Bard College Receives $40,000 NEH Grant To Support The Milošević Trial Public Archive

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Human Rights Project at Bard College (HRP) has been awarded a $40,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) planning grant for the Milošević Trial Public Archive, a project being developed in collaboration with the Internet Archive, a San Fransisco–based nonprofit. The Milošević Trial Public Archive will provide fully searchable streaming and downloadable video of the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević at the United Nation’s war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands.

Milošević was the first head of state ever to be tried for genocide, and the footage of his historic trial—which lasted from 2002 to 2006—amounts to more than 1,800 hours of testimony and procedure. This archive constitutes a vital repository for what is arguably the most significant trial in the jurisprudence of war crimes to date, and represents a substantial record of the decade of war that engulfed the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. When the project began in 2002, Wired magazine called the Milosevic archive “the first to make a global trial globally accessible online.” Now, more than a decade later, as streaming video has become commonplace, the trial footage will be the test case for new standards in context-rich digital human rights archiving.

“This National Endowment for the Humanities planning grant allows us to take the needed time to lay the necessary theoretical and technological groundwork to carry out the project in full,” says Danielle Riou, research associate at the Human Rights Project, who directs the venture. “The goal of this endeavor is not simply to make the archive available to the public but to help recast what an archive like this can be and what it can offer the people who use it.”

The Milošević Trial Public Archive will house the complete English-language video of the trial, all of the expert reports submitted during the trial, and the complete trial transcripts, all within the Internet Archive, where it will be stored in perpetuity. This archive will feature search capabilities that are unprecedented, and will be of significant value to scholars, researchers, specialists, interdisciplinary artists, and documentarians across a broad range of fields.
 
About the Bard Human Rights Project
The Human Rights Project is an exploratory research and action initiative at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Through teaching, public programs, research, and engagement with communities in the region and globally, the project aims to foster critical discussions of human rights theory and practice, and to engage with practitioners on the leading edges of human rights research. Founded in 1999, the project developed the first interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree program in human rights in the United States in 2003.


About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

 
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, nonsectarian, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music—and offers an M.Music in vocal arts and in conducting. Bard also bestows an M.Music degree at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College with accredited Bard College branch campuses in New York City, Cleveland, and Newark, New Jersey; A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S. in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. at multiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual B.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan; and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University; as well as dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds University in the West Bank.

Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 5,000 students. The undergraduate College in Annandale-on-Hudson has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. For more information about Bard College, visit www.bard.edu.

Bard High School Early College allow students to earn up to 60 college credits and a Bard College associate in arts degree, tuition-free, along with a high school diploma. These schools have had great success in helping students access, afford, and complete college. For more information, visit bard.edu/earlycollege.

(04/22/15)

This event was last updated on 06-02-2015

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