of Guatemala, and a few days before the regulation for access to this service was published. SEREVIDH counts the databases and finding aids produced by the Recovery Project for National Police Archives and the images digitized during the same, corresponding essentially to the years from 1975 to 1985, which nowadays represent nearly 10% of the volume of records of the archives and a total volume of 7,500,000 images. The day of the report’s presentation was complete chaos at ciudad de Guatemala. Bus drivers and passengers were killed, on top of multiple attacks to transport means without death results, blocking the city and sowing confusion. All type of rumors broke loose. Finally, president Colom made a public appearance warning about a planned escalation of violence addressed to create a climate of unrest and panic. None of us who assisted could avoid thinking that all this was related to the report’s presentation and the opening to the public of the archives. The ceremony itself was emotionally charged and was experienced with enormous expectation by public and media. All the powers of the State attended through their highest representatives (except the executive, who sent the Vice-president instead of the President, who couldn’t attend due to his press conference related to the violent events commented). The next day, we awoke with the news of the kidnapping of the wife of the Attorney for Human Rights. Fortunately she was freed after twelve hours of captivity during which she underwent torture, humiliations and maltreatments, to be finally abandoned in the street. The monsters are afoot. As it happened in Argentina with the disappearance of Julio Lopez –witness in the first trial against the torturers of the dictatorship once repealed the acts of Full Stop and Due Obedience (Leyes de Punto Final y Obediencia Debida)- these are the typical thuggish answers that criminals use to scare society and try to continue living in absolute impunity. Let’s hope they don’t achieve it. Letting people from our countries know what’s happening in Guatemala, spread it as much as possible, can help those who strive there to know the truth and call for justice. We have to continue to support the Recovery project for the National Police Archives, defending, as archivists, that which seems better for it. That is, without forgetting that those who have to deal daily with the beasts are the Guatemalans; and it’s evident that there’s much at stake. (Antonio González Quintana, March 31 2009)

-Grace

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , ,

April 1, 2009

Conference: Media in Transition 6 at MIT

Media in Transition: April 24 – 26, at MIT. This looks to be excellent. The theme is “Stone and papyrus, storage and transition,” and touches on new media, digital archives, communications, social networks, mobile media, memory, history and more. Excerpt from the conference description:

“ What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?”

Here, a few abstracts from the many scheduled papers/sessions:

Archiving Women, Minorities, and Indigenous Peoples in the Digital Era, Amalia Levi
Digitizing can mean greater visibility and usability for material hitherto relegated to obscure stacks or to the knowledge, good will and not-always-so-impartial judgment of referral librarians and archivists. It would seem that digitization has brought about the emancipation of the record from the spatial, temporal, and human elements. But are digital humanities today truly liberated from the tyranny of cultural politics? This paper will examine the ways we archivists involve minority, ethnic, and native peoples in literacy, especially digital literacy. What is the meaning of the digital divide for minorities and their representation in archives? What do “hot topics” such as copyright law, digital curation, social networks, e-scholarship have to do with people whose permission was neither asked when their heritage was pillaged or taken away through unethical ways, nor consulted when they were “exhibited” in museums and archives?

Case Study: Burkina Faso Newsreels, Andrea McCarty
Several years ago, Patrice Napon, an archivist in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, rescued hundreds of 16mm newsreels from a dumpster in the parking lot of a local television station. The TV station had updated its technology to video, and in its coverage of current events, it no longer had a use for these newsreels. Napon realized the value of this film without even examining or viewing it. The reels contain footage shot by local film crews just after Burkina Faso declared independence from the French in the 1960s; they feature images of urban life, rural life, local events and national and regional political leaders. Commissioned by the new government, the footage bears witness to the events and daily life just after independence. It also represents the efforts of the nation to document its own government and citizenry, and to put its own people behind the camera after decades of colonial rule. Part propaganda, part documentary and part industrial film, these newsreels represent some of the only moving images from this time period in Burkina Faso’s history. This collection is in dire need of preservation, but no money exists for such a project. The possibility of saving the remainder of the collection is uncertain.

Web 2.0, Social Networking Technologies and Human Rights Organizations, Hector Postigo
This paper will present preliminary findings from a National Science Foundation funded study on social networking/web 2.0 architectures and their use by social movement/human rights advocacy organizations. The article presents the case of the Digital Universe Foundation, a non-for-profit organization that is building social network architectures to bring together human rights organizations under a common portal system. The portal system (called the Human Rights Portal) brings together activist networks, professional advocacy organizations and experts to form user communities that coordinate activism at all levels of a movement, connecting local grass roots initiatives with global advocacy. This initiative has the potential to change the dynamics that have historically existed between the media and social movements in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it places the power of issue framing squarely in the hands of movement actors.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Older Entries