The Digital Imaging Project of South Africa presents the full text and page images of 42 anti-apartheid periodicals ranging in date from 1950 to 1994. The archive makes the journals accessible in a variety of ways, by both browsing and searching. All dates of each journal can be browsed. In addition, each journal is accompanied by an annotation describing its political affiliation and stance. The extensive search features also make the archive easy to use. All the newspapers have been catalogued by article title, author, and full-text keyword. But most importantly, this archive gathers a variety of periodicals from diverse sources across South Africa that are of general interest and would be difficult to access and analyze in print form. One significant drawback to the site is that the images in the newspapers cannot be searched separately.
Because of its structure, this archive supports research at all levels. High school (or middle school) students with virtually no background knowledge of anti-apartheid struggles could use the browse features (which aren’t complete) to undertake a general exploration of the variety of anti-apartheid perspectives that the journals offer. More advanced researchers could take advantage of one of the search features. Using the author search feature, it is easy to trace the political and ideological development of prominent anti-apartheid leaders, like Steven Biko a.k.a. “Frank Talk” (a search returned seven articles for Biko and five for Frank Talk) or Joe Slovo (24 articles). DISA also lends itself to the examination of specific time periods within the 1950 to 1994 date range. Comparing the editorial stances of several papers representing different wings of the anti-apartheid struggle in a critical time period, e.g. the states of emergency between 1984 and 1986, would be easy.
Posted by Kristin at November 8, 2004 05:45 PM