The Visual History Archive

Craig Matthew keeps his archive up-to date! Here he's seen in action at the Right2Know Campaign's Cape Town march against the Protection of Information Bill. Photo credit: Jo-Anne Duggan

Craig Matthew is a man with a mission: he wants to make archives, especially audio-visual archives, accessible digitally, through the worldwide web. So do many others, but what’s different about Matthew and his team at Doxa Productions/Visual History Archive (VHA) is that they have developed an interactive and immersive approach to archiving, which they’ve termed Natural Knowledge TM. Their Visual History Explorer an innovative Natural Knowledge TM product, that has been three years in the making, uses the physical landscape as an entry point to an interactive environment that holds a wide variety of archival material, allowing users to explore spatial, temporal and conceptual relationships between different components, at the click of a button.

I asked Matthew to tell me how his interest in archives and his particular approach to the work of archiving evolved. He tells me that as a filmmaker in South Africa, Namibia, and Angola, amongst other places, in the 1980s and 1990s, he had the “extreme privilege” of witnessing the turbulent events of those years unfolding at all levels, in the townships, on the city streets and in Parliament. Speaking of the sometimes “unbelievable situations” in which he found himself, Matthew tells of being arrested on countless occasions, having his phone tapped, enduring police raids and being followed by security officers. He was there, he says, not just as an observer, but part of it all. He has, in his personal archive, hundreds of hours of footage documenting his experiences. A small portion of this record - he estimates this at less than 3% - has been broadcast. In 2007 Matthew’s material, now the Doxa Liberation Struggle Living Archive Collection, was, placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2007. http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=22344&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. He has, he says, an almost “visceral relationship” with this archive, and he sees it as an important repository of history and memory.

Matthew tells me too of the formative experience of working as a ‘stringer’ for World television news (WTN). Watching colleagues from other agencies and networks in action, he became increasingly critical of the way in which news, especially for television, was constructed and presented as a ‘consumer product’.  Referring disparagingly to ‘cut and paste’ journalism and ‘crude propaganda’, he explains how generally just a couple of seconds, or sometimes minutes, of footage were used in news programmes with little supporting information, or thoughtful or intelligent comment. While he ascribes this to some extent to the need to meet unrelenting deadlines and the competition between agencies, he’s clearly irritated too by the focus on presenters, and the way in which they, as personalities with no real understanding or experience of the situations they were reporting on, dominate the screen. At some point, says Matthew quite mischievously, he took to “filming the people filming the news”. What seems to have bothered him most is the loss of context, the loss of meaning, and the objectification of the material.

Intensifying his work in documentary film making from the late 1980s gave Matthew more control over the way in which his material was used. Having covered political developments in Namibia, Matthew spent time with John Marshall documenting San communities in Northern Namibia in the early 1990s. Matthew describes this as a situation “diametrically opposed” to the fast pace of working on the news front. Even now, he still seems bemused by the way in which Marshall spent all day shooting in a place where “seemingly nothing is happening”.  Matthew has subsequently invested more than a decade in research and documentary work related to the oral history and indigenous knowledge systems of the Himba people of North-Western Namibia, spending lengthy periods of time quietly observing communities going about their daily lives. After years of dealing with ongoing deadlines and packaging material quickly, and “quite roughly” for the news, he spent months meticulously editing the Himba material for his award-winning film, Ochre & Water: Himba Stories from the Land of the Kaoko http://creativecontent.unesco.org/media-library/product?usca%5fp=t&product%5fid=2529 , something that he still seems to find astonishing. What Matthew gained from his interactions with Namibia’s indigenous peoples, and set him on the path to the current project, is a profound sense of the power of place and an understanding of the way in which cultural practices are deeply rooted in the landscape. He was struck too, in his interactions with the San and the Himba communities, by the power of the landscape as an archive and the way in which features such as trees, rocks and places of ritual served as markers of memory, especially in a cultures based predominantly on oral traditions.

