WITNESS, Author at WITNESS Blog

Grace's First Skype Interview! Grace Lile, our Media Archive Manager, appeared on BoingBoing TV this week, performing her first Skype interview ever. She talks about the importance of the archive for human rights campaigning and the activities surrounding the 60th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. You can watch the interview at http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/11/bbtv-xeni-interviews-1.html December 11, 2008
Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 60: what image opened your eyes to human rights? On December 10th, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In commemoration WITNESS offers this short video featuring footage from the Media Archive. What image opened your eyes to human rights? Join the conversation by commenting or posting your own video response. December 7, 2008
Archives of human rights NGO seized by Russian police The St. Petersburg offices of the prominent human rights group Memorial were raided on Thursday by Russian security forces. (Memorial in Grozny is a WITNESS partner.) According to Human Rights Watch: “In the morning of December 4, 2008, seven masked men, armed with batons, broke into the office of the Memorial Research and Information Center […] December 5, 2008
Archives, power & memory “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” – Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. Clifford Levy’s November 26 NY Times article about renewed control and suppression of the archives in the Putin era chillingly illustrates Derrida’s thesis: “TOMSK, Russia: For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving […] December 2, 2008
Notes on AMIA 2008: Part 2 A few more session highlights: New Media Distribution Technologies. Brian Newman of Tribeca Film Institute gave a great presentation on Re:frame. Archivists, filmmakers, and distributors of independent film should know about Re:frame, which is making all kinds of previously unavailable or hard-to-find independent film available via DVD on demand and download to own/rent. WITNESS is […] November 21, 2008
Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories It’s been a week packed with info sessions, as last week not only brought together moving image archivists from all over North America at the AMIA conference, but also featured a smaller scale workshop in the Metropolitan New York Area. 55 archivists from various domains gathered at NYU for the NY Archivist’s Round Table on […] November 19, 2008
Notes from AMIA 2008: Part 1 Back from the 2008 Association of Moving Image Archives conference (AMIA) in Savannah, a beautiful city. No archive visits, but then Savannah is an archive in itself, and extremely rich in metadata, eg: It was a good conference. A couple of themes were dominant. Key for me was the focus on archiving in the context […] November 18, 2008
Stories that must be told: archives & records in post-conflict and peacekeeping The 2nd newsletter of the ICA Human Rights Working group is now available; the highlight is the text of a paper presented by Tom Adami at the ICA Congress last July in Kuala Lumpur. Adami spent eight years as archivist/information manager at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and is now working for the […] November 2, 2008
World Day For Audiovisual Heritage: Human Rights Archives Today, October 27, is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, established by UNESCO in 2007 to highlight the importance of film, video, television, radio and all other forms of audiovisual media to global culture, history, and communication; and to call attention to the vulnerability of this media, due to neglect, deterioration, a lack of human or […] October 27, 2008
New WITNESS Archive Intern My name is Ioannis Papaloizou and I am from Cyprus. My educational background is in film and video production (I obtained my Bachelor’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York) and more recently in “Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image” (prof. Master’s degree of the University of Amsterdam). At the university […] October 17, 2008
October is American Archives Month… 10 things to read/do/think about: 1. Read Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective by Verne Harris. 2. Check out this upcoming NY Archivists Roundtable workshop: Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories: Case Studies Addressing the Development and Implementation of Systems. November 10, 2008. One of the presenters is David Rice, Channel 13’s Digital Archivist. […] October 8, 2008
Job announcements for human rights archives/archivists Three current job openings relating to human rights collections: University of Texas Austin: Human Rights Archivist; Columbia University: Director of Area Studies/Global Resources; the position includes serving as the Director of the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research. Amnesty International (at the Secretariat, UK): Cataloger, Peter Benenson Collection. October 2, 2008
What is an archivist? In a previous post I referred to Mark Greene's SAA address, "The Power of Archives: Archivists’ Values and Value in the Post-Modern Age." The full text is now available on the SAA site, but here is the "elevator speech" quote I referred to: September 17, 2008
Archiving cellphone video Earlier this week amateur cellphone video surfaced corroborating that casualties suffered in the August 22 US airstrike on the Afghan village of Azizabad were much higher than the military has been willing to admit. The Times published a piece by Carlotta Gall "Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid," which also includes a link to some of the video (edited due to graphic content). September 12, 2008
September 11 archives online Two online archives on the events of 9/11/01, both worth looking at: The Library of Congress Web Archive A wide range of web sites from individuals, institutions and news media around the world during the aftermath of the attacks. The September 11 Digital Archive Includes over 150,000 digital items including emails, images, voicemails, stories, video, […] September 11, 2008