Digital/Visual Archives of War and Conflict (2025-2026)

This project team is now recruiting additional student team members. Review the full list of recruiting teams and apply by June 9 at 5 p.m.

Please note that incoming first-year undergraduate students and students who have already accepted a spot on a 2025-2026 Bass Connections team are not eligible to apply.

Background

Since it’s onset, the Israel-Gaza war has generated an unprecedented volume of digital imagery, particularly on social media. Gazan Palestinians have been digitally documenting their wartime experiences in real time, turning platforms like Instagram and TikTok into a visual archive of the everyday experience of life under Israeli bombardment.

At the same time, Israeli soldiers have been using social media to document their combat experiences, while open-source (OSINT) investigators, human rights workers and legal bodies across the globe have been combing through satellite and social media images to reconstruct wartime events and consider legal implications.

These digital visual archives are at once historical and political documents, tools of persuasion and propaganda, legal documents and tools of community building. They find their way into library archives, courtrooms and museum exhibitions. 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 builds from the Gaza case to study the vast field of wartime visual and/or digital documentation across a range of perspectives, institutions, geographical contexts and historical time periods. The team will consider the highly varied functions of the wartime visual archive as historical documents, legal evidence, eye-witness activist records of atrocity, wartime souvenirs of conquest, testimonies and more, in an effort to understand the changing status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. Team members will meet with experts from a range of fields – legal scholars and practitioners, librarians and museum curators, OSINT investigators, human rights workers – to understand the highly varied functions of visual and digital archives of war.

Project Description

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 and digital archives within war and conflict contexts: 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?
Institutional archives of the war and film/photography: Students will study institutional archives – in universities, libraries, museums and human rights institutions – that have tracked wartime visual documentation to compare and contrast the functions and practices of these archives across a range of contexts.
Digital forensics and data visualization: Students will meet virtually with human rights workers and civil society organizations – such as Witness, AirWars and SITU -- who are using open source digital materials (OSINT), digital forensic methodologies, and data visualization to produce 3D cartographies of the violence, generate digital models of the war, and track civilian casualties.
Archives held at Duke University: In collaboration with Duke librarian Caitlin Kelly, Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, students will study the long history of war photography. We will also work with curators at the Nasher Museum to see how representations of war function within a museum context.

Anticipated Outputs

Student-curated exhibit of visual and digital archives of war; exhibit of selected war photography in Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery (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, visual studies, art history, digital humanities, or digital media studies.

Team members will conduct in-depth studies of a war or conflict context of their choosing, contemporary or historical, to consider the role of visual and/or digital archives. They will have the opportunity to learn analytical methods for social media content and visual analysis. Students will also develop familiarity and skills in digital forensics.

Timing

Fall 2025 – Summer 2026

Fall 2025: 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 and Nasher collections
Spring 2026: Develop independent archives-based projects
Summer 2025 (optional): Continue independent archive-based projects

Crediting

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