For the past couple of months, I've only been able to get out posts on a biweekly basis because my graduate school load was fairly heavy.  But things have eased up a bit for now and I'm hoping that I can get back on a weekly schedule since there are so many awesome projects that deserve their own feature on this platform.  But, for now, this week's featured project is Digital Matatus, a collaborative mapping project between University of Nairobi's C4D Lab, Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development, MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, and Groupshot. Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in a major African city knows how key the informal transit network is.  Whether it's kombis in Durban, molues or danfos in Lagos, informal modes of transportation are easily the cheapest and most effective ways of getting around the city of your choice.  The problem with these networks is that it requires a lot of insider knowledge.  Routes, rates, hand signals, and etiquette are all things that have to be passed on to you from someone else in order to get to and from where you need to go.  In a lot of ways, this system can come across as chaotic, unruly, and impossible to tame.  Matatus are the minibus taxis that crisscross through Nairobi daily.  Arguably, the city is dependent on this mode of transportation, as most people get to and from work on these minibuses.  The problem with this system is its informality, with changing routes, delays, and fee shifts wrecking havoc on not only the passengers, but also the Nairobi government. Digital Matatus was launched in an effort to address some of these shortcomings, according to Sarah Williams, a project director from MIT's Civic Data Design Lab, “exposing that the city really does have a system and that the government should recognize that system and hope to regulate it.”  Jacqueline Klopp, a scholar at the Center for Sustainable Development, echoed Williams' statement, recognizing "that if there was going to be any kind of improvement of this system in Nairobi, then people would need to be able to see it and visualize it and speak about it as a system."  Local people were central to this project from its inception, with the project directors sending out volunteers on the matatus armed with cell phones and GPS devices to map out the city's informal routes.  Since Nairobi residents were the ones who would benefit from this system the most, it only made sense that this project was a true representation of development-from-below. On The Atlantic's City Lab blog, Sarah Williams, director of the Civic Data Design Lab, spoke to the importance of this project in utilizing technology for real social benefit.

When the government does not step in, these informal economies are developed to meet a certain need that the government should be taking care of.  That’s exactly what’s happened here. And it’s fascinating to see, because it’s totally driven by need.

Early last year, these routes were used in efforts to fundamentally restructure the informal transit system in Nairobi, utilizing this knowledge and the digital technologies that created it to design more effective routes and provide better information on routes to citizens.  You can see the fruits of their labor above and on their site.  The GIS data for this project is available on this site, meaning that researchers can access and utilize this data for their own purposes.  Someone has already begun trying to utilize GoogleMaps to map out the matatu routes.  Using the files available on the site,I created an interactive version of this map using ArcGIS.  You can access this map by clicking on the image below. The data generated in this project has already been used by some to improve the experience of matatu riders, with some developers using this project as a launchpad for crowdsourcing data on accidents and crime, while others have developed a mobile payment system that calculates the correct payment for a rider’s trip to combat price fluctuations.  And, really, this project is about more than just a single map.  In a piece written for The Guardian, Klopp insisted that

To us the data and map are not ends in themselves; they should be powerful ways to spur advocacy and support better-informed public dialogue and planning. This is a necessary step towards better public transit, which is critical to building better cities.

In this perspective, this project is just a stepping stone to utilizing digital technologies to improve the daily lives of citizens around the world, not just in Nairobi.  And it shows the potential for using African participants to devise solutions to real problems that require innovative solutions. Follow Digital Matatus on Facebook and Twitter.  Also keep track of the latest from the C4D Lab at the University of Nairobi on Twitter.  As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!

Nigeria has gotten a lot of attention on this platform in the past few weeks, with the publication of a new e-book the week prior to the election of Muhammadu Buhari over Goodluck Jonathan. I have been wanting to cover the Nigerian Nostalgia Project since Sean brought it to my attention a couple of months ago, but I was waiting for the right time. This time of change and possibilities in Nigeria seems like the right time to look at a project that aims to preserve Nigerian pasts while also facilitating the development of national pride amongst members of the global Nigerian diaspora. Nigerian Nostalgia has been featured on Africa Is a Country previously, but the project has expanded and evolved since that 2011 post. This hybrid crowdsourced digital archive and social media project originally launched on Facebook as part of an effort to use social media as as "place for the estimated 6 million Nigerian users online to gather and piece together, through commentary and discussion, the fragmented history of our collective recent past." This emphasis on the psychological potential of this project, according to the Tumblr site, was meant to "reconnect the Nigerian psyche to pre-existent, indigenous and proper thought giving base to national pride and a foundation for a sustainable future." This emphasis on reconnecting Nigerians to their past is linked to the founder, Etim Eyo, being called unpatriotic by a friend. Based on this, Eyo said that he "wanted to find inside myself what would I be celebrating? And I realized that we have to celebrate the values, history and the things that identify us." That is the impetus driving the community-building activities associated with this project. Olayemi, the founder and administrator of the Tumblr site, similarly found this project to be an outlet to reconnect to her personal history, as well as challenging popular misconceptions of Africa.

