Learning from Other Archives

For this week, I looked at two archives that I think have lessons for what I want to do. One is close to home, the Camp Boiro Memorial. The other is in South Africa, the District Six Museum. Both are about memory, trauma, and how to keep history alive when official records often ignore or erase it.

Camp Boiro Memorial

Camp Boiro was one of the darkest places in Guinea’s history, a detention center where so many people were tortured and killed under Sékou Touré’s regime. The website is an attempt to keep that memory alive.

What I think works well:

  • It makes memory public and visible names are listed, stories are shared, and silence is broken.
  • The structure (victims, perpetrators, charniers, bibliography) gives a sense of scope and seriousness.
  • The categories (victims, perpetrators, mass graves, testimonies) make it clear this is a site of memory and mourning.

What feels missing:

  • Many entries are uneven, some with detail and others almost empty. It leaves the impression of fragments instead of a fuller picture.
  • There’s little context about how stories were collected or by whom, which makes it harder to trust.
  • Navigation feels flat. You can browse, but you don’t really see the connections between people, families, or events.
  • It doesn’t feel very open to people adding new material. It reads more like a finished list than an ongoing living archive.
  • I also worry about sustainability. If one day the site shuts down, where will all this memory go?

For me, Camp Boiro shows how important it is to record and publish memory, but also how important it is to make it feel alive, connected, and open to people.

District Six Museum

District Six was a neighborhood in Cape Town where over 60,000 people were forcibly removed under apartheid. The museum and its digital archive document those lives and memories.

What I think works well:

  • It is deeply community-centered. Former residents themselves are guides and contributors.
  • It’s multimedia photos, maps, oral histories, even recipes. It reminds you that history is not just dates but lived experience.
  • It connects memory to place. You can see where homes, mosques, and churches once stood, making the loss visible.

What feels missing:

  • Some of the digital materials are hard to find, scattered across pages. It doesn’t always have one clear catalogue to explore.
  • It depends a lot on the museum itself. If you’re not in Cape Town or don’t have strong internet, you miss a lot of it.
  • It’s less accessible to people who might want to use the material in their own way, since the museum curates the experience tightly.

District Six works because it feels alive, rooted in community and multiple forms of memory. But it also shows how hard it is to make that accessible to everyone, especially outside the museum walls.

What I Take Away

From Camp Boiro, I take the urgency. If we don’t record now, memory disappears. From District Six, I take the community and multimedia approach. For my Guinea project, I want both. I want Guineans to be able to see themselves in the archive, not just as names but as stories, voices, and traditions. I want something simple enough that someone with weak internet in Conakry could still access it, but also strong enough that scholars can use it years from now.

For my Guinea project, I want to:

  • Collect stories but also connect them so people can see relationships across families and regions.
  • Keep it open so Guineans can add their own materials.
  • Use multiple forms of knowing oral history, photos, objects, testimonies not just written documents.

Other DH Projects That Inspire Me

Looking beyond these two, I explored projects that experiment with mapping and relationships in history.

  • Kindred Britain and Mapping the Republic of Letters show how you can visualize networks of people, letters, and knowledge across time. They made me think of how Guinean families and cultural figures could also be mapped to show connections beyond state borders.
  • Mapping Haitian History and Mapping the Haitian Revolution use geography as an entry point into memory and history. This inspires me to think about Guinea’s regional histories and migrations not just as stories, but as maps people can explore.
  • African Digital Heritage reminded me that this work is already happening across Africa. They push for community-centered archives and highlight that digital tools should serve local people first.

For More Reading