Introducing the After Violence Archive
This year, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Texas After Violence developed and launched our first independent digital repository for our collections: the After Violence Archive, where users will be able to explore our interview collection, access transcripts, and view images of physical items from us and our partner archives.
The first TAVP interview I watched was with Tina Duroy. She spoke about her brother, his struggles with severe mental illness, his court case and eventual execution by the state of Texas. She spoke about her intense grief in the aftermath of his death, and the difficulty she had moving forward. The interview was instantly startling in the intimate way it offered a connection to Tina and her story, and — even though it was several hours long — I watched the entire thing in one evening.
In late 2015, Tina’s interview — like all of our interviews — was only viewable on the University of Texas at Austin’s library website, through an old platform for audio-visual materials known as Glifos. As a student at the UT Austin School of Information, I was familiar with Glifos and the glitchy, begrudging way it mediated online access to videos. These days, 2015 feels like a lifetime ago, but YouTube had already been around for over a decade, and iPhones nearly as long. Glifos offered no mechanism for mobile viewing: videos were only viewable from a laptop or desktop.
Glifos operated as the digital equivalent of a stuffy archival reading room. As an archivist, I’ve never minded a stuffy reading room, but I also recognize that my comfort is predicated on my identity as a white woman with a graduate degree, who grew up in an academic setting. My own comfort in these spaces does not change the fact that they are exclusionary by design, built to prioritize a white gaze and police users of color or other marginalized people. Access to information is controlled, even as it has already been curated to uphold existing power structures.
This is not just a problem at UT, it’s a problem with institutional archives and libraries everywhere.
In 2016, a few months after watching that interview with Tina, I started working with TAVP. For the duration of my work here, I’ve been TAVP’s primary liaison with our partners at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. The partnership was established in 2009, around the time HRDI was founded as a post-custodial collection and mechanism for supporting archives with critical importance for human rights around the world. Post-custodial archiving has always aimed to upend traditional archiving practices, using modern technology to build digital collections sustained by institutional (read: financially secure) archives while the physical collections remain in the custody of their communities. HRDI’s inaugural partner was the Genocide Archive Rwanda. A myriad of factors made it vitally important that the GAR records remain in Rwanda, physically accessible by Rwandans still recovering from the relatively recent civil war and genocide. HRDI was able to provide digital infrastructure, making it possible for GAR to digitize their records and post them online — hosted, initially, by UT Libraries — without removing the records from their home.
Texas After Violence has always had a primarily digital collection. For the first few years of our organization, we created video oral histories on Mini DV tapes, which we quickly digitized. We store these Mini DV tapes at our office, but primarily treat the digital files as our archival objects. Now, our interviews are all recorded digitally. Still, our partnership with HRDI has meant that the digital files of our public interviews are safely preserved by UT Libraries, and are also available for viewing through the UT Libraries website. Although we are always thinking about collection management and safety, HRDI provides a preservation safety net that gives us peace of mind our collections would remain available even if our tiny, struggling non-profit lost funding and ceased to exist.
Post-custodial archiving remains an important tool for collaboration between institutional archives and smaller community-based organizations, but in the past few years, we’ve shifted in our understanding of a relationship with a large university like UT. The aims and purpose of the Human Rights Documentation Initiative have always been exceptional, and post-custodial archival projects like it still have the potential to harness the resources and power of major institutions, diverting those resources to critical collections like GAR and TAVP’s oral history collection. The individuals we work with at HRDI are also exceptional, each with a deep commitment to equitably supporting community-based archives. However, it is impossible to separate a program like HRDI (and the individuals who run it) from the institution that maintains it, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for an organization like TAVP to justify housing our digital collection under the umbrella of institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, without providing additional points of access for our community members.
In 2018, TAVP participated in Architecting Sustainable Futures in New Orleans, organized by Bergis Jules, where community-based archives gathered to discuss long-term sustainability. In an accompanying post for the Sustainable Futures blog, Samip Mallick wrote about the question of precarity for community-based archives, and addressed concerns by mainstream archivists that an organization that cannot guarantee the long-term preservation of its collections cannot call itself an archive. His post ends with a question: “How precarious is it to steward collections representing communities of color in predominantly white institutions in our current white supremacist neoliberal climate? The past decade of working on SAADA has shown us that true sustainability is built from within rather than without the community we serve and represent.”
