(percussive music)
(metal chiming)
(drum pounding)
- Hi, it's all of you (laughs)
(audience laughs)
Cool, I want to show you my grandmother.
This is Kaltouma Shihabi.
My grandmother was born in Palestine,
in a village called Lubya.
This is a video of her, I'll explain
what she's doing in a bit.
But so, she was born in Lubya in 1937.
In Lubya, she lived there until 1948,
which is when the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine happened.
We call the ethnic cleansing
of Palestine in Arabic
(man speaking foreign language)
or the catastrophe.
After she fled Palestine,
she went to Damascus,
where she lived until 2012
and in 2012 she had to flee again.
This time she went to
Canada and in this video
you see her as a refugee again
for the second time in her life.
But here she's doing her English homework
for the English class
that she has not missed
since the day she arrived in Canada.
This is a video that her classmate,
who's 23 years old, took of
her while she was not looking.
(audience laughs)
(Majd laughs)
This is a map of Lubya,
my grandmother's village,
just before it was destroyed in '48.
It was made by the British
Colonial Authorities
and it shows a lot of the texture
that was present in Lubya
just before it was destroyed.
You can see the houses,
you can see the school,
you can see the fields, the agriculture
that was happening there.
This is what it looks like right now.
The bald spot in the middle
is where the houses were.
The green is the forest
that was planted to replace
our farms, it was planted
with European pine trees.
And there in the side, you see
an exclusively Jewish settlement,
replacing what was Lubya.
Teta, Teta Im Majed, as I know her, knows
a lot about daily life in Lubya.
She knew where we baked our
bread, how we baked our bread.
She knew how to press olives.
She knew the ride of the
donkey from the houses
to the fields in the harvest season.
The second Nakba of Palestine
is when the last person
who remembers Palestine as
it was before the Nakba is
no longer with us to tell
the story of Palestine.
Hopefully, my grandmother stays with us
for a long time, but she's 82.
This is the only photo that remains
or that is known of Lubya, and this is it
as it was being ethnically cleansed.
So throughout the Arabic speaking world,
we're realizing that the
second Nakba is approaching.
So there is this huge rush to collect
as much information and data that we can
about what life was like in
Palestine before the Nakba.
Organizations like AL-JANA
and the Nakba Archive
have been collecting
oral history testimonies
to tell the story, more vivid
and nuanced story of Palestine.
The Palestinian Oral
History Archive has archived
those collections and it's being released
in June and then open license.
And it's not just about oral testimony,
it's about what has remained in artifact.
So this is the Khazaaen Archive
of Palestinian ephemera.
They've collected everything
from advertisements,
train tickets, magazines, anything
that they could get their
hands on and they want
to, through this archive,
which is a physical archive,
were creating a record of
what Palestine was like
as a cultural hub of the region.
It's a physical archive
that's coming online.
And it's not just Palestine.
In Syria, we have the archive
of the Creative Memory
of the Syrian Revolution
that has been collecting
creative art made by people from Syria
and publishing it and
archiving it in one place.
We also have the New Palmyra project,
which is started by Bassel Khartabil.
(audience claps)
Bassel created this 3D model
of the ruins of Palmyra
that are now destroyed by ISIS.
The same technology
that was used to create
this 3D model of Palmyra is now being used
to reconstruct Notre
Dame after it was burnt.
Even further, from Syria and Palestine,
we have a massive movement
to archive on an independent level.
So we have people
collecting independently.
These are non-state
institutions or/and individuals
trying to document political movements,
document cultural heritage,
and women stories.
So here we have the 858 archive
of the Egyptian Revolution,
the Arabic Music Archive, the
Feminist Oral History Archives
of both Lebanon and Egypt.
We have the Wikigender project,
the Arab Image Foundation,
the Syria Untold project,
and the Archive of the Missing
and Disappeared in Lebanon.
We are building those
archives because we need them.
The states that we are living in do not
make their archives, their
official archives accessible.
And they're not even interested in hosting
the knowledge that we are
interested in as a people.
How does this connect to
the political movement?
In the '30, '40s, and
'50s and even the '60s,
just after independence,
there was a flourishing
of political activity
all across the region.
And this flourishing of
activity was very quickly,
systematically destroyed in the '80s
and following it, even until now.
Here you can see the (man
speaking foreign language)
or the Baath pioneer,
which is the youth branch
of the Baath party of Syria.
