Towards a Living Activist Archive Online: A case study of CivilMedia@TW in Taiwan

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Universiteit van Amsterdam

Graduate School of Humanities, Department of Media Studies

Professional MA: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image

Towards a Living Activist Archive Online:

A case study of CivilMedia@TW in Taiwan

Supervisor:

Dr. Manon Parry

Second Reader:

Dr. Stefania Milan

Thesis by:

Chia-Wei Tung

Student number: 11107979

E-mail: chia-wei.tung@student.uva.nl

Amsterdam, September 2016

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Foremost, I’d like to thank my supervisor, Professor Manon Parry, for her constant advice, feedback, and support throughout the research and writing process. I’m also thankful to Professor Carolyn Birdsall for her lectures, which inspired me to start research on my thesis topic, and for her generosity to brainstorm with me at the beginning of my research stage. Moreover, I’d like to thank Professor Eef Masson, for her warm and consistent guidance from the very start of my study in Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image (P&P) programme. And I also thank Professor Stefania Milan in advance for her evaluation of this thesis.

My deepest gratitude goes to Professor Chung-hsiang Kuan for his willingness to accept my interview, sharing his activist archiving experience selflessly. Without him, my research would be impossible to complete. My thanks also go to Ms. Yvonne Ng for her kindness to share her experience as an archive working group member in Occupy Wall Street Movement and also her expertise as an archivist in WITNESS archive.

I thank my P&P comrade and dear friend Mariela Cantú for all the inspiring discussions and exchanges of ideas we had. I also owe thanks to Jessica Chang for her warm company during my study in Amsterdam. I’d also like to thank my friends scattered around the world, who never stops caring about me, even from afar, especially Yin-Chen Chang, Hsiang-Yin Wang, and Daniel Yang. Lastly, my most profound gratitude goes to my parents for their unceasing loving support and understanding.

Two years ago, while I was busy working and preparing for graduate school application, I never knew I would end up in Amsterdam writing a thesis about an online activist archive. It has been a long yet wonderful journey that could only happen with all the kindness and help I have received along the way.

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Social movements and citizen actions are an essential force to propel social transformations, yet they are highly ephemeral and dynamic in nature and thus can be hard to archive as heritage. This thesis examines activist archiving practice in the contemporary digital era and explores how the dynamics of social activism can be preserved. By looking into CivilMedia@TW, an online audiovisual activist archive dedicated to preserving and presenting social movements and citizen actions in Taiwan as a case study, the thesis aims to investigate the archive’s archival strategies, especially its use of digital technologies to preserve and sustain active social movement cultures. Through close study on CivilMedia@TW’s history, workflow, its interrelationships with activist groups and citizen organizations, and its application of alternative media practices, the thesis further discusses the meanings of sustainable preservation for an activist archive and how it can possibly reach the ideal of a “living archive,” preserving the dynamics of social activism in the present and even encouraging more citizen initiatives to contribute to social change in the future.

Key Words: activist archive, activist archiving, digital archiving, alternative media, social activism, CivilMedia@TW, Taiwan

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Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 Prologue: A look back on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

In 2011, after the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement started on September 17th in Zuccotti Park in New York’s Wall Street financial district, several heritage institutions were in a race to collect and preserve the traces of the movement: the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, to name just a few.1 Apart from formal institutions, individual participants in OWS also organised archive working groups to document and preserve the movement. According to Yvonne Ng, who was a member of Activist Archivists, an archive working group founded during OWS, each working group had a different focus at that time: some focused on collecting ephemera such as flyers and posters; some emphasized the preservation of audiovisual records of the protests and demonstrations, while others were dedicated to documenting the working process of the archive working groups themselves.2 The archival endeavours during the movement were rather dispersed and decentralized. The interrelationships among different heritage institutions and archiving groups were complex, which reflected the participatory dynamics of institutions and individuals, experts and non-experts, during the archiving process of the movement.

Due to the ephemerality of the movement, the decision to collect and preserve materials had to be made instantly, rather than after the movement ended. In fact, during the time when all the activities such as demonstrations and protests were happening, even experts could not foresee whether OWS would leave an important mark on history, but “by the time scholars know for sure it will be too late to collect materials.”3 Therefore, institutions and individual working groups initiated their archival endeavours during the

1

Shane Ferro, “The Smithsonian and New-York Historical Society Race to Preserve Occupy Wall Street’s Art and Artifacts,” Blouin Artinfo, accessed March 26, 2016, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/38922/the-smithsonian-and-new-york-historical-society-race-to-preserve-occupy-wall-streets-art-and-artifacts. A.T., “Documenting the Occupy Protests: Data Mining for Instant History,” The Economist, accessed March 26, 2016,

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/12/documenting-occupy-protests?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/dataminingforinstanthistory. 2

Yvonne Ng, Google Hangouts interview with author, March 17, 2016. A disc containing the audio recording of the interview will be attached to the thesis as a supplement. Yvonne Ng is a senior archivist at WITNESS, Brooklyn, New York. During the OWS movement, she was a member of Activist Archivists, a working group mainly dedicated to preserving the audiovisual materials generated during the movement. The group largely consisted of audiovisual archiving graduate students, professionals, and academics. For more information on Activist Archivists, please go to: http://activist-archivists.org/wp/.

