Walking the Archive of District Six: Memory, Augmented Reality, and Counter-Surveying
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2022-05-03

David A. Wallace (University of Michigan, USA) and Siddique Motala (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

This talk will review previous and ongoing interdisciplinary research that integrates archives and geomatics into an augmented reality (AR) enhanced walking tour of District Six in Cape Town, South Africa, perhaps the most well-known site of apartheid forced removals (some 60,000 Black individuals between 1968 – 1983). Since 2018, the presenters have collaborated to combine Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping technologies with personal, institutionalized, and newly created digital records to recover unknown histories and narratives of former District Six residents. A newly created geocoded map represents the first ever digital historical map of District Six that contains discrete and granular locations of all homes, businesses, and public services. The archival component integrates onto this map a range of documentary evidence: digitized historical baptismal registry records from St. Mark’s church, one of the few surviving structures in District Six; visual resources from the District Six Museum, and; oral histories of a handful of former residents, supplemented by their personal archives. The current manifestation of this work is deploying AR to transform the “Haunted Walks of District Six” tour to enable the simultaneous integration of the physical and virtual within District Six while exploring new heritage-related theoretical and praxis directions at the intersections between archiving, engineering, and information technology, and their incorporation into social justice decolonizing memory work. We seek to substantially reinvent the embodied and affective experience of the walking tour, while exploring its potential for application to other contexts of forced removal, recovered and contested memory, and ongoing justice-seeking efforts.

For more information about the 2022 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org