The risks of relying on an institution built on the tradition of upholding white supremacy has become devastatingly clear to us over and over again in the last several years. In 2020, when students began protesting “Eyes of Texas” — the UT fight song, which was first performed at student minstrel shows in the early 1900s. In March of 2021, the Texas Tribune accessed emails from donors to UT development staff and administrators. The emails are horrifying. Donors threatened to pull funding if the “Eyes of Texas” were not whole-heartedly embraced as the UT song, spouted hateful rhetoric the presence of Black students on campus, and decried protests and critical race theory and anything they deemed “disrespectful.”
This summer, after UT released a report about the history of the “Eyes of Texas,” they stood firm in their decision to keep the song, and said that band members would be required to play it. Anyone who felt uncomfortable with the use of the song could join a new, separate marching band, which would not play at public events and would not be required to play the song. Separate but equal.
Conflict over the racist origins of the UT fight song may seem distant to a project like TAVP, existing as we do in the periphery of campus activities, but these decisions — and the way power is given so totally to the wealthiest of donors, who are able to dictate school activities to the point of harming students — trickle down and have an outsize impact on programs like HRDI and the organizations it supports. HRDI has always been underfunded, which is why — in spite of its efforts to transform archival practice — it still ends up falling into the same patterns of institutional archives everywhere. Without support, we’re left using outdated platforms like Glifos that don’t meet the needs of our community.
This year that conundrum reached a crisis point for our organization. Glifos has always used Adobe Flash to play the videos it hosts, and Flash was discontinued on at the end of 2020. Adobe announced this three years prior, giving plenty of warning. In spite of that, UT Libraries was unprepared, and on January 1st, our interview collection became unwatchable, no matter what device a person used. It is now September, and a few of our interviews have only recently become available again on the UT Libraries website. As Samip pointed out, it is incredibly precarious to host your collection at an institution like UT. The funds do not trickle down.
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In graduate school at UT, I learned how context shifts and changes information, which is what makes the work of archivists so important. So what are we saying when the only access point for our collection is one immersed in the identity of the University of Texas, with the UT Austin name and logo emblazoned above every single interview? The view is decidedly one for researchers who already feel at home in an academic research setting. And because UT has firmly decided to publicly support the demands of wealthy donors at the expense of the college community, the name and logo also carry whiffs of white supremacy.
We are a community-based archive, with collections that document the stories of individuals who have been directly impacted by state violence. Because people of color are much more likely to experience severe or fatal forms of state violence (death sentences, executions, police beatings and killings), we cannot do this work without actively working to create a space in which it is safe for people of color and anyone who has experienced state-sanctioned violence to engage with our collection.
This brings us to the launch of the After Violence Archive. AVA has been built with Mukurtu, a content management system created with indigenous communities “to manage, share, and exchange their cultural heritage in ethically minded ways.” In AVA, we have control over how our collections are presented, who receives access to each digital heritage item, and how each items links with other items and stories in our collections. Mukurtu is designed to be community first, which means we have been able to build a site to suit our needs and the needs of our partner collections and users beyond academics and researchers.
We are beginning to understand access as a spectrum, and we want to provide as many points along that spectrum as possible. So, while we use Vimeo to embed our video content in Mukurtu, we can also share those same Vimeo links easily and quickly on social media, when it is relevant or appropriate to do so (certain narrators have requested we not share their interviews on social media, and for those interviews, it is just as easy to restrict that interview so that it is only viewable through the After Violence Archive portal.) Likewise, we recognize that the Human Rights Documentation Initiative provides an important access point for our collections, as long as it is not the only access point.
Ultimately, we want people who can keep the transformation of these stories going to have access to these stories wherever they need: whether that is through the After Violence Archive, Twitter, the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, or a simple printout of the interview transcript.
There’s something to be said for transforming the archive by expanding the materials preserved within, but sometimes, it’s equally important for those materials to be saved outside of that space, in space that is designed by and for communities, where researcher-outsiders are welcome — when appropriate — but not centered.
This is the first of several upcoming blog posts about the After Violence Archive — we’ll be talking more about how to use Mukurtu, new highlights from our collections, and the process behind its development.
