Archive as Work-in-Progress

This paper describes an electronic archive being created to investigate the role of the media in the constitution of new religious publics in western Nigeria in the late 1990s. The aim of the project is to capture the arguments, silences and shared ground between Muslim, Christian and traditional constituencies as articulated in their media productions, and to represent these in a multimedia format in keeping with the subject matter. The electronic archive consists of digitised pamphlets, videos, off-air television and radio recordings, newspaper articles, posters, pamphlets and tracts, supported by transcriptions of interviews and questionnaire responses. It was designed to capture a cross section of religiously oriented media items circulating among the heterogeneous, antagonistic but often overlapping religious constituencies in Yorubaland, and it focuses on Agbowo, a suburb of Ibadan. The paper discusses the nature of this deliberately created archive as a work-in-progress where the processing of the material (translating from Arabic and Yoruba, subtitling videos, producing synopses and brief summaries, transcribing oral performance genres, devising multiple-keyword links across genres) is itself a mode of research.