SyriaUntold and the anxiety of (digital) memory

SyriaUntold started in 2013 as an online effort to aggregate and curate the online production of Syrian civil society in the uprising. This involved the collecting, archiving and contextualizing of a disparate and diverse array of texts (e,g, photos, videos, songs, posters, comments) produced by Syrian activists, artists and civil society groups, and disseminated online through different social media platforms.

SyriaUntold’s mission is a telling sign of two distinct anxieties about memory. One specifically related to the Syrian context, where 40-years of authoritarian rule has diluted and fragmented all meaning of “social” or “collective” memory. The other one is more generally concerned with our ability to remember, or form collective memories, under the increasing pressures of information flows constituted by the new digital tools we use. This presentation aims to introduce SyriaUntold’s work, and elaborate some of techniques it developed to achieve its mission. Prime amongst which is the adoption of a thematic storytelling approach that allows it to synthesize the different forms of texts into the body of the story without compromising their value as standalone pieces of evidence.