This blog reflects on ‘Engaging Communities with Archives: Video as a tool for activism, advocacy, and archival work’, a collaborative webinar hosted by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) on 7 Sept 2021.
On 7 Sept 2021, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) hosted a collaborative webinar exploring participatory projects or archival initiatives that train or support community groups in using video to tell personal stories, bring about social change, or archive and preserve activism and advocacy work. The webinar aimed to continue an international conversation opened at last year’s ‘Archival Activism: Community-Centred Approaches to Archives’ event, about how organisations can collaborate with care with community groups to empower people with the knowledge and skills to create and preserve their own stories. The recording of the DRI-PRONI event ‘Engaging Communities with Archives: Video as a tool for activism, advocacy, and archival work’ can be accessed below and on the DRI Vimeo channel. Event recordings are also preserved for long-term access in our events collection in the Repository.
We were delighted to partner with PRONI to welcome almost a hundred participants from all over the world to the webinar, which was chaired by Dr Laura Aguiar, Community Engagement Officer & Creative Producer at PRONI. Laura introduced our first speaker, her colleague Lynsey Gillespie, Archivist at PRONI, who joined us from Northern Ireland to speak about the Making the Future project. Lynsey is the curator for Making the Future, a cross-border cultural programme run by PRONI, Linen Hall Library, National Museums NI, and the Nerve Centre, that aims to empower people to use museum collections and archives to explore the past and create a powerful vision for future change. Key to the work of Making the Future is the idea that ‘everyone has a voice, everyone has a story, everyone has a future’, and everyone should be enabled to participate in the archive. Lynsey explains that one of PRONI’s aims is to expand into ‘a more participatory and inclusive archive’ by identifying gaps in the archive and bringing in the voices of underrepresented communities – like differently-abled communities – through initiatives like ‘Every Day is a School Day’, a series of 10 short films created by a group of participants with varying degrees of sight loss as part of Making the Future’s 100 Shared Stories programme. ‘Every Day is a School Day’ ran from January to March 2021. The first-time filmmakers took part in several Zoom workshops, which included filmmaking skills with advocate and visually impaired YouTuber Connor Scott-Gardner and a virtual tour of PRONI’s archives. Each participant was then challenged to make a short film that reflected their personal experiences with education. Lynsey shared with us the challenges of teaching and learning new filmmaking skills in an online environment, which was necessary due to COVID-19 restrictions, and how meaningful engagement was built through forming strong partnerships with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and with Connor Scott-Gardner, who was able to share insights as a peer with sight-loss working in the field of video creation and production. The participants were empowered to share diverse experiences of education from their own unique perspectives. This project allowed PRONI to give voice to communities that have traditionally been underrepresented in national archives. Lynsey noted that ‘all of our participants leave something with us for the archives at the end of the programme’ and because their stories are digitally preserved with PRONI, ‘it gives them a personal connection to [PRONI] that is ongoing’. Lynsey’s presentation is openly accessible on the DRI Slideshare for the benefit of anybody interested in learning more about PRONI’s community engagement work through Making the Future.
Our next speaker, Yvonne Ng, Archives Program Manager at WITNESS, joined us from the Czech Republic. Yvonne spoke about WITNESS, a non-profit organisation that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. Yvonne highlighted how WITNESS’s work has changed over the past 30 years as the landscape of digital technology has evolved and access to cameras and other forms of technology has widened, making it easier for citizen journalists to use video to document human rights abuses. Of course, as Yvonne points out in her talk, there are numerous threats and challenges to preserving human rights video documentation. The volume of content presents challenges for discovery; furthermore, social media content moderates and often removes content that is considered to be violent, which results in the loss of human rights evidence, and there are growing concerns about the viral spread of misinformation online. As Yvonne notes, community-based archives are not a new phenomenon; however, the interest in archives and archival methodologies has increased over the last ten years due to all the changes in the technological landscape, the increased reliance on video as evidence, and new threats and challenges to the discoverability and preservation of content. Digital material is fragile and erasable and it is therefore important to train and support people to plan for the long-term preservation and care of their videos so that valuable content is not lost. Yvonne shared how WITNESS supports human rights activists to create their own archives and plan for long-term preservation of content through resources such as the Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video and the Video as Evidence Field Guide. Yvonne ended her talk by providing illustrative examples of two archival collaborations to which WITNESS contributes – El Grito de Sunset Park and Berkeley Copwatch, two grassroots cop-watch organisations in the United States that have been building databases documenting police accountability. Learn more about the important collaborative work of WITNESS by accessing the presentation on the DRI Slideshare.