For me, the purpose of this blog is simply to learn more about my history. Collectively, there is constant negativity that surrounds Nigeria and Africa as a whole, so the objective of this blog is to show Nigeria’s true beauty and richness in culture both in the past and at this very moment. And who doesn’t like to see old pictures of their beloved country? Haha.

As Olayemi's comments indicate, the main focus of this project, whether on Tumblr, Facebook or Instagram, is on photographs as a means to preserve the past, in addition to inspiring nostalgia among Nigerians, wherever they may be located. The Facebook group (which requires membership) is host to a whole range of content, from advertisements in magazines to profiles of athletes to family photos.  The Tumblr offers photographs, gifs, and videos that span the Nigerian past from the nineteenth century to the present.  Between the two different platforms, users can explore a wide expanse of Nigerian realities, inspiring critical thought and nostalgic reflection.  You can see a selection of photos pulled from Tumblr below. [gallery theme="photomosaic" ids="88547,88546,88544,88543,88542,88541,88540,88538,88539"] Over the years, the project has jumped from social media to the art scene, being featured in art exhibitions in LagosPhoto 2012 and a "Native Nostalgia" exhibit in Johannesburg in 2013-2014. The Lagos event, in particular, marked the first time that the project left the confines of social media, with the "intimately scaled prints cover the walls of the exhibition venue to form an encapsulating mural."  Curator of LagosPhoto, Joseph Gergel, found that although there was doubt about the transition of the project into a gallery space and the ability to maintain the connectivity that marks the project online, but, he found, "it did: visitors conversed in person and exchanged their own memories of...cultural events."  The analog presentations of the fruits of this digital projects shows just how far an endeavor of this kind can go in forging community outside of physical boundaries. Contribute to Nigerian Nostalgia through Facebook. You can also submit photos through the Tumblr site.  You can also follow Nigerian Nostalgia on Twitter and Instagram.  As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!

On March 4th, the Justice Department released an 86-page report of its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.  Though the report cleared Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown last August, of any wrongdoing, this report represents a valuable composite of oral testimonies of antecedents of and proceedings of the events that resulted in months of protest in Ferguson, Missouri and around the country.  This week's Digital Archive will focus on two projects that both contextualize and preserve, respectively, those events. A lot of the projects that I have focused on thus far in this series have been historical in nature, compiling primary source documentation into a digital repository.  While this is absolutely an important use of digital technology for scholarly ends, there are so many possibilities out there, including scholarly activism.  The two projects that I chose for this week show how scholarly and activist interests can intersect and interact. Mapping Police Violence is a collection of interactive maps and data visualizations chronicling over 300 police killings of black people in the United States in 2014.  The data for these maps and visualizations was pulled from three main sources:  FatalEncounters.org and KilledbyPolice.net.  The project also says it pulled data from the U.S. Police Shootings Database, but provides no link to this specific repository.  So when looking at this data, especially if analyzing it from a scholarly standpoint, it's incredibly important to assess it critically, but it's hard to deny the power of the visualizations that this project provides. [gallery type="slideshow" link="none" ids="87487,87486,87485,87461"] The main focus of the site is on the interactive map of police violence in 2014.  You can view the map through four different layers: (1) by an animated timeline of the lives lost; (2) by the locations of the killings; (3) by likelihood of a black person being killed by police; and (4) by proportion of black lives lost by state.  There also several interactive data visualizations (built using Tableau) that allow you to compare police departments by various factors or analyze national trends in police killings.  All of these different tools provide powerful depictions of police violence in the United States; the kind of violence that resulted in the Ferguson uprisings last year.

Documenting Ferguson is a project of a partnership between Washington University in St. Louis and a number of local libraries that "seeks to preserve and make accessible community- and media-generated, original content that was captured and created following the killing of 18-year-old, Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014."  The project is completely accessible and intended for use by students, scholars, teachers, and the community in general, with the "ultimate goal of providing diverse perspectives of the events surrounding the conflicts in Ferguson."  Integrating images, video, audio, and stories related to the memorials, community meetings, rallies, and protests occurring in Ferguson and the surrounding area, this collection of over 500 items that capture this important moment in the history of racial politics in this country. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7aTt7wqHqI[/embed] You can contribute your own web content or media to Documenting Ferguson via the links provided.  Projects like these grow and develop based on user contributions, so pass the word along to help build this critical archive. As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  We've been getting some good suggestions from readers that will be reviewed soon! (Many thanks to Jill Kelly for letting me know about these awesome projects!)