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climax of the movement in order to rescue the “heritage-to-be” in time. This implies an instantaneous archiving model in contemporary times, which is largely made possible with the application of digital technologies. Though there was not much coordination among different institutions or working groups, one notion shared by people and organizations participating in the archiving process was a kind of awareness that the moments of OWS had to be saved. The historical significance of the materials generated during the movement was anticipated for the future, as evidenced by Jean Aston, the New York Historical Society’s Library Director, who said, “These items document a particular moment in time which may become significant in the future.”4

For heritage institutions, one of the main reasons for their preservation endeavours is to meet the research needs of professionals in the future. As Sharon Leon, the Director of Public Programmes at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, further elaborated, “[T]he site [of OWS] will be useful for future historians of social movements.”5 Nevertheless, for the OWS archive working groups outside the context of heritage institutions, there may be a more subjective motivation for archiving the movement. Again, according to Ng, these independent working groups organised by individuals mostly had “a desire to build up their own community,”6 a community with its own identities and space for interpretation beyond the narrative of formal institutions. Most of the members of the archive working groups were participants in the OWS protests and demonstrations during that time; in other words, they were activists in the movement and their subjectivity played an essential role in their archival endeavours. For them, archiving practice, in a sense, can be regarded as an integral part of their action in the movement.

The archiving efforts for the world-renowned OWS movement illustrated above serve as a good initial point of reflection through which to introduce the main themes that I am going to explore in this thesis. The archiving process of OWS offers a very useful lens through which to contemplate the dynamics between the archival profession and social activism. In this thesis, I am going to discuss how archiving practice can become an effective means and indispensable part of social activism, eventually contributing to actual social change in reality.

What lies at the core of the archival endeavours of contemporary social movements is the application of digital technologies. Digital tools play a crucial role in the

4 Ibid. 5

See note 1, “Documenting the Occupy Protests: Data Mining for Instant History.” 6

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instantaneous archiving of movements. Devices such as smartphones and digital cameras enable general participants in the movements to document the moments on their own easily and upload the records online right away, sharing the content on social media while they are still in the middle of the protests or demonstrations. Owing to digital technologies, the highly ephemeral traces of social movements or citizen actions can be documented and preserved in time, and later open for dissemination and convenient access on the Internet. Moreover, for individual activists and archivists outside the context of formal institutions, such as the members of the OWS archive working groups, digital technologies also offer great possibilities for them to archive and interpret movements, and to tell the stories on their own terms. Hence, in this sense, digital technologies have opened up potentialities for broader participation in the archiving practice, enabling more people to preserve and interpret their histories.

Ultimately, how is it possible to ensure the sustainable preservation of social movement cultures after a movement comes to an end? With the advent of a digital era, the meanings of “sustainability” to the heritage of social activism may also change. In this thesis, following the question whether archiving practice can become an essential part of social activism, I would like to discuss to what extent digital technologies can contribute to the archiving of social activism by closely examining three dimensions: instantaneous archiving, online participatory culture, and finally, an activist archive’s sustainability and permanence. How do digital technologies facilitate a kind of “instantaneous archiving” in the mid of social movements or citizen actions? Can digital platforms really create a successful mode of participatory culture that is open for the general public to join in history-making processes? In the end, how can digital tools ensure the long-term preservation of activist collections? Can the collections remain active and influential on society afterwards? These are the main questions I’d like to explore in this thesis.

1.2 Research Objectives, Methodologies, and Case Study

This thesis has three main objectives: to reflect on the current development of archiving practice as a means of social activism in the contemporary digital age, to stimulate discussions on how to sustain an activist-based archive, and to consider what “sustainable preservation” really means for an archive dedicated to preserving the dynamics of social activism. Hopefully, it can generate more discussions and ideas about activist archiving practice and its relationship with social activism both in the present and in the future.

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My research is based on two methodologies: a critical review of the existing literature and a comprehensive investigation of the case of CivilMedia@TW (公民影音行動資料庫),7 an online audiovisual activist archive dedicated to documenting and preserving social movements and citizen actions in Taiwan. My case study is based on in-depth research into CivilMedia@TW’s online platform, annual work reports, and other relevant literature. Additionally, an interview was conducted with the founder and current director of the archive, Mr. Chung-hsiang Kuan (管中祥).

So far, CilvilMedia@TW can be regarded as one of the most prominent online audiovisual archives dedicated to the documentation and preservation of social activism in Taiwan. Its foundation was owing to the fact that citizen actions and social movements had long been neglected by mainstream media, and that there had not been any digital archive or database dedicated specifically to preserving social activism in Taiwan. In fact, until recently, little attention had been paid to the long-term archiving of citizen actions and social movements in a digital age.

In 2007, Chung-hsiang Kuan, a scholar of media and communication studies and a persistent participant in social movements and media reform, founded CivilMedia@TW (later referred as CivilMedia):

to actively document citizen actions, offer audiovisual records, enable the general public to understand the values and ideas behind the actions through the presentation of online platforms and archives, and finally, to facilitate further discussions on social issues and for future generations to learn about the history, social development, and social activism in Taiwan.8

In other words, the establishment of CivilMedia can be regarded as a response to the lack of endeavours to preserve the heritage of social activism in Taiwan. Moreover, apart from being an online audiovisual archive, CivilMedia also operates as an alternative media platform, and its double identities (archive/alternative media platform) in fact enable it to have more agency and potential as a site to preserve and facilitate the dynamics of social activism. Through close examination and research on CivilMedia’s history, organization,

7

“CivilMedia@TW,” CivilMedia@TW, accessed March 10, 2016, http://www.civilmedia.tw/. 8

CivilMedia@TW, CivilMedia@TW 2008 Annual Research Report (Taipei: National Science Council, 2010), 75. My translation.

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workflow, and its relationship with activist groups and citizen organizations, I’d like to address the research questions I raised previously, and critically reflect on how the working model of this online audiovisual archive can contribute to the notions of activist archiving and archives, discussing whether it can actively facilitate citizen actions and generate further impacts on society, transforming the archival profession into an effective means of activism.

1.3 Overview of the Thesis Structure

A critical review of existing literature will be covered in the second chapter. First I am going to trace the archival profession’s paradigm shifts throughout history, and then introduce the notion that archives are becoming spaces for dynamic participation rather than static repositories behind walls. The paradigm shifts signify the foundation for the rise of community archiving and later activist archiving practice, which I am going to address in the second section of the chapter. Finally, in the chapter’s last section, I will put activist archiving practice into a digital context, connecting it with digital archiving strategies. Since digital technologies have become essential for the archival profession nowadays, I will delve into the discussion on digital archiving practice and its features, potential, and possible limitations when applied to the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of social activism and activist-related materials. Overall, what the second chapter offers is a close examination on the existing literature, and more significantly, a theoretical framework for the case study that follows.

