There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over ninety archival interviews. Having started with leading anthropologists, my subjects have broadened to include other social scientists and, recently, biological and physical scientists.

The full list of interviews can be found here.

Moving on to something a little more exciting … Last year I wrote about the possibilities of crowdsourcing photo archives, so I was happy to learn that the Library of Congress is giving it a go.

(Hat tip to Why that’s delightful and BoingBoing.)

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was developed collaboratively over the last two years by myself, Warumungu community members, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich (software developers) and Chris Cooney (designer). Mukurtu means ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu. Dilly bags were used as safe keeping places for sacred materials. The archive is thus a “safe keeping place.”

The gist of the project is this: Warumungu community members wanted a way to manage the digital materials they received from a number of sources—mainly researchers, teachers and missionaries who had once worked in the community. How could they store, organize, distribute, and allow access to these images based on the Warumungu cultural protocols that surround viewing and distribution of images and the associated knowledge that goes with them?

Over two years of consultation, we developed a browser-based digital archive (using a MySQL database and PHP scripting language, the archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP web environment—Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP—for those techies out there) using the cultural protocols to drive the technology. That is, the information architecture of the system was driven by the specific Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing, distribution, and reproduction of images. There is a detailed summary concerning the functionality of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive on my blog.

Over the last few years of development I have met several people involved in similar projects—mainly in Australia (I’d love to know about others). Finally having Mukurtu installed in Tennant Creek though gave us the opportunity to 1) think of ways to develop it further in the context of Nyinkka Nyunyu as an art and culture centre and 2) reach out to others to find ways to improve and share what we have. We have begun to develop a framework for a flexible system that would allow other communities to customize the system to fit their own cultural protocols–what we need now are more developers! Although at present most of the content in Mukurtu is from personal collections, the goal is to now reach out to museums and begin a process of virtual repatriation of Warumungu cultural materials. The South Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria have already loaned physical objects to Nyinkka Nyunyu for their museum space. These objects are displayed at Nyinkka Nyunyu and are accompanied by Warumungu narration.

The local archive allows for thousands more objects to be virtually repatriated at a fraction of the cost. Mukurtu allows for the content to be curated by individuals in the community. People can tag the content with restrictions, add multiple stories and recollections, and sort it by culturally relevant categories. People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Digital archives—powered by Indigenous protocols and intellectual property systems—have the potential to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the institutions that hold Indigenous materials and the communities to whom they belong. Even if one thought that all objects should be repatriated, most Indigenous communities don’t have the money or facilities to store the objects properly. Many communities want museums to keep their objects safe—they want a voice in the way they are displayed and curated. Digital projects can provide one avenue for Indigenous curation. One great example of this is the Virtual Museum Canada project. The Canadian government has funded many First Nations web based museum projects (see the Dane Wajich project by the Doig River First Nations community).

There is potential, then, for digital archives and other web-based projects (that take seriously and integrate Indigenous protocols) to reanimate the terrain of museum display, curation, and information management and to establish collaborative development projects between technologists, anthropologists and communities. Local archives, “safe keeping places,” that use Indigenous cultural protocols to define access and distribution parameters should not be read as closing down the commons or sealing off information. Instead, these projects give us a way to interrogate the limits of commons-like narratives about information or information freedom. They give us a way to redefine access and control apart from big business models. They allow us to examine different modes of information distribution and reproduction and the ways in which these systems maintain and create knowledge through their specific protocols. These archives are as much about production as they are preservation—in these cases the two are intertwined. Can these systems also inform the larger debate about access to information in relation to digital technologies? They seem poised to do so.

Project Naming started in 2001 when Inuit youth took 500 digitized photos taken by Richard Harrington during the 1940s and 50s and asked their elders to help identify the people and places in the pictures. This program was slowly expanded to include more and more photos, but in 2005 they started a new phase of the project in which “more than 1,700 photographs” from Canadian archives “were digitized and sent to Nunavut Sivuniksavut for identification.”

Although much of the project has been about bringing Nunavut youth together with their elders in a very personal way, the project has a page entitled “The Naming Continues” where web visitors can help identify those photos which have not yet been cataloged.

I think it would be great if more archives had sites like this. One possibility I see is that anthropologists could help out by doing what these Nunavut youth are doing. Before going off to the field you could download relevant uncataloged photos and then ask your informants about them. Talking about photos is a great way to start an interview, and who knows, maybe someone will recognize some faces! And it needn’t just be uncataloged photos. That photo listed as “Indian boy in native dress,” surely someone can identify the specific type of clothing and the region of India where it is worn … even if we never find out his name.

