This presentation was delivered by Yvonne Ng, Archives Manager at WITNESS, as part of ‘Engaging Communities with Archives: Video as a tool for activism, advocacy, and archival work’, a collaborative online event hosted by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) on 7 Sept 2021. The webinar focused on archival initiatives and participatory projects that aim to train or support community groups in using video to tell personal stories, bring about social change, or archive and preserve activism and advocacy work. The presentation focuses on WITNESS’s work and how they support people to use video as a tool for activism and advocacy.

1. Supporting Activists to
Preserve Video
Documentation
Engaging Communities with Archives webinar
DRI / PRONI, Sept 2021
Yvonne Ng, Archives Program Manager
yvonne@witness.org

2. WITNESS helps people use
video and technology to protect
and defend human rights.

3. Human rights video documentation - since 1992

4. Human rights video documentation - today

5. Video as evidence

6. Ongoing and new threats

7. Activist-led archives

8. Where we work
USA
Brazil
Latin America
& the Caribbean
Asia & the
Pacific
Africa
Middle East &
North Africa
+ Cross-regional programs: Video as Evidence, Technology Threats and Opportunities, Archives.
Thematic focus areas: serious international crimes, state violence, land defense.

9. How we work

10. Example: Collaborative Archiving for Police
Accountability in the US

11. El Grito de Sunset Park collaboration

12. El Grito de Sunset Park - learning and sharing

13. Berkeley Copwatch

14. “In order to answer the question of ‘what did we want
to ‘ask’ the database?’, our group had to look inward
and be mindful of what we wanted to focus our efforts
on as copwatch.
We had to review our core beliefs and goals. When we
were able to answer ‘what we wanted to focus on’ as an
organization, then we better understood what
questions or what information we wanted to be able to
‘ask’ the database. That has guided our approach to the
design of the database from our POV.”
- Andrea Prichett
Berkeley Copwatch - collaboration

15. Berkeley Copwatch - learning and sharing

16. More learning and sharing

17. Learning and sharing impacts
Kilometro0 database: https://evidencialaviolencia.org/evidencia-la-
violencia/base-de-datos/

18. Resources
● https://archiving.witness.org/
● http://blog.witness.org/
● https://library.witness.org/
● https://vae.witness.org/
● https://elgrito.witness.org/
● https://lab.witness.org/berkeley-copwatch-database/

19. Thanks!
yvonne@witness.org
@ng_yvonne