Our final speaker, Liz Miller, joined us from Canada. Liz is a documentary maker and professor interested in new approaches to community collaborations and to documentary making as a way to connect personal stories to larger social concerns. Liz spoke about Mapping Memories (2007-2012), a five-year participatory media initiative that offered over a hundred and eighty young individuals the opportunity to recount their stories of refugee experiences on their own terms. The photos, exhibits, and videos that emerged from this project have been used to build understanding about refugee rights and the diversity of refugee experiences in classrooms, with decision-makers and with the larger public. The project was part of a wider oral history project called LIFE STORIES, that engaged communities in documenting and archiving the life stories of those displaced by war and human rights abuses. Liz shared the diverse participatory methods that were used to develop this project; including, oral histories, documentaries, digital storytelling, mapping, live sound walks, and bus tours. She also drew out compelling connections between Mapping Memories and the projects highlighted by the first two speakers, such as the importance of forming strong partnerships for successful collaborations. One of the values that guided this project was the idea of ‘reframing the refugee narrative’ from ‘one of victimisation to one of resilience and complexity’ by empowering people to share their personal perspectives of refugee experiences in their own words. Liz also discussed the afterlife of the project, and how it has generated further archival and digital preservation work through initiatives like Living Archives and Atlas of Rwandan Life Stories. Liz finished her talk by inviting us to think about some of the tensions that need to be negotiated when creating a participatory project where you must consider both the personal needs of the community members and the long-term requirements of the public record. You can access Liz’s presentation on the DRI Slideshare.
The three talks were followed by a Q&A session with our international audience, expertly guided by Laura, who opened up a thought-provoking discussion around the concept of collaborating with care. We are grateful to our three speakers for sharing their expertise and experiences and to our attendees for their enthusiastic engagement throughout the webinar. Below you will find a list of resources that we hope you will find useful if you wish to explore some of the topics and themes introduced in the webinar further.
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Resources
Atlas of Rwandan Life Stories . Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://rs-atlascine.concordia.ca/rwanda/index.html.
“Berkeley Copwatch.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://lab.witness.org/berkeley-copwatch-database/.
“Blog.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. http://blog.witness.org/.
Digital Repository of Ireland. Archival Activism: Community-Centred Approaches to Archives, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Digital Repository of Ireland [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.m6141k788.
Digital Repository of Ireland. (2018) DRI Event Videos, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Digital Repository of Ireland [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.3485bx88b
Digital Repository of Ireland. (2016) Digital Repository of Ireland Publications, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Digital Repository of Ireland [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.3b591898r.
DRI Community Archive Scheme. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://dri.ie/dri-community-archive-scheme.
Every Day is a School Day. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://www.educationstories.org/.
“Library of Free Resources for Video Activists, Trainers and Their Allies.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://library.witness.org/.
Living Archives. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://livingarchivesvivantes.org/.
Making the Future. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://makingthefuture.eu/.
Mapping Memories. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://mappingmemories.ca/.
“Profiling the Police.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 2021, 10. https://elgrito.witness.org/.
“Video Archiving.” WITNESS. Accessed 09 10, 2021. https://archiving.witness.org/.
“Video as Evidence.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://vae.witness.org/.
“Video as Evidence Field Guide.” WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://vae.witness.org/video-as-evidence-field-guide/.
WITNESS. Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://www.witness.org/.
WITNESS. “Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video.” Accessed Sept 10, 2021. https://archiving.witness.org/archive-guide/.