Last summer, I got the chance to visit the Origins Museum on the University of the Witswatersrand campus in Johannesburg.  A major feature of the Museum's collection is an installation of San rock art.  As the Rock Art Research Institute's website attests, rock art is a key medium through which to understand our collective pasts (pasts which evade the written word).

Rock art is one of the most evocative of all the pieces of heritage left for us by our ancient ancestors. By looking into its symbolism, we can look into the minds of people who lived thousands of years ago. Rock art can take us back to a time when the world was very different, to the time when Egypt was home to the greatest civilization on earth. At that time people were painting rock art in the centre of the Sahara. But, even then, the rocks were not clean. The painters were covering over rock art that was already some 6000 years old. And, while Pygmy dancers entertained the great Pharaohs, their womenfolk painted the shelters of central Africa with a geometric art that remains amongst the most sophisticated of all the world's arts. These great traditions, and hundreds of others, remain on the rocks to be discovered by anyone willing to take the time. The following pages introduce you to some of our great painted and engraved treasures, but words and pictures are a poor substitute for a visit to a site to witness the real thing.

The Rock Art Research Institute (RARI), based at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, aims to not only research Africa's rock art, but also to publicize, preserve, and conserve these treasures.  And one of the ways that they have worked to achieve these aims is through the South African Rock Art Digital Archive. Some of the images from RARI are available through the Google Cultural Institute.  But while the Google collection only contains five images, this site contains over 270,000 images of rock art from 30 institutions around the world.  The digitization of the RARI collections began in 2002, thanks to funding from the Ringing Rocks Foundation.  In developing their preservation schema and digitization methods, this organization realized it could use their newfound expertise to preserve other private and institutional collections, including materials owned by the Analysis of Rock Art of Lesotho project, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Natal Museum, National Museum, University of Cape Town, and the University of South Africa (the specific collections and their digitization dates can be found on this page).  This collaborative venture (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) resulted in the website that you can access today. [gallery theme="photomosaic" ids="86875,86885,86886,86887,86888,86889,86890" orderby="rand"] There are multiple ways to navigate the site, which are laid out in these guidelines on how to search the database.  The most straightforward way to explore the archive is through the Browse options.  You can search by subject (ranging from animals to equipment to human figures), traditions (focusing on African hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists/herders), researchers and institutions, and locations (specifically Southern African public rock art sites--though this project also features rock art from throughout the continent).  For those planning trips to Southern Africa, this site also acts as a hub of information for public rock art sites that you can visit (as well as proper etiquette for interacting with the artifacts). It is useful to go through each browsing function to explore all of the options available, since the organizational scheme of this site seems to obfuscate as much of its content as it presents.  For example, there are brief essays with each browsing category that are only accessible if you click through each section.  Take, for example, this introductory essay on KhoeKhoe Rock Art.  Or this essay on Chewa Rock Art in Malawi and Zambia.  On that same note, this is not just, as the title suggests, a South African Rock Art Digital Archive, but an African Rock Art Digital Archive.  There are artifacts included from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Mali, the Sahara, Kenya, and, of course, South Africa.  But you do have to dig for them. Find out how you can get involved with SARADA's efforts here.  You can also follow the Rock Art Research Institute on Facebook.