In the third chapter, I will outline the historical background for my case study, CivilMedia@TW. First I will give a brief introduction to the history of social movements and alternative media attempts in Taiwan, which is highly pertinent to the initiation of the archive. Subsequently, I will elaborate on CivilMedia’s development since its establishment in 2007, and then focus on its current structure and operation as both an online audiovisual archive and alternative media platform. The following chapter will then concentrate on the analysis of CivilMedia as an activist archive based in a digital environment, bringing the case into conversation with the theoretical framework laid out in the second chapter and exploring how existing theories can be used to understand the actual activist archiving practice applied by CilvilMedia, or, whether there are some aspects that have not yet been fully covered in the literature so far. In the end, perhaps the most significant and inspiring

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dimension of the study on CivilMedia is the challenges the archive faces and the strategies the archivists come up with to sustain the dynamics of the archive.

Finally, the fifth chapter will conclude by summarizing the concepts of activist archiving in a digital age and their realization in the CivilMedia archive. Hopefully, the discussions brought forth by CivilMedia can provide some new and feasible directions for activist archiving practice in the future, especially regarding how an activist archive can evolve organically as a “living archive,” sustaining social movement cultures and contributing to real progressive transformations in society.

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Chapter 2. Literature Review–A history towards activist archiving in a digital age 2.1 Paradigm Shifts in the Archival Profession: Towards active archiving

[T]he rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft.9

What is an archivist’s relationship with history-making processes? How has an archivist’s role evolved throughout history? Before delving into the theme of activist archiving, it is useful to reflect on the historical shifts in archivists’ roles and the archival paradigm, in order to understand the provenance of an activist archiving approach.

Archivists were traditionally regarded as neutral and impartial professionals who handled historical materials such as documents, recordings, and files on an administrative basis. As a passive custodian of historical sources usually hidden from the public’s sight, they were not associated with active knowledge production or history-making processes; instead, neutrality and impartiality were their professional principles. However, in the 1970s, American social activist and historian Howard Zinn pointed out in his essay, “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest” that this kind of neutrality and impartiality is

actually a “fake.”10 Technical and mundane as they may seem, the archivists’ daily duties,

including acquisition, appraisal, selection, cataloging, and making descriptions of collections, are all in fact a form of social control, since these duties determine how our history is filtered, preserved, and presented. Every step of the archivists’ working process could be a strengthening of the existing authorities in society, even though they may be entirely unaware of this. As Zinn noted, the claimed “passivity” of archivists indicates that they are in fact responsible for reaffirming and maintaining the status quo in society, and thus the archival profession is inherently political. In this sense, archivists’ conscious denial of the fake neutrality and impartiality of their roles is not “the politicizing of a neutral craft” but “the humanizing of an inevitably political craft.” To admit the political nature of

9

Howard Zinn, “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest,” The Midwestern Archivist 2, no. 2 (1977), 20. 10

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their daily duties and to rebel against the norms is the first step for archivists to assume their active role in history-making processes.

Even though it was published more than four decades ago, Zinn’s essay has remained a significant reference for contemporary archival studies. It acknowledged the inevitably political nature of an archivist’s role, and further encouraged archivists to break away from fake neutrality, taking on a more rebellious (and also more human) role in their archival work. Canadian archivist and scholar Terry Cook further proposed four archival paradigms to elaborate on the shifting identity of archivists since the late nineteenth century. The four paradigms, in sequential order, are evidence, memory, identity, and community.11 From the 1970s onwards, the third paradigm of “identity” meant that records started to function more as a means to promote social justice and human rights. With the advent of computer technology, records also went electronic and therefore became more “fluid and transient.”12 Thus, the paradigm emphasized archives as “a societal resource” that is more pluralistic and hard to pin down due to the features of digital media, which I will further elaborate later in this chapter.

Subsequently, the fourth paradigm demonstrates a participatory archiving process, a major shift “from exclusive custodianship and ownership of archives to shared stewardship and collaboration.”13 The autonomy and self-determination of communities is strongly emphasized, and community archiving practice is no longer perceived as amateurish or unprofessional; instead, the diverse archival working models of different communities should be respected, since they can make the whole archival profession more inclusive and holistic. Archiving has become a way of community empowerment for people to understand their own identities and histories; while archivists are also transformed into more active agents participating as a member of society rather than merely “proficient professionals behind the walls of [their] own institutions.”14 Indeed, during this paradigm shift, digital technology is a significant factor for the transformation since it greatly facilitates the participatory process of community archiving. Again, both the

11

Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13, no. 2 (2013): 95–120. One thing to note is that the four paradigms do not completely replace one another across the course of time. According to Cook, “Traces of what went before linger in successive mindsets, and sometimes form discursive tensions in our professional literature and in our practices.” 12 Ibid., 110. 13 Ibid., 115. 14 Ibid., 116.

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notions of community archiving and digital technology application will be examined more closely in the subsequent section.

In summary, Cook’s research on archival paradigm shifts offers an outline for the changing conceptions of the archival profession and the transforming identities of archivists throughout history. The shifts demonstrate that archivists have gradually played a more active and participatory role in the archiving process; additionally, they have become more connected with people and communities, and thus the definition and composition of the archival profession has been transformed to be more diverse, fluid, de-centered, and inclusive.

