It is difficult to explain to someone who has not seen the site what it’s like to explore the digital archive at Humanitec. University of Cape Town (UCT) Libraries’ web editor Gareth Dawson has, one imagines, truly taken the idea of a virtual experience to heart. He wants you to have the all-round experience; the whole package. If you can’t actually smell the dusty books and the musty shelves, he’s going to make damn sure you get the next best thing.

Talking to Daily Maverick, the team, which also includes project leader Professor Colin Tredoux, head of special collections and archives at UCT Libraries Renate Meyer, and writer Alexandra Dodd, is discussing how the archive evolved, and speculates that as we become more and more immersed in a digital world, there’s a hunger for experiences that engage the senses. (Or, as Meyer puts it, “a return to object in the ethereal world”.) Trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, at one of her recent visits to Cape Town, said more or less the same thing; that fashions, textiles and even furniture were set to become chunkier, thicker, fluffier, as human beings craved a more tactile experience – more touch.

The Humanitec archive is a “very good combination” between the material and the virtual, says Meyer, and the team worked hard to keep the experience as authentic as possible. Each article – of which there are more than 14,000 – was painstakingly discussed. “Conversion requires incredible intellectual consideration,” says Meyer.

When it came to slides, for example, did one clean the mould off the slides, or was it more authentic to keep the slides as they were? “There’s a strange aesthetic to it,” explains Dawson. “It’s almost more intimate with the scars.”

The same applied to transcribing Khoisan recordings. “Transcribing Khoisan is different to transcribing English,” says Dawson. “If you filter out the noise, you destroy the language.”

Photo: Father PJ Pearson in the church hall where the congregation were tear-gassed and attacked by police after the funerals of ANC members Robbie Waterwitch and Coline Williams. Photo by Zubeida Vallie.

Close contact was a core point of focus for the team; it had to feel as though visitors were actually there. Whatever object was being displayed couldn’t just be a low-resolution reproduction on a web archive, but the high-resolution version couldn’t take an hour to load and cost a fortune in data, either. To this end, Dawson relied on deep zoom, a data-conscious method for handling very large images. If you’re the user, you’ll experience this as a tool for magnifying visual objects in extreme close-up one section at a time. Behind the scenes, it means the picture is loading bit by bit – only the section you are looking at – which means you won’t have to wait unnecessarily long for the page to load, and you won’t have to pay unnecessary data charges.

This use of deep zoom means visitors to the Bolus Herbarium collection or viewers of some of the rare maps can in fact access closer detail than they might do with the naked eye. The Bolus Herbarium is the oldest functioning herbarium in Africa, and the collection features a collection of watercolour paintings and drawings by botanical artists Mary Page and Beatrice Carter, who were employed at the Bolus Herbarium in the early 1900s.

View one of the digitised maps here.

More painstaking work was required to produce the sonic archives. Each hour of audio, Meyer explains, takes four hours to convert – that’s just the metadata conversion – but roughly eight hours of transcription, if the transcriber is good. Three thousand hours of sonic audio, Dawson points out, amounts to a person’s career.

Then there is the Repeat Photographs collection: 4,000 historic photographs of the South African landscape were collected and digitised, and contemporary replications taken, to create three complete sets. Think for a minute about what that means: trying to find the exact spot in the country where an archived photo was taken, and taking the exact same photograph. It couldn’t be a similar photograph, it had to be an exact replication, so that the replication could be placed atop the archived photo and a slider feature created. The slider can be moved from left to right, allowing viewers to see the change in the landscape over the years.  

View one of the Repeat photographs here.

As far as close contact with the artefacts go, Humanitec will offer not just wider access, but also closer access. The Kirby collection of more than 600 rare musical instruments, for example, comprises instruments that are so delicate they cannot be touched. “But they are photographed in such dimensionality that you can get right into the texture of the vellum,” says Dodd. “Musicologists from across the world can now see them close up. Imagine the cost, otherwise, of accessing such a collection.”

The care taken was almost inevitable, Dodd adds. “There’s a strange sense of being a torchbearer. Someone has invested their whole lifetime in these projects. We are investing the same care.”

“It’s a fine line between working for research and working for the public,” says Dawson. “This is not just for research. Anyone can access it.”

According to Dawson, a major motivating factor is the democratisation of knowledge. “We have academics who have resources and academics who don’t,” he says.

Photo: Matjes River Skull. Human Anatomy Archive.

Previously, archiving was driven by researchers or departments archiving their own material, Tredoux says. Now that archiving is an interdisciplinary endeavour, the team believes the sum of the effort can be greater than its parts.

It’s a politically charged time for UCT, and the team acknowledges that archiving is a contested action, not just at the university but further afield. “The archive is highly politicised terrain,” admits Dodd. “But it is some form of evidence. Whatever angle you wish to take – whichever way you want to proceed – there is some record there. It is a starting point.” Dodd points out that the Community Arts Project, for example (also housed within Humanitec) which documents visually the resistance against Apartheid in the Western Cape, is highly contested. “None of these objects are neutral,” she says. “All are influenced by some form of bias. There is also the privileging of some kinds of knowledge. In South Africa, this is deeply political. But if you have the records, you can write against the grain and mobilise evidence.”

“We acknowledge that it’s a contested area,” says Meyer. “But this comes from a very informed position, with mindfulness.” DM

Read more:

• Immense new digital archive launched at UCT

• Visit the Humanitec Digital Showcase