In about 2000 Matthew started to thinking more deeply about the archive, the process of archiving, and ways in which people might access and relate to material in different ways. He pictured, in his mind, an archive in digital format that would allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to access multiple sources of information about a particular place, but adds that the project has developed beyond his wildest imagination. The Visual History Explorer (VHX) integrates sophisticated mapping technologies, quantitative data, audiovisual, textual, photographic and interactive 3-dimensional models and panoramic components, all of which are geo-tagged, allowing users to explore spatial, temporal and conceptual relationships between the different components.

One of the first projects to which the team have applied this concept is Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square. http://www.saha.org.za/publications/between_life_and_death.htm
This interactive product, commissioned in 2007 by the South African History Archive (SAHA) for the Sunday Times Heritage Project, http://heritage.thetimes.co.za/ allows users to explore John Vorster Square, now known as Johannesburg Central, a place notorious in the apartheid years as a centre for police intimidation and interrogation. A 3D model of the building and 360˚panoramic photographs allow users to explore the building and create new narratives by juxtaposing historical and contemporary audiovisual materials, photographs, documents and personal accounts from former security policemen and detainees.  Interactive and comparative timelines allow users to take virtual narrative pathways through virtual archives, access relevant life histories, audiovisual and photographic data, texts and objects, and view local events in relation to important events on the continent and internationally. Audiovisual interviews are presented in a multi-layered format, allowing visitors to access recordings and full transcripts of these as well as other related material. Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square is available on DVD from SAHA. The team have worked on similar projects, including the Nelson Mandela: 20 Years of Freedom Portal http://www.20yearsoffreedom.com/, the District Six Living Archive Project, the San Living Archive Project and the Kaoko Living Archive Project.

In 2008 Matthews formed the Visual history Archive (VHA), an independently funded non-profit entity/public benefit organisation. Funded primarily by Atlantic Philanthropies, the VHA has initiated a digital archiving project which involves establishing relationships with owners and custodians of historical audiovisual collections, conducting archival audits and sourcing previously unknown footage, the digitisation and preservation of audiovisual material, and the creation of freely accessible online portals.

To this end, the VHA has set up a high-end digitising unit, as well as reliable storage systems for the digitised material, and partners with the University of Cape Town Libraries on the cataloguing, curation and preservation of archival audiovisual material housed in their repository under internationally accepted archival standards. The German broadcaster ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) has recently deposited approximately 5000 tapes tracing political developments in Southern Africa between 1983 and early 2006 to Doxa/VHA. This, together with the Doxa Liberation Struggle Living Archive Collection, will be made available through the Liberation Struggle Archival Portal.

The team’s Cape Town office is quiet, but it’s a hive of activity. Every item in the collection is digitised and then logged, geo-referenced and tagged. Events and people are identified wherever possible and contextualising information and keywords loaded as meta-data into a content management system and then checked by a moderator, an expert in archival film footage, for consistency and quality.

The VHA’s The Visual History Explorer Version 1.0 will be launched early in 2011. This product which includes a custom-built Content Management System feeds directly into an online platform which allows digital assets to be organised, geo-tagged and uploaded from anywhere in the planet. Essentially, the VHX offers a seamless way to preserve, organise and bring archival material into the public domain. It can also be used for heritage management, education and research, social networking and training. Matthew tells me that its application goes far beyond historical archives; organisations involved in tracking human rights abuses have shown an interest in it!

What excites me most about the VHX is that it is place-based. I think of the landscape of our country and the way in which history is layered in and on the ground, at a site like Mapungubwe, for example. Walking through the landscape one finds Stone Age tools, paintings of the rocks, Iron Age artefacts, traces of colonial settlers, military insignia from the more recent past and, of course, the border fence. Collectively these tell the story of the site and the various people who occupied it over hundreds of thousands of years. It’s the possibility of being able to recreate this experience in digital format that has such enormous potential for the way in which we store, access and use archival material.

Jo-Anne Duggan

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