In another essay, Cook further situated the transformation of the archival profession in a contemporary postmodern context. Under postmodernism, it is argued that the societal norms that appear rather natural in our daily lives are in fact all culturally and socially constructed. Following this core principle, “[t]he notions of universal truth or objective knowledge based on the principles of scientific rationalism from the Enlightenment, or from employing the scientific method or classical textual criticism, are dismissed as chimeras.”15 According to postmodern thought, nothing is absolute or completely natural. Likewise, in the archival profession, the seemingly objective professional archival system is actually built upon certain ideologies and inevitably biased from the very beginning. An archive and its collections are consciously constructed with specific preconditions and purposes and involved with certain power relations, even though they may be hidden within the quotidian daily routines of the archiving process and not easily noticed by the general public or even by archivists themselves. In other words, even though they may be disguised as neutral repositories, archival institutions are never free from their involvement with power relations, and the records in archives are always subject to archivists’ interpretations, as Jacques Derrida pointed out in Archive Fever, “…the people in charge, those who have the power in fact to build the archive and to publish the archive and to interpret the archive, have, of course, their own interpretations, their own motivations, their own pre-shaped schemes of interpretation.”16 In a postmodern context, archivists no longer adhere to the futile insistence on neutrality and passivity; instead, they embrace their role as an active contributor who shapes collective memories.

15

Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science 1, no. 1 (2001): 7.

16

Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever” (transcribed seminar), in Refiguring the Archive, ed. C. Hamilton, et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 50.

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The key concepts of postmodernism, “[p]rocess rather than product, becoming rather than being, dynamic rather than static, context rather than text, reflecting time and place rather than universal absolutes,”17 should also be applied to archival science and serve as the basis for a new archival paradigm, in which archivists hold an active role in history-making and an archive becomes an on-going dynamic process rather than a static storehouse. To summarise, from Howard Zinn’s rejection of archivists’ neutrality and passivity to Cook’s notion of archival paradigm shifts and their relation to postmodernism, the “active archiving/archivist” approach is brought forward, which “acknowledges the role of the record keeper in ‘actively’ participating in the creation, management, and pluralization of archives and seeks to understand and guide the impact of that active role.”18 However, this “active archiving” approach still centers on the identity transformation of professional archivists being trained and working in archival institutions. As the archival profession has become more fluid and dynamic today, has the hierarchical structure of the profession actually loosened? Are general citizens able to assume an active role in the archiving process, reclaiming their subjectivity and rights over their own histories and eventually agitating for social change? This will be the focus of the following section about community archiving, which will then lead to the theme of activist archiving practice.

2.2 Community Archiving Traditions and the Emergence of Activist Archiving

Community Archiving

“Archives of the people, for the people, by the people,”19 a phase by Dutch archivist and scholar Eric Ketelaar, highlights people’s subjectivity and power in building their own archives. Arising from the “active archiving” approach discussed in the previous section, in which archivists reject the fake neutrality of their profession and acknowledge their agency in archiving process, the general public outside the professional domain has also started to call for their right to actively participate in archiving their cultural heritage and interpreting their histories. In this way, archival work may ultimately become an integral part of social

17

Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 22. 18

Andrew Flinn and Ben Alexander, “‘Humanizing an Inevitably Political Craft’: Introduction to the Special Issue on Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving,” Archival Science 15, no. 4 (2015): 331.

19

Eric Ketelaar, “Archives of the People, By the People, For the People,” South Africa Archives Journal 34 (1992): 5–16, reprinted in Eric Ketelaar, The Archival Image: Collected Essays, ed. Yvonne Bos-Rops (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997),15–26.

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activism and propel actual social transformation. Eventually, “activist archiving” goes beyond an active archiving approach and “instead embrace[s] a view of archival practice as a form of social, cultural and political activism.”20

Activist archiving can be regarded as an extension of the broad concept of community archiving. As scholars Flinn and Alexander argue:

[T]he recognition of the potential significance of archives and archival processes within a range of different political and social movement campaigns, was also

activated by contemporary independent and community-based archival initiatives launched in the 1960s and 1970s which documented and engaged with the

histories and on-going struggles of women and working-class organizations, and for gay liberation and civil rights.21

Community archives originate from “the desire to document, record and preserve the identity and history of their own locality and community.”22 According to British scholar Andrew Flinn, community archiving can be defined as “the grassroots activities of documenting, recording and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control and ownership of the project is essential.”23 Certainly, there are different kinds of communities with various compositions, and the definition of a “community” is open to multiple interpretations; likewise, the formation of a community archive and archiving practice is also diverse.24 However, for all community archives and archiving practices, the essential component is that people take the initiative to participate actively in an open and transparent archiving process of their own heritage. As Verne Harris noted, it is about “[p]articipation in its constitution and in its interpretation. Opened to the endeavour of experts and non-experts alike. Opened to the voices of people. Open to contestation.”25 A community archive should be established in a public sphere, with a

20

Flinn and Alexander, “‘Humanizing an Inevitably Political Craft,’” 332. 21

Ibid., 330. 22

Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream,” Archival Science 9, no. 1 (2009): 71.

23

Andrew Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (2007): 153.

24

Ibid, 152. 25

Verne Harris, “Madiba, Memory and the Work of Justice” (The Alan Paton lecture at Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, n.d., 2011).

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more horizontal participative network and its collection more accessible to the general public.

