Over the past decade, scholars and community leaders have experimented with the use of
new digital technologies to tell the history of the anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa. Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in
hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Digital
humanities may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an
alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing
histories. The layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of
archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, in particular, the
endangered nature of those archives across South Africa related to the Soweto Uprisings
of June 1976. The Soweto Historical GIS Project’s Social Justice History Platform is a
software platform designed to represent geographic and spatial data within an enhanced
interface designed to contextualize locations and objects alongside the primary source
documents that provide their historical narrative. As a 3D and virtual reality enabled
platform (built atop the Unity engine), the Social Justice History Platform is able to
represent both 2D geospatial information (such as maps, photographs, and records) and
3D representations of landscapes, locations, and 3D models of historical buildings and
objects. The platform also lets users explore changes to those locations or objects over
the course of a defined timeline of its history, allowing for an interactive view that lets
users step backward or forward through a location’s changes over time. This unique
timeline runs along two axes which we call the “macro-history” (more specific timelines
including the stories of relevant events outside the scope of the 3D view, etc.), along with
a second axis, a series of collapsible vertical timelines, which we call the “micro-history”
(the most prominent changes to the physical structure of a location over time).