Outline for "Digital Witnessing: A Record of Human Rights and Wrongs," Tuesday, 2 March, 2010

Digital witnessing in, and, versus The Rare Books Room

Excitement about the possibilities and opportunities. Knowledge that we may be contributing to the demise of physical archives. It shouldn't be that way, but in real life (in real institutions),administrators look for ways to cut costs. It becomes more difficult to make the case for physical libraries, for books and paper.

Voices and Bodies

Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered voices: language, violence, and the work of truth commissions, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights (Philadelphia: U. Penn Press, 2006), writing about Ariel Dorfman's play, Death and the Maiden, (1991):
Paulina is all body and no voice. The torturer is all voice and no body
(as our governments and collectives where responsibility is diffuse and no one in particular is accountable. Passive voice: Mistakes were made. Torture was approved.)
The primary moral imperative of our work is to integrate bodies and voices, to respect the full humanity of people, to hear their voices.

Stories change the world.

What would happen if one woman spoke the truth about her life?/
The world would split open.
Muriel Ruykeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz,” The Speed of Darkness, 1968

If we believe stories can change the world, we have to be consistent and accountable for the effects of our work -- including the unintended effects.

The world is not neatly divided into victims and perpetrators.

To say as much does not mean we devolve into complete relativism, any nonsense that we are all equally victims and all equally perpetrators. But it does mean that the actual work, like the actual world, is messy.

Underlying issues and questions

1) If human rights, at a most elementary level, require respect for the irreducible and inalienable worth and dignity of every human being, and treatment of each human beings in ways that manifest such respect, it follows that there is no purpose that is more important than treating each human being with respect. So we have obligations to respect the human rights of each person as we conduct our work.

2) Who is the person who tells oral histories? How do we think of her or him; what is this person's role?

- Subject ("human subject" in the sense of "research with human subject" covered by federal regulations; consensus is that oral history is not research with human subjects, but conservative view would assume that it is. Distinction between ethnography and oral history blurry and porous.)
- Interviewee
- Collaborators (ethnography)
- ** Narrators -- the ideal
- ** Co-creators (intellectual property) -- the reality
- Witnesses
- "Human evidence" and "fragile evidence" - "conscious. . embrace [of] the vulnerability, the legal fallibility, and fragility of the human witness. It is precisely the witnesse's fragility that paradocisally is called upon to testify and to bear witness" (Feldman on how the strategy in Eichmann trial reverses that of Nuremburg prosecutors, who sought invulnerable evidence)
Question: We tell narrators we want theirstories [as evidence?]; is it unethical to fail to point out that they themselves might serve as "evidence"? (But every encounter always involves a judgment about credibility of the source or speaker.)
- Total environment of a computer (Redwine) - People are also embodied information; we can't separate the content of a story from the person.

3) Methods & metaphors: what are we doing?

- Metaphors of collection - already there, something to be collected
- Metaphors of extraction (Tony Cherian's recent talk) - mining, or cracking open a nut
- "Getting" the story, "getting them to tell you" questions people don’t want to answer: interrogation (legal, military, journalistic) or therapeutic (instrumental, as well, but for the person's "own good" or to produce compliant/less disturbing subject, "productive citizens") or analogous to legal representation (necessary evil?)
- * Listening
To what extent do we direct the interview?
- * Co-creation

4) What is a "good" interview?

- Intimacy? Gore? Emotion? Secrets? "Powerful" clips? Looking for drama?
- "If it bleeds, it leads"
- "The poster child" syndrome
- Drama versus the ordinary, "normal" and banal
- Relationship between the "value" of interview and the difficulty of the material?

To some extent, we've clarified our own values as we picked segments of interviews to feature on our website. We had surprising degree of consensus, and then went backwards and identified the criteria that guided our choices, to some extent consciously and to some extent unconsciously. Here are our criteria. Other people would almost certainly use other criteria.

On the other hand, we often following an interview that surprises or disappoints us, "It is what it is..." which is also true, but sometimes our blunders shape interviews. Then we are not so sanguine.

5) Limits of confidentiality

- Confidentiality is not the same thing as legal privilege. There is no such thing as an oral history privilege.
- Narrators and potential narrators need to understand the distinction between confidentiality and privilege.
- Who do we tell, and how? Do we scare potential interviewers away. There are interviews we must not conduct.
- Imperative not to create evidence in ongoing cases? Self-limitation because of unpredictability; inherent incompetence and inability to predict
- The Prime Directive?

6) What are the sources of our ethical responsibilities?

- Professional - but there is no "profession" in the strictest sense (code of ethics, self-regulating, certification or license)
- "Disciplinary" - history, anthropology, criminal justice
- Legal & institutional - Institutional Review Boards (IRB) rules derived from federal regulations. They do not apply to staff and volunteers of the Texas After Violence Project, or to the project itself, but they may to students or volunteers. Nevertheless, we do follow these regulations. Would HRDI form a relationship with the project if we did not? (I doubt it.)
- Contractual

7) Telling stories, speaking truth to power, testifying changes the world.

That is the basis of our entire project. So we cannot pretend, at some moments, that we are not "doing" anything but only listening and recording. No dishonest naivete.

8) Mistakes, bias, prejudice, blind spots, ignorance, and worse are all inherent and inevitable in our work. We know we make mistakes. We don't deliberately choose to make mistakes, but we expect to make mistakes.

Partial response or mitigation: Transparency, so that viewers, readers, or other users and critics may easily identify the kinds of mistakes we made, where, and how, and so that others may do similar work in more effective ways (or learn from our mistakes to do completely different work).

9) Responsibilities to particular actors