#arabarchive

Mark R. Westmoreland, in the chapter “Time Capsules of Catastrophic Times” of the book The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, discusses the role of digital archives in the Arab Spring. According to the author, revolutions are a fertile territory for the so-called “citizen journalists” (amateur people who employ their cellphones to produce evidence) to document. During such critical times, digital archives make sure that all the content produced by both citizen journalists and professional video-makers is preserved once the revolution ends. 

Westmoreland focuses on the Mosireen archive, significant during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The name given to this archive is “858” due to the number of hours of content uploaded. The chapter “No Archive is Innocent. On the Attempt of the Archiving Revolt” of the book focuses on this digital archive and points out some of its negative sides. One of them is that such platforms difficultly ensure open access and clear organization of the content. Another one is that the importance of authorship and image-makers, is often overlooked. 

Likewise the Egyptian revolution, the yellow vests movement, a French social movement sparked in 2018 to fight the rise in fuel taxes, makes use of digital achieves to preserve the evidence created by its professional and non-professional journalists. For instance, the CRAS (Centre de Recherche pour l’Alternative Sociale/Center of Research for the Social Alternative) is an online digital archive which aims to collect documents about French social issues — like the yellow vests movement — to make them easily accessible for people. 

Unlike the Moisereen, the CRAS is very focused on organization. Thus, in the section dedicated to the yellow vests each file is categorized by type and date. However, in respect to the Moisereen, this archive is quite limited. It collects a great number of texts and a few compilations of videos which amount to about two and a half hours. Nothing compared to the 858 hours of the Moisereen. 

A. Retrieved from the CRAS archive. One of the pictures part of the “Yellow Rage” project made by Jérôme Fourcade.

B. Retrieved from the CRAS archive. One of the pictures part of the “Yellow Rage” project made by Jérôme Fourcade.

What the two digital archives have in common is the use of amateur content. For instance, in one of the videos shared in the CRAS, the authors make it clear that their montage is “a collection of the content found online, both of good and bad quality, filmed in precarious and courageous conditions” (second 16). Precisely because they mostly rely on citizen-journalists content, both archives are unable to give credit to the image-makers.