It's training kids in schools to be
as conformist as possible
and it's punishing
any kind of disconformity or dissent.
But it's not just the Baath party
and it's not just internal.
For Palestinians, we have
had the Israeli state
systematically assassinating
our democratic leaders
and our cultural leaders
and our intellectuals
in Palestine, outside of Palestine,
whether it's in Europe or North America.
And of course, we have the Oslo Agreement
that neutralized any kind of resistance
and any kind of democratic movement.
But in Palestine and in Syria
and all across the region,
we have a strong impulse for democracy.
The impulse has been repressed,
but we have seen it burst
out in Tahrir Square.
We're seeing it right now
in Sudan and in Algeria.
We're seeing it all
across the Arabic world
and we're seeing it also in the diaspora
of the Arabic world, in
exile, in the Berlin,
all over Europe and North
America and wherever
there are Syrians or exiled refugees.
So let's think about archives again.
So we can read archives in two ways.
One way of reading it is what it contains.
The other way of reading an archive is
what it does not contain.
Do the archives represent our diversity?
And I'm not just talking
about the content,
I'm also talking about the
governess of those archives.
Do they use licenses that represent
the interests of the content holders?
Do they create the right
types of collaborations?
Do they give the right
access to the right people?
Are they activated as archives
and culture records in the right ways?
This is why openness is important.
Openness subverts the oppressive, violent,
coercive, hegemonic powers and asserts
the democratic right to access
public knowledge and culture.
Openness and democracy
are dangerous concepts.
They're dangerous to oppressive powers,
which is why they Syrian regime killed
our friend, the free culture
and open source activist,
Bassel Khartabil.
What does this look like in practice?
Through the Bassel Khartabil Fellowship,
I've been working on this
project, the Palestine Open Maps.
Palestine Open Maps is a
collection of historic maps
of Palestine made from the 1880s up to '48
by the British Colonial Authorities.
And I document Palestine at
a very intimate and detailed level.
Here you can see a
record of two of the maps
that we have in our collection.
The first one on the left is from '46,
two years before the Nakba
and the creation of the state of Israel.
And the one on the left is three years
after the creation of the state of Israel.
They're almost identical.
The one difference is the
'46 one says Palestine,
the 1951 map says Israel.
These maps are a record of
the erasure of Palestine.
But these are paper maps,
they're just photos of papers.
And we need to be able to
make them more analyzable,
more searchable, more accessible to
as many people as possible.
So how are we doing that?
I've been working with
open source software
to vectorize the content of those maps.
I've held eight mapathons so far.
The most recent one was this morning.
And we have been extracting the data using
OpenStreetMap infrastructure and making
it openly accessible
to anyone who wants it.
Those mapathons are extremely special.
This is the one mapathon that I held
at a Palestinian refugee camp
in the North of Lebanon, Beddawi Camp.
I'm telling you, there's
nothing that matches
the look on the teenagers
eyes when they see
their maps, the maps of their
villages for the first time.
Those teenagers, 15 year olds,
they're Palestinians Syrians,
they're Palestinian Lebanese.
They're contributing to an open data set.
They're actively contributing
to knowledge production
and they're learning about
the ugliness and the beauty
of democratic practice of
managing open archives.
The question that I pose right now is
how do those archives reflect us?
We have the 858 archive and
the Tahrir Square protests
reflecting the same moment.
Last year, the GLAM-Wiki
conference happened.
It was an open GLAM conference
and it happened in Tel Aviv, Israel.
All of us GLAM practitioners all over
the Arabic speaking
world were heartbroken.
We come out to participate
in this conference.
Israeli state policy,
racist Israeli state policy,
does not allow us, me as a
Palestinian, to go there.
I think this can be remedied,
how can we remedy it?
I have three ideas (laughs)
(audience laughs)
As we know it takes a
village to raise a child.
And it also takes an entire
community to raise an archive.
So I want three things from you.
I want you to create a
spaces for us in our region
to foster the development of our ideas,
to foster the development
of our practices,
and to foster knowledge exchange.
I also want you to support us with funding
so that people, leaders
of our communities can
have the resources to actually do
the much needed work that we need to do.
And I also want us to exchange.
I want us to mutually support each other
with resources, with our
experiences, with our practices.
This could take the shape of trainings,
mentorships, partnerships,
this is two-way.
And this trinity of types of support,
I hope will make our communities
much stronger thank you.
(audience claps)
