Co-sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Angel David Nieves
Professor, Department of History, San Diego State University
Transmedia Historical and Architectural Reconstructions: Forensic Traces of Apartheid-Era Human Rights Violations in Soweto’s Built Environment, 1976-1989
Over the past two decades, scholars and community leaders have experimented with the use of new digital technologies to tell the complex histories of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony using online platforms and multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Architectural reconstructions of sites where apartheid-era crimes occurred can now be used to document more complex histories of the liberation movement. As a field, digital humanities (DH) can also help analyze new forms of documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories for the foreign tourist market.
Nieves will discuss Apartheid Heritages: A Spatial History of South Africa’s Township’s, now under consideration at Stanford University Press as part of their Mellon Foundation-funded digital publishing initiatives.