Undeniably, sometimes the relationship between community archives and formal heritage institutions can be contentious, especially over issues such as ownership, archiving strategies, or historical interpretations. In some cases, it may even “involve or maintain legacies of oppression, colonization, and displacement, or connote the power relations of policing and surveillance.”26 Yet, an independent community archive does not necessarily separate itself entirely from heritage institutions, nor confront them absolutely; collaborations still exist between them and the interrelationships can be rather complex. Eventually, the key to distinguishing a community archive is that “the impetus and direction should come from within the community itself.”27 Members of a community should be able to make their own decisions independently during the archiving process, determining their own way of history-making, just as Joan Nestle, one of the founders of Lesbian Herstory Archives, claimed, “We wanted our story to be told by us, shared by us and preserved by us.”28

Community archiving’s ultimate goal is to preserve and present the histories of communities which are often underrepresented, marginalized, or even distorted in mainstream society, those “histories which are often absent from mainstream archives and other heritage institutions.”29 It is an approach that allows communities to make their own voices, resisting and challenging dominant historical discourses. Through the archiving of their heritage, communities are able to establish continuity for their histories and collective memories.30 Archiving practice thereby becomes a tool for empowerment with great political agency. While carrying out their archiving practice, community members establish or affirm their identities, empowering themselves through active history-making processes; “archive materials were used as sources documenting and memorializing past struggles and violations of rights, as resources supporting on-going claims for justice and healing, and as tools for understanding the past in order to influence the present and the future.”31 It’s not only significant for community members; it’s crucial for the entire society, as

26

Alycia Sellie, et al., “Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture,” Archival Science 15, no. 4 (2015): 463. This paper offers many insights on activist archives and thus will serve as my main reference for the following discussion.

27

Andrew Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives,” 153. 28

Joan Nestle, “The Will to Remember,” Journal of Homosexuality 34, no. 3–4 (1998), 227. 29

Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives,” 72. 30

Ibid. 31

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community archiving contributes to social production, adding to the diversity and multiplicity of our histories and cultures as a whole. Community archiving is far beyond neutral record keeping and heritage custodianship; instead, it is highly political as it urges social change as its ultimate goal.

Activist Archiving and Archives

Community archiving’s participatory and collaborative approach, advocacy for people’ self determination on history-making, and political resistance to mainstream discourses are essential components which lay the foundation for the emergence of activist archiving practice. Activist archiving, if not more radical, shares all the above-mentioned characteristics of community archiving, while sometimes there are no clear boundaries between community archiving and activist archiving. Similarly, the definition of activist archiving is far from fixed. According to Grace Lile, the Director of Operations and Archives of WITNESS, there are many possible connotations for activist archiving (or archives/archivists).32 In this thesis, activist archiving is referred to as an approach, and I’d like to apply the definition proposed by Flinn and Alexander in “Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving,” a special issue of the journal Archival Science published in 2015. They define “activist archiving” as “the processes in which those who self-identify primarily as activists engage in archival activity, not as a supplement to their activism but as an integral

part of their social movement activism.”33 Hence, the key concept about activist archiving

is that archiving practice becomes a means of social activism, an integrated part of citizen actions or social movements, to facilitate advocacy for certain social issues.

Activist archivists’ double identities as both an activist and archivist equip them with flexibility. Indeed, getting involved in social activism means that they deny the notion of neutrality in the archival profession from the very beginning. By documenting, preserving, and disseminating otherwise under-voiced and ephemeral citizen actions or social movements, archivists stand by citizens and activist groups, challenge mainstream narratives, and resist social injustice. However, their professional standards for archival work should not be compromised, as American scholar Randall C. Jimerson claims, “Advocacy and activism can address social issues without abandoning professional

32

Grace Lile, “Archives for Change: Activist Archives, Archival Activism,” WITNESS, accessed March 17, 2016, http://blog.witness.org/2010/09/archives-for-change-activist-archives-archival-activism/.

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standards of fairness, honesty, detachment, and transparency.”34 Being an archivist who self-identifies as an activist means that the person has to constantly balance between the two roles, performing archival activities as a means to facilitate social activism yet at the same time still holding on to the standards of archival professionals when handling records and heritage objects.

Apart from activist archivists, archival space is also an essential agent in activist archiving, since the space is where all the actual actions take place and the real impact happens. There should always be a space, whether physical or virtual, for people to come together and collaboratively create their histories35 Essentially, an activist archive comprises “community involvement and a collection of activist materials,”36 and whether it’s a physical or virtual space, it’s supposed to be “a locus out of which a community, real, and imagined, can emerge.”37 As the core members in the “community,” activist archivists aim to participate in social movements or citizen actions, while also archiving the dynamics of social activism. Activist archives therefore function as sites of creation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of “social movement culture,” which consists of “artifacts and social formations that movements create, such as public protests, demonstrations, encampments, affinity groups, collectives and solidarities.”38 On the other hand, they are also a site of resistance to mainstream narratives and autonomous space to facilitate political agency and advocate social transformation, “as a platform for archivists—as activists—to contribute to the on-going production of social movements with which they identify.”39 Sometimes, activist archives also function as an alternative media platform, as they not only preserve social activism, but also contribute to content production and dissemination of social movement cultures to the general public. I will discuss the connection between activist archives and alternative media in more detail in my case study in the next two chapters.

Rather than emphasizing the history-making of a specific community, activist archives focus more on the interconnectivity among different activist or citizen communities. In other words, “[a]ctivist archives not only honor specific communities but

34

Randall C. Jimerson, “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice,” The American Archivist 70, no. 2 (2007): 252.

35

Sellie, et al., “Interference Archive,” 463. 36 Ibid., 457. 37 Ibid., 463. 38 Ibid., 458. 39 Ibid., 454.

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also forge new relationships between parallel histories, reshape and reinterpret dominant narratives, and challenge conceptions of the archive itself.”40 They strive to archive the dynamic “networks” among multiple activist initiatives, which is largely owing to the fact that “[s]ocial movements are not distinct and self-contained; rather, they grow from and give birth to other movements, work in coalition with other movements, and influence each other indirectly through their effects on the larger cultural and political environment.”41 Indeed, activist archives offer a platform to connect social activism across different times and geographical locations; they “help strengthen the ties that bind movement networks both synchronically (in one time, across many places) and diachronically (across many times, in many places).”42 In the archival space, a multitude of social movements are able to interact with one another, and activists can also exchange their experiences. In this sense, an activist archive space is a crucial component for activist archiving practice since it provides a site to establish networks and possibly stimulate further actions or movements.

Moreover, with the advent of digital technologies and virtual environments, as more and more activist archives are based in virtual space, the notions of activist archives and the role of activist archivists can become even more complex. How have digital technologies influenced activist archiving practice? Can digital tools really facilitate the archiving of social activism?