This week I thought I'd try something a little different, inspired by some links I came across on Twitter.  Earlier this week, John Edwin Mason tweeted a story from The Guardian featuring five African musical acts to watch in 2015.  Three of the five acts featured in this article were either hip hop acts or heavily influenced by hip hop.  Reading this story made me think about the huge number of artists that are virtually unheard of here in the United States, but enjoy large followings throughout Africa and the diaspora.  Many of these talents are featured on African Hip Hop, the focus of this week's post. This site first appeared in 1997 under the name Rumba-Kali Home of African Hip Hop (the remains of the original site are available here).  It's original focus was, and continues to be, on "unifying everybody who’s inspired by hip hop and by the cultures of Africa and of African origins."  While at different points in time the site was sponsored by organizations like the Madunia Foundation, the Africa Server or This Is Africa, currently the site is independently run by a team of contributors spread throughout both the continent and the diaspora.  These contributors present a range of stories, from posts on recent hip hop releases to music videos to feature stories with more substantial content.  Readers can explore the history of Nigerian hip hop or a critical appraisal of American artists using African nations as backdrops in their videos or hip hop's role as a political tool in Gabon.  Though the site isn't updated on a regular basis with stories of this type, there is a lot already available and it's definitely worth exploring. In addition to individual blog posts, the site hosts regular columns, including The Hip-Hoppreneur by Cedric Muhammad on the business side of things and Bottom Juice by MissJackee which focuses on new sounds from the continent.  Africanhiphop.com also hosts several monthly radio shows, including the newly launched Africa Is Hot and African Hip Hop Radio.  The team producing African Hip Hop Radio consists of presenters from sixteen different countries, providing a broad range of musical selections.  You can listen to the first episode of Africa Is Hot below. [soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/158991909" params="color=ff5500" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /] There are also several documentary projects linked to the site, including Hali Halisi: Rap as an Alternative Medium in Tanzania and a series of videos from Nomadic Wax on Global Hip Hop Culture, hosted by Zimbabwe Legit's Dumi Right.  Finally, in addition to enjoying music and content on the site, a number of mixtapes have been made available for download, including songs from Ghanaian artist Blitz the Ambassador and Gambian-American Say-hu.  Such a wide range of perspectives and so many different styles of hip hop are collected on this site, making it a phenomenal resource for not only learning about African hip hop but also exposing more listeners to these infectious sounds. This project is entirely independent, so the creators invite any one with information on the development of hip hop in Africa to contribute any materials or stories that they might have.  You can contact the team via this form.  You can also follow African Hip Hop on Twitter (@africanhiphop.com) and Facebook. As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  We've been getting some good suggestions from readers that will be reviewed soon!  

In the U.S., the past few months have showcased the power of social activism in bringing awareness to injustices in the country. Social activism has a deep history in the States; one that is not limited to domestic issues. U.S.-based organizations and individual activists have frequently looked abroad to attempt to impact change in nations beyond our border. Africa has not been beyond this reach, particularly during the eras of decolonization and antiapartheid activism. The African Activist Archive, a project co-sponsored by the African Studies Center and MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University, aims to capture these histories. The African Activist Archive is an online archive of "50 years of activist organizing in the United States in solidarity with African struggled against colonialism, apartheid, and injustice."  The creators of African Activist Archive refer to this project as a "people's archive"; this is a fair label for this initiative as the materials included not only focus on activist organizing by local organizations, but also due to the fact that a good chunk of these materials were donated by individual activists.  In a piece entitled "Posters That Challenged Apartheid" posted to this site following Nelson Mandela's death in December 2013, Christine Root and Richard Knight (both members of the Advisory Committee as well as being major activists in their own right) explained the depth of the African Activist collection, as well as its grassroots origins.

The African Activist Archive Project website contains more than 7,200 freely accessible documents, photographs, buttons, T-shirts, posters, and video and audio recordings from the African solidarity movement from the 1950s to the 1990s.  We thank the more than 90 activists who have contributed materials to this collection.  We have been adding about 1,200 items per year, and we are eager to hear from people who have kept materials from this struggle.

The collaborative nature of this archive, being gathered from individual activists and organizations, as well as being sourced from various archives around the world, captures a rich geographic and thematic focus.  You can navigate the collection through a variety of categories, from the media type to the African nation referenced to the organization which produced the material (both inside and outside the US).  Root and Knight provided a great sampling of the posters available on the site in their previous post, so below are a few examples of the other materials captured in the collection. [gallery theme="photomosaic" ids="86534,86533,86536,86554,86555,86553"] It's hard to describe the width and breadth of this collection, let alone it's potential utility for research.  While I am a historian of South Africa and Africa more generally, I can only grasp a fraction of the potential that this archive holds for unlocking more stories of decolonization, the antiapartheid movement, and international social justice efforts.  Each person who uses this site will discover something different.  But taking the time to explore and discover in this rich resource will, undoubtedly, reap rewards.  Users interested in delving into the anti-apartheid movement will find the Related Sites list interesting.  This extensive list of digital initiatives, museum websites, films, and archives provides a great jumping off point for further exploration into these compelling histories.  For those scholars and researchers who might want to go a step further than that, the Archives list offers further pathways for exploring the rich history of the global African activist networks. Keep up with all of the latest from African Activist Archive on Facebook.  If you have or know of anyone who has materials that would fit this unique archive, see the Collection Policy for more information. As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  We've been getting some good suggestions from readers that will be reviewed soon!  