Many visual archives are offline. One place we visited had a two inch thick sheaf of handwritten notes about their photographs. Two others had computerized databases, but you can only access those databases if you are physically sitting in front of the computer in their office – something that they don’t normally let anyone do. That’s right, unless you are lucky (as I was in one case), you aren’t even allowed to use the database yourself! But I’m jumping ahead of myself – we haven’t even gotten in the door yet. We are still in the Catch-22 position of telling the archivist what materials we want to use without really knowing what materials they have. You might be able to find some kind of broad statement about the nature of their collection, and if you say something vague about the connection between your research and this collection the archivist will do a search themselves before setting up an appointment. Of course, having been vague, it will be a vague search, and they will tell you that they don’t have anything and you probably shouldn’t come. And they are probably correct because some archives charge a lot of money to get in and access the collection. That’s because an archivist will have to help you get out and put away any material you ask to see. Fees can range from $30 to $100 a day, or even higher for some film archives.

In our case we are looking for images of a group of people who went by many different ethnic names with many different spellings: Bhat, Bhantu, Sansi, Sansees, Kanjars, Kanjar-bhat, Adodias, etc. all refer to basically the same ethnic group. Even worse, they might simply be listed as “street performers”, “convicts,” or “vagrants” depending on the context in which their image was taken. As nomads they could also have been just about anywhere in South Asia. And with many archives the pictures are probably not individually labeled at all, but are simply in a big box of photos according to who took it: the name of a missionary, missionary society, or colonial official, etc. So good luck telling the archivist which keywords you want to use. What we wanted was the archivist to explain to us the nature of the collection and how it was organized so that we could zero in on potentially useful documents and spend our time in the most efficient manner possible. What the archivists wanted, on the other hand, was for you to already know which of their pictures you wanted to use. Of course, once we explained everything, they were usually quite helpful, but it did take a while to convince them that we weren’t wasting everyone’s time.

Once in the door you will likely have the best luck with photographs that are collected together with text – such as those found in old books or manuscripts. That is because the books and manuscripts provide textual clues as the contents of the photographs, and are probably indexed – even computer searchable. Photographs, however, are a very different matter. As I said, even if they have a database you are probably not allowed to use it yourself. This is exceedingly frustrating for someone used to trying various odd search combinations on Google to find what they want.

Having (mistakenly) been given access to one such database I have some theories as to why this might be the case: First, archivists are embarrassed about how poor their records are. Much of the keyword entry is done by volunteers, and these volunteers don’t know the difference between North and South India, not to mention between a Bhantu and and Bantu. One archivist told me that she had to personally edit out racist entries by some of her volunteers. This is a difficult problem. Google is now trying to tackle this problem by putting a game online where two people tag the same photo in real time and get points for matching keywords. Actually, Modonna was the first to try something like this, having her fans tag her huge archive of unlabeled photos. A second problem is more mundane: the databases are written using old software and it is very easy to switch from browsing the data to actually editing it, a very risky proposition. And, finally, the vast majority of material still hasn’t been archived.

Another explanation is that these problems are unique to the British archives. There does seem to be a certain ambivalence in England to examining their colonial past. People told us that the left is embarrassed by it and the right nostalgic, so nobody wants to look at it too closely. I’ve also heard people complain that British computer and internet use lags behind other developed countries. The Library of Congress, for instance, has fantastic image archives, much of which are up online. And we even found pictures of Sansis (spelled “Sanseeas”) at the New York Public Library …

Once you do get a hold of some useful photos you are then stuck with another problem. While some archives are generous about letting you snap a picture with your digital camera, others do not, and scanning fees can be exorbitant. I wouldn’t mind so much if they would use the money to create an electronic copy which would be available to everyone online, but when they say scanning they just mean a fancy photocopy which doesn’t damage the original document. Not being able to take your own digital image means that you have to keep meticulous written records describing each photo you found so that you can relocate it later on if you decide it is something worth copying.

Still, despite how cumbersome this process is, I found that I really enjoyed spending my days snooping around these dusty archives. I would almost consider becoming a historian were it not for one problem – I can’t read other people’s handwriting. The letters and journals of various colonial officers seemed to have been written by a seismograph rather than by a human hand. I really don’t know how historians do it without going blind.

Did we find what we were looking for? Some. We were really hoping for some film footage, or photos of the Chharas themselves, but we found images from other “Criminal Tribe” settlements that we might be able to use. More importantly, we found key documents about the history of the Chhara settlement that are very useful to the Chharas (both because they have lost any record of their own history, and because they are trying to claim the land on which their settlement had been built), and may lead us to additional sources of photos. We now have the names of the colonial officers who ran the settlement, so we can perhaps contact their families directly to see if they don’t have anything lying around. We also know the name of the specific office in charge of the settlement which might lead us somewhere …