Yonah Bex Gerber, Human Rights Watch, Spring 2013, NEH
