Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Digital Humanities

Advisor

Aránzazu Borrachero

Committee Members

Matthew K. Gold

Subject Categories

Digital Humanities

Keywords

Archives, politics of memory, ethical archival theory, U.S. military, human rights, qualitative analysis

Abstract

Developments in digital technologies have complicated existing debates around the ethics of cataloging war crimes and human rights violations. Digital humanities methods of evaluating digital scholarship can help to construct a framework for evaluating war crimes databases, a process which requires a fine-tuned critical analysis aimed towards understanding the purpose of compiling the database, the platform or media template through which the database is presented, and the communicative potentials of the database. The following paper presents a survey of the existing literature on war crime databases and the politics of memory; a model of how war crimes database analyses may be conducted; and a synthesis of ethical archival theory with critical literary theory to argue for an interdisciplinary approach to memory archives. This paper proposes an evaluative framework drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of “precarious life” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of “speech genres” to examine how the infrastructural conditions, or frames, of war crimes documentation enable a dialogic interrogation of injustice. The evaluative framework is then applied to three projects that present data on U.S.-perpetrated war crimes following 9/11: the “In the Dark War-Crimes Database,” “The Index of the Disappeared,” and “Our Condolences, Afghanistan.”

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