2.3 Being Digital

[T]he mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable— that is, the content of what has to be archived is

changed by the technology… So the archive, the technological power of the archive, determines the nature of what has to be archived.43

In the digital age, we are recording ourselves obsessively…. But we are not archiving ourselves or our media with anywhere near as much alacrity. Without

40 Ibid. 41

David Meyer and Nancy Whittier, “Social Movement Spillover,” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (1994): 277. 42

Sellie, et al., “Interference Archive,” 465. 43

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some system for organising, collating and preserving the Facebook pages, YouTube videos and blogs the movement is generating, the materials may be lost.44 The advent of digital technologies has brought drastic change to every aspect of human life. Since digital formats have become the new media for documenting and recording human experiences, inevitably the archival profession has also undergone great transformation in order to adapt to the change. With the emergence of digital communication networks and computing devices, many archives have moved online, situating themselves in a digital environment. From handling physical documents to intangible digital records, archivists have to rethink and even re-invent their discipline and workflow since they are now dealing with completely different media and logistics. As records are created and stored in electronic format, they have become much more “fluid and transient.”45 Likewise, the archival profession has also become more fluid and dynamic. As Terry Cook argued, there is:

a shift away from viewing records as static physical objects, and towards understanding them as dynamic virtual concepts; a shift away from looking at records as the passive products of human or administrative activity and towards considering records as active agents themselves in the formation of human and organizational memory.46

Ultimately, the development of digital technologies has transformed the way we document, collect, preserve, and present our histories. For digital archiving practice, it especially stresses providing access to the public, because as Eric Ketelaar states, in the modern information society, archival science is “embracing an access paradigm, leading to strategies for rethinking and repositioning of all work-processes of archival institutions, since they are all access-related.”47 With the evolution of Internet networks, it is no surprise that archival collections can be disseminated more easily and become accessible

44

A.T., “Documenting the Occupy Protests: Data Mining for Instant History,” The Economist, accessed March 26, 2016,

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/12/documenting-occupy-protests?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/dataminingforinstanthistory. 45

Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 110. 46

Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 4. 47

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to a much broader public.48 According to cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, “[T]he new technological developments which are transforming the practice of archival collection, in ways which have an impact, not only on what and how much can be preserved, but on

how widely it can be disseminated and circulated—on how a wider access to an archive

can be instituted.”49

In other words, the contemporary archival profession has already gone beyond a static and closed record-keeping practice in a single archive; now it pays more attention to disseminating archival collections with the help of digital networks, so as to improve the accessibility and usability of the collections. As a result, archives, as institutions, also restructure themselves; they have transformed into “virtual ‘archives without walls,’ existing on the Internet to facilitate access by the public to thousands of interlinked record-keeping systems.”50 In the digital sphere, archives are no longer separate and self-contained spaces; instead, they form an intertwined network. Ultimately,it’s more than dissemination. General users no longer merely receive disseminated content passively; they have also begun to participate proactively in digital archiving processes.

On the other hand, digital technologies have an immense impact on social activism as well. The emergence of digital communication networks has completely changed the way citizens organise and mobilize social movements. As access to the Internet has become more prevalent and the application of Web 2.0 has enabled active user interaction and collaboration in virtual communities, people in different regions around the world have already started to take advantage of digital technologies to call for citizen actions and mobilize social movements. Meanwhile, scholars like Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells have conducted research on the interrelationships between Internet networks and social movements in an information society where traditional boundaries no longer exist. In contemporary times, the use of Internet and mobile communication networks has gradually become indispensable to social activism. For social movements, their networking forms are “multimodal,” which includes “social networks online and offline, as well as pre-existing

48

However, we need to be aware that even though the coverage of Internet networks has been growing tremendously in recent years, there are still large sections of the world’s population who don’t have access to the Internet. According to the United Nations’ Broadband Commission’s “The State of Broadband” annual report, released on September 21st 2015 in Geneva, the digital divide is still very much with us. I will elaborate more on this in the following discussion about online participatory archiving. For the report, see: http://www.broadbandcommission.org/publications/Pages/SOB-2015.aspx.

49

Stuart Hall, “Constituting an Archive,” Third Text 15, no. 54 (2001): 91. My emphasis. 50

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social networks, and networks formed during the actions of the movement.”51 Digital technologies are significant for social activism because “they provide the platform for this continuing, expansive networking practice that evolves with the changing shape of the movement.”52

Moreover, with the facilitation of digital technologies, the scale and influence of social movements has increased in recent years. During movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, activists all made extensive use of digital media to initiate actions, mobilize people, and disseminate up-to-date information. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are growing more important for the mobilization of social activism.53 Social networking in the virtual sphere can spread information about movements in a short time, activating mass mobilization at a speed previously unimaginable.

In conclusion, digital technologies have not only profoundly transformed the archival profession; they are also regarded as “liberated technologies”54 as they play a crucial role in the shifting contemporary scene of social activism. What, then, can we say about activist archiving, a combination of the archival profession and social activism? How can digital technologies contribute to the archiving practice of social activism? Digital tools such as social media platforms have indeed improved activist communication and networking, yet at the same time, social movements and citizen actions are also becoming increasingly fluid, ephemeral, and elusive. As social movements rise and fall, ebb and flow, one after another, how many traces can be collected and preserved afterwards? In the following section, I am going to explore digital technologies’ application to activist archiving in three dimensions: instantaneous archiving, online participatory culture, and finally, the sustainability and permanence of activist archives and their collections.

Instantaneous Archiving

51

Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 221.

52 Ibid. 53

For the research on activist communication and its relationship with social media platforms, media scholar Thomas Poell’s works can serve as good references.For example, Thomas Poell, “Social Media and the Transformation of Activist Communication: Exploring the Social Media Ecology of the 2010 Toronto G20 Protests,” Information, Communication & Society 17, no. 6 (2014): 716-731.

