Building the revolution’s memory: Coders archive Lebanon’s protests
A collective of activists in Lebanon and abroad are archiving the Lebanese protests that broke out more than two months ago as a way to preserve the materials for future analysis.
Late on a smoggy Friday afternoon Dec. 13, three friends sat huddled around a laptop at Raseef coffeeshop in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut. On Twitter, many Lebanese users urged people to head down to Martyrs’ Square to protest over the weekend. Thousands did, with state security forces tear gassing and shooting rubber bullets at demonstrators, who posted videos of the confrontations online.
With each day of the mass anti-government demonstrations that have swept Lebanon for the past 12 weeks, protesters are adding a new page to the country’s history books. To ensure their activism is not lost or distorted by the passage of time, a handful of tech-savvy citizens are working to preserve and archive materials associated with the demonstrations through open-source online projects.
“Collaborating on the archive was a way for me to use my skill set — which is not really normally applicable to political revolutions — to help out and to show up for people,” Ramsey Nasser, a Lebanese coder who works in New York, told Al-Monitor. “Plus, you know, the reality is I have power in New York. So I could actually connect to activists on the ground,” he added, alluding to the daily electricity outages that are a common complaint among protesters fed up with politicians’ corruption and mismanagement.
Along with Nasser, friends Marc Farra and Majd al-Shihabi are creating “Lebanon 2019,” a series of interactive maps about the demonstrations, while the Beirut-based media advocacy group Maharat has partnered with analytics company Data Aurora to launch the interactive platform Lebanon Protests, breaking down Twitter engagement. The American University in Beirut has also published an online research guide, Lebanon Protests 2019, to accompany the thousands of documents it has preserved for in-person viewing at its campus library.
