Background

The Israel-Gaza war has generated an unprecedented volume of visual imagery, particularly on social media. Gazan Palestinians have been digitally documenting their experiences in real time, turning platforms like Instagram and TikTok into a visual archive of the everyday experience of life under bombardment. By contrast, Israeli soldiers have been using social media to document their own combat experiences, while open-source (OSINT) investigators across the globe have been combing through satellite images and journalist footage to reconstruct wartime events.

Numerous institutions in Palestine, Israel and beyond have been active in archiving this digital material. Some of these efforts are undertaken by established institutions (e.g., Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, Forensic Architecture, The National Library of Israel). Other efforts are crowdsourced projects (e.g., Accountability Archive) that are intended as a chronicle of violence that will function as “a public resource to be used by future historians and researchers.”  

These archives are at once historical and political documents, tools of persuasion and propaganda, legal documents, and tools of community building. The same piece of footage can function in multiple categories at once and can serve divergent political interests, depending on the ways it is mobilized. 

This team will study the vast field of wartime digital documentation across a range of perspectives. The team will consider the highly varied functions of the wartime visual archive as historical documents, legal evidence, eye-witness activist records of atrocity, wartime souvenirs of conquest, testimonies and more, in an effort to understand the changing status of war in the digital age.

Project Description

Using the Israel-Gaza war as its primary case study, this project will explore the relationship between war, visual media and archiving, with a particular emphasis on the ways that wars have been recorded and preserved by a range of actors and institutions in digital and social media. Team members will examine the long history of wartime visual archives and survey the state of digital archiving to consider the imperatives for generating lasting archives of digital material.    

The variety of the archives under investigation – from the highly institutionalized to the crowdsourced, from the state-funded to the amateur image curation done on social media – beg a range of useful questions about the very status of the archive itself, such as: what, precisely, counts as an archive?  For whom are they useful?  Whom do they tend to privilege, and whom do they tend to exclude?

To investigate these questions, team members will conduct archival research within several interlinked contexts, including:

Emerging social media archives within the context of the Israel-Gaza war: Students will focus considerable energy on social media archives, including the emerging use of social media archives in legal contexts. Students will curate and construct their own archives, based on a review of relevant social media material. 

In this context, team members will consider the following questions: What does it mean to treat social media as a historical archive? What are best practices, tools and platforms for this archival work?  What, by contrast, are the limits of using social media as an archive? What are the advantages and disadvantages to crowdsourcing an archive? What are the conditions under which social media documents reach the threshold of legal evidence?  

Israeli and Palestinian institutional archives of the Israel-Gaza war: Students will study institutional archives that have tracked wartime visual documentation, such as Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, Forensic Architecture and The National Library of Israel, to compare and contrast the functions and practices of these archives across a range of contexts. 

Israeli and Palestinian archives held at Duke University: In collaboration with Duke librarian Sean Swanick, students will consider the Israel-Hamas wartime archives in relation to Middle East archives currently held at Duke to consider points of historical resonance and  to determine the history of the documents being studied.

Anticipated Outputs

Student-curated exhibit of visual and digital archives of the Israel-Gaza war; exhibit of selected war photography in Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery (to debut in Spring 2026)

Student Opportunities

Ideally, this team will include 1-3 graduate/professional students and 5-10 undergraduate students. Students from all majors and backgrounds are welcome to apply, but applicants should be interested in topics such as society and politics in the Middle East; visual studies; art history; digital humanities; or digital media studies.

In Fall 2024, undergraduate team members must enroll in CA 290T: War and Digital Archives, class time TBD. 

Team members will conduct in-depth studies of the Israel-Gaza war and its emergent visual archives. They will have the opportunity to learn best practices for social media data collection (e.g., social media scraping) and analytical methods for social media content and visual analysis. Students will also develop familiarity and skills in the digital humanities.

All team members will have the opportunity to travel to regional museums or archives in Durham, Richmond and/or Washington D.C.

Timing

Fall 2024 – Summer 2025

• Fall 2024: Identify and examine key wartime archives and collections; learn and practice best practices for social media data collection, documentation and preservation; attend guest lectures from regional and legal experts; discuss archival practices and theories; visit Duke library collections 
• Spring 2025: Develop independent archives-based projects; design and create digital and physical exhibits
• Summer 2025 (optional): Continue independent archive-based projects

Crediting

Academic credit available for fall and spring semesters; summer funding available