54

Stefania Milan, Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost, accessed May 3, 2016.

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Social movements and citizen actions are fleeting, flexible, and unstable in nature. In order to document movements/actions in time, and collect activism-related materials before they disappear, archival endeavours have to be carried out almost simultaneously with the movements/actions. This is different from usual archiving practices, in which records and materials are documented and preserved after the events take place. For activist archiving, the archival decisions have to be made instantaneously during movements/actions, and archiving strategies often need to be planned beforehand. The pressing temporality at the core of activist archiving practice is distinct; “instantaneity” has become the major principle for the practice. Similarly, for digital archiving and preserving ephemeral digital objects, “instantaneity” is also a crucial requirement. Here, I’d like to apply Canadian scholars and archivists, Daniel J. Caron and Richard Brown’s notion of “the documentary moment”55 to further elaborate on the concept of “instantaneous archiving” in a digital environment. “The documentary moment” refers to “the critical decision-making experience” in the archiving process, which is usually termed as “appraisal” or “acquisition.”56 For digital objects,

[G]iven the technological enhancements and metadata markings necessary from the outset (beginning with the technical engineering phase) to ensure the

persistence of information objects in digital cyberspace, decisions about the survivability of information resources will need to be taken before, during, and

immediately following the act of creation. Effectively, the value, status, destination,

and persistence of digital information resources will need to be determined and decided concurrently.57

In other words, for the archiving process in a digital environment that secures digital heritage preservation, archival decisions have to be made timely, and digital records or objects have to be collected right at the moment when they are born. This tendency is even more clearly manifested when it comes to the archiving of social activism, due to the highly transient and dynamic nature of social movements and citizen actions. In the midst of movements/actions, activist archivists’ double identities are advantageous for them to

55

Daniel J. Caron and Richard Brown, “The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: Establishing New Value Propositions for Public Memory,” Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011): 1–20.

56

Ibid, 2. 57

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perform instantaneous archiving work since their identities as both an archivist and activist allow them to have more agency and flexibility during the actions.58

In the past, the archival profession mainly served the authorities and focused on preserving official records such as governmental documents. Archiving rebellious citizen activities like protests and rallies was unimaginable. The shifts in archival paradigms have changed the nature of what content is considered worth archiving; yet, the change of the archived content also has largely to do with the advent of new technologies. As French philosopher Derrida stated in “Archive Fever,” “the mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable.”59 The degree of instantaneity offered by digital media could not be realized in the past. For example, digital cameras allow archivists to record the dynamics of social movements in time, and online social networking platforms enable archivists to disseminate activism-related materials instantly. Therefore, “instantaneous archiving” is greatly facilitated by the application of digital technologies.

Other than documenting the process of social movements/citizen actions and collecting relevant objects, active and instantaneous online presentation and dissemination of activism-related information or materials is also a crucial aspect of activist archiving, since the instantaneous sharing and constant updates about the movements/actions can mobilize more participants, raising public awareness and thus maintaining the movements’ vitality. The characteristic of instantaneous archiving makes an activist archive in virtual space also operate as a media platform, which offers the public a channel to stay tuned to the development of the movements or actions that tend to be ignored on mainstream media. Moreover, the inherent instantaneity in digital activist archiving practice also enables different activist groups or initiatives to stay active and constantly interconnect with one another to establish lively networks. This will ultimately contribute to the sustainability of activist archives, which I will further explain in the subsequent section. Online Participatory Archiving

In the digital era, general users have become more involved than ever before in the production process of media content. This is mainly due to “the emergence of new,

58

Yet, again, having more agency and flexibility does not mean that activist archivists can abandon the archival profession’s ethics and standards such as fairness, transparency, and honesty.

59

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participatory technologies of information access, knowledge exchange, and content production, many of which are associated with Internet and new media technologies.”60 The traditional dichotomy of media producer and consumer is no longer appropriate, as American media scholar Henry Jenkins claims, “Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands.”61 The boundaries between producers and consumers have already blurred, and users can take on both the roles of producer and consumer at the same time, or shift between the two flexibly, as the words “produser” and “produsage,” coined by Australian scholar Axel Bruns, demonstrate.62 In this context, user-generated content has grown increasingly prevalent and users’ participation has become more significant in media production. The term “participatory culture,” as Jenkins defines it, “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship.”63 Participatory culture emerges largely thanks to the facilitation of new, mainly digital, media technologies that “make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.”64 However, we have to be aware that “not all participants are created equal.”65 Undeniably, large corporations or institutions possess greater power than individuals, and individuals with better capabilities are also more powerful than those without.

In the archival profession, “participatory culture” has also become a common notion. The general public should be able to assert their autonomy during the archiving process, because, as Swedish scholar Isto Huvila argues, “The principal implication of assuming the notion of a participatory archive is the reconfiguration of responsibilities between curators, users, and the general public.”66 Nevertheless, in reality, can general participants really share the responsibilities of archiving practice? Or does the term “participatory culture” turn

60_{Axel Burns, “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production,” in Proceedings: Cultural} Attitudes towards Communication and Technology, ed. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess (Perth: Murdoch University, 2006), 275.

61

Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’: A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 3.

62

Axel Burns, “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production,” 275. 63

Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence,’” 3. 64

Henry Jenkins, et al., “Enabling Participation,” Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009): 8.

65

See note 63. 66

Isto Huvila, “Participatory Archive: Towards Decentralized Curation, Radical User Orientation, and Broader Contextualization of Records Management,” Archival Science 8, no. 1 (2008): 33.

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out to be an empty cliché, rather than a solid concept that can actually be realized in practice?

Scholar Karen F. Gracy states in her essay that traditional heritage institutions should contemplate how to “incorporate”67 user contributions within the institutions’ existing systems. Gracy’s proposal indicates that the institutions still take control over the archiving process; user participation is merely an addition that should be integrated into the current institutional systems. In this case, the general users in fact don’t assert their subjectivity in the archiving process; rather, their participation only ends up catering to the institutions’ need to “appear” more participatory and open to the public.

Admittedly, the term “participatory culture” now tends to be overused and sometimes it turns out to be an empty slogan. Nevertheless, positive examples of archives that aim for real and inclusive user participation do indeed exist. Digital technologies have broken down or at least lowered the barriers to citizen engagement in archiving practice. Digital media offers a trans-border environment where geographical boundaries no longer exist. With digital tools such as social media platforms, a digital archive is able to connect with other online groups or entities much more easily, and the networking makes the participatory culture expand to a broader extent. Moreover, the highly generative features of digital technologies also bring about online collaborative practices, such as social tagging, that are mainly based on users’ interpretations and creations.68

Activist archives not only aim to preserve the heritage of social activism but also strive to maintain lively activist networks. With social networking technologies, it is easier for different activist groups to connect with one another in a virtual sphere. An online activist archive serves as a site for activist archivists to come together, establishing shared identities and a virtual community to cooperate in the archiving and advocacy of social activism. However, participation should not be limited to activist archivist communities. An activist archive should ensure that the participation includes people from diverse backgrounds, both inside and outside the communities. Meanwhile, it’s also important to ensure that participants in activist archiving practice have the basic knowledge required to perform archival work. If people do not possess basic knowledge and skills for archiving practice, even advanced digital technologies wouldn’t be of much help to their participation. Eventually, “[a] focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us

67

Gracy, Karen F., “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital,” Library Trends 56, no. 1 (2007): 196. 68

Due to the limited length, further discussion on different practices of folksonomy is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this thesis.

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only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.”69

Furthermore, “technology is not an end in itself; it is a means to a political end.”70 Activist archiving efforts should not remain only in the digital sphere; instead, it should expand to the real world and encourage people to go into the streets rather than merely hide themselves behind computer screens. In the end, participation in virtual environments should transform into actions in the real world in order to bring forth actual social change. On the other hand, we also need to recognize that being digital does not automatically guarantee participation. As Flinn argues, the web is not inherently a democratizing force.71 Though some argues that digital technologies offer “potentially transformative opportunities for a less mediated documentation and collection of memory,”72 the idea “less-mediated” is contestable. In fact, the information presented online might have been through many layers of mediation; it’s just not so easy to discover due to the intangible nature of digital media. Digital technologies may help give rise to the notion of participatory culture in the archival profession, but they should not be a prerequisite for it. After all, to look back upon history, online participatory culture is not fundamentally new; instead, it can be traced back to “the traditions of history from below, oral history, History Workshop [movement] and many other attempts to give recognition to less privileged voices.”73

Finally, we have to acknowledge that even today the digital divide is quite large. According to the United Nations’ Broadband Commission’s “The State of Broadband” 2015 annual report, while around 3.2 billion people currently have access to the Internet, this still leaves about 4.2 billion people offline.74 Hence, the common remark that “everyone is connected through the Internet” is actually far from the truth. We cannot ignore the fact that from the very beginning, digital media itself has already excluded an extremely large

69

Henry Jenkins, et al., “Enabling Participation,” 8. 70

Stefania Milan, Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change, 2. 71

Andrew Flinn, “Independent Community Archives and Community-Generated Content: ‘Writing, Saving and Sharing Our Histories,’” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 16, no.1 (2010): 46.

72

Flinn and Alexander, “‘Humanizing an Inevitably Political Craft,’” 331. 73

Andrew Flinn, “Independent Community Archives and Community-Generated Content,” 39. 74

The Broadband Commission, “The State of Broadband 2015: Broadband as a Foundation for Sustainable Development,” the Broadband Commission, United Nations, released September 21, 2015, accessed May 1, 2016, http://www.broadbandcommission.org/publications/Pages/SOB-2015.aspx. Also see the video, “State of Broadband Report 2015: Key issues #2” in which the report’s lead author, Phillippa Biggs talks about the digital divide, one of the key issues in the report. YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8aqs2hW13A&feature=youtu.be posted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) channel.

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section of the world’s population, most of whom are living in technologically-underprivileged regions. How these people, without access to digital media, can participate in activist archiving is beyond the scope of this thesis, yet it’s a major issue we have to contemplate. Again, digital tools should not be the only means to realize participatory archiving today. One thing is for certain, however, no matter how many advanced technologies people apply, they cannot automatically guarantee the general public’s participation in archiving practice. Ultimately, it is individuals’ or communities’ efforts to mobilize participation that will make the real difference.

Permanence and Sustainability

When a social movement comes to an end, how is it possible to keep social dialogues alive to expand the movement’s influence in the public domain? Can digital technologies ensure the long-term preservation of activist collections? Can the collections remain relevant to society afterwards?

As previously stated, social movements or citizen actions are unstable, fluid, and temporary in nature. Many attempt to store archival collections in a digital environment in order to keep them alive and allow the materials to be disseminated to a broader public. However, not all attempts turn out successfully in the end. Many collections of social movement cultures gradually become inert in the vast digital environment, entirely neglected by general users. For activist archiving, successful long-term preservation indicates that social movement cultures can stay alive, and activist collections can stimulate further discussions on social issues and constantly encourage citizens to participate in progressive social transformations.

Activist archives in fact challenge the traditional notion of archival permanence. “[W]hile archives have traditionally been regarded as spaces that exist in perpetuity, the nature of an activist archive might reflect the temporality of social movements themselves.”75 Both social movements and activist collections generated from the movements are associated with “the idea of impermanence,”76 since they tend to be inherently ephemeral and unstable, and thus hard to preserve permanently. Instead of regarding permanence as the ultimate goal, an activist archive aims to maintain a lively network of activist communities and to make its collections remain politically relevant to

75

Sellie, et al., “Interference Archive,” 454. 76