Over the past decade, scholars and community leaders have experimented with the use of new digital technologies to tell the history of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Digital humanities (DH) may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories for the foreign tourist market. The potential layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, in particular, the endangered nature of those archives across South Africa related to the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976.

DH technology is already being used as a forensics tool in other instances of crimes against humanity. 3D historical reconstructions of Auschwitz-Birkenau are already being used to bring former Nazi soldiers to trial for crimes committed against remaining Holocaust survivors. A German police team from the Bavarian State Crime (LKA) created detailed models of the facility documented from over a thousand photos and maps from a Warsaw surveyor’s office. Incorporating an HTC Vive virtual reality headset viewers were able to see what the accused would have seen during World War II. The model can be used in trials to counter the objection of suspects who claim they did not witness crimes such as forced marches to gas chambers or executions. In addition, the UK’s Holocaust Commission recently used ground-penetrating radar to map Bergen-Belsen and build an interactive 3D reconstruction to help document what happened there. At the University of Southern California, New Dimensions in Testimony, developed by the Institute for Creative Technology, 3-D imaging capture from Holocaust survivors coupled with language-processing skills are building a voice-recognition system to make conversation-based testimony accessible to future generations.

It is without dispute that the morning of June 16, 1976 that marked the beginning of the Soweto Uprising is an exemplary moment in the “common officializing memory” of South Africa’s black townships. Then, Black African students marching to protest the adoption of Afrikaans as the primary language of instruction for schools in Johannesburg’s “South Western Townships” (S-O-W-E-T-O) were gunned downed by members of the South African police and security forces. My work in Soweto began with a prototype for Soweto ’76: A Living Digital Archive. Soweto ’76 is a prototype for an online multimedia archive of the holdings of Johannesburg’s Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. Using existing oral histories, testimonies, photographs, video footage, material objects, and sound recordings in the collections of the Hector Pieterson Memorial & Museum, the work seeks to redress the existing portrayal of the lives of township residents in the mainstream or “official” historical record.

My work on the Soweto Historical GIS Project’s Social Justice History Platform, builds on the early work of Soweto ’76, by providing a new software platform designed to represent geographic and spatial data within an enhanced interface that contextualizes locations and objects alongside the historical narrative of the primary source documents. As a 3D and virtual reality enabled platform (built atop the Unity engine), the Social Justice History Platform is able to represent both 2D geospatial information (such as maps, photographs, and records) and 3D representations of landscapes, locations, and 3D models of historical buildings and objects. The project combines traditional ethnographic and oral history fieldwork with 3D technologies in the pursuit of documenting past human rights violations by the former apartheid regime. This paper will discuss efforts to build an extensible and sustainable platform for similar social justice projects and the comparative possibilities between researchers conducting work on the former apartheid regime and the Holocaust. It poses the question: “Can digital reconstructions of difficult histories be used to harness the tools of restorative social justice while also bringing to light those yet untold stories of past human rights violations?” Much of this DH scholarship is at a critical juncture given the ages of Holocaust survivors and those who experienced the rise of the Nationalist Party across South Africa. Likewise, how do we capture the stories of survivors and perpetrators still living, from the 1940s, in both South Africa and across Europe who survived atrocities committed by authoritarian empires while also preserving the memories of these no longer extant heritage sites?

Angel David Nieves is an Associate Professor at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y and is Director of the American Studies and Cinema & Media Studies Programs there. He is also Co-Director of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) which is recognized as a leader among small-liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. He is also Research Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Nieves’s scholarly work and community-based activism critically engage with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South. He is currently working on a new volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series (w/ Siobhan Senier of the University of New Hampshire) and on special issue of American Quarterly (2018) on DH in the field of American Studies. His digital research and scholarship have been featured on MSNBC.com and in Newsweek.

His work can be found at http://www.apartheidheritages.org