I absolutely love photography.  This might be obvious from some of the choices I've made for previous editions of the Digital Archive, like World War I Africa and Africa Through a Lens.  It's always been a medium that I enjoy on an artistic level but, recently, this interest in photography has trickled over into my academic pursuits as well.  This quote from Susan Sontag's On Photography speaks to the power of photography as a medium to capture snapshots of the past:

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality... One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

While, as a historian, I can not pretend to be attempting to possess the past, I can always strive to present the past, an endeavor made much easier through the existence of digital historical photograph collections like the The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960. The Humphrey Winterton Collection is an expansive collection of over 7,500 photographs taken mainly in East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Part of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Collection at Northwestern University, the Winterton Collection was assembled by British collector Humphrey Winterton. These photographs preserve a range of key historical moments in the region, from the opening of the Busoga Railway in 1912 to Hermann von Wissman's 1889-1890 expedition to suppress the Abushiri Revolt. In addition to major historical events, this collection also captures life in this region from the mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth century.  From portraits to landscapes, this collection really does, as the site purports, represent "an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa."  The photographs are tagged and cataloged in a variety of ways, but, to be honest, these efforts at organizing the collection make it quite difficult to find anything.  It's much simpler to use the keyword search function to navigate the collection or, if you have the time, to browse the collection in its totality. [caption id="attachment_86451" align="alignleft" width="200"] Jomo Kenyatta & Christopher Kiprotech, then member for Kericho East[/caption] The site also features an educational collection, entitled "In the Classroom."  Educators will find the Lesson Plan useful to begin teaching students how to engage with not only the items contained in the Winterton collection, but historical photographs more general.  The architects of the site have also assembled a series of curated galleries that can serve as jumping off points for learning more about East African women, political leadership, and, even, the Kenyan heritage of President Barack Obama.  This section also includes links to some other African historical photograph collections (which I won't go into detail about here since they might appear in a future edition of The Digital Archive!). Keep up with all of the latest from the Winterton Collection and the Melville J. Herskovits Library at Northwestern University on Twitter and, as always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  

In honor of the centenary of the Great War, Jacques Enaudeau and Kathleen Bomani set out to bring attention to the forgotten story of Africa's involvement in World War I.  As Enaudeau, a French geographer/cartographer, and Bomani, a Tanzanian activist (and frequent contributor to Africa Is A Country), rightly point out, "the story of Africans’ involvement in the Great War is largely unheard of."  Taking the hundredth anniversary as not only an opportunity to uncover this history, but also using it as "a fertile common ground for investigating the present," their project, World War I Africa, is a platform for exploiting this "window of opportunity to connect the dots and discuss the knots, to challenge the boilerplate narrative and change the usual narrators." As the subtitle of World War I Africa states: "What Happened in Africa Should Not Stay in Africa."  And what this project has done is begin the process of making sure that these stories find their way to a broader public.  Not a full year into the four-year centenary, this website has begun to accumulate a series of stories and sources, preserving these histories and beginning a conversation that will continue throughout the next four years and, hopefully, beyond.  The fourteen articles currently featured on the site cover a range of topics, from the history of Askaris to Marcus Garvey's opinions of the war to the Constellation of Sorrow Memorial to Senegalese tirailleurs fallen in France and a brand new piece on Ethiopia's path through the war.  Obviously, this site is a work-in-progress, with a small range of stories (some of which have been published elsewhere previously), and the creators are, of their own admission, no experts (in their first Africa Is A Country feature on World War I Africa, they admitted that they "claim no expertise" and "aim to educate ourselves as much as we hope to teach others").  But, with these caveats, this project already sheds new light in ways that suggest that what will come in the next three years holds the potential to have a broad impact in how we conceive of and talk about these important historical moments; moments which have largely been forgotten in popular memory. [caption id="attachment_86284" align="alignright" width="300"] Senegalese tirailleurs in Saint-Ulrich (Haut-Rhin), France. 16 June 1917. Photo by Paul Castelnau. Source: Ministère de la Culture.[/caption] Though the bulk of the original content of the project exists on the main site, these articles and links should really be supplemented by the rich variety of materials contained within the Tumblr.  Including links to other stories related to Africa's role in and experience of the Great War, this Tumblr also incorporates more of the stunning images which make this project so visually dynamic.  These images serve not only to put faces to the stories uncovered by this project, but also as a window into the rich resources available online for those interested in pushing further.  Utilizing the links from Tumblr and the Resources page, interested users can find recommended readings, digital bibliographies, and online image collections; materials which all provide an additional window through which to begin exploring these histories. In announcing their plans for the project, Enaudeau and Bomani entreated their readers to "unpack what the world thinks it knows, and put what it should not ignore right under its nose."  So, get reading and let's make sure that the centenary is a celebration of the world's experience in World War I.  Follow World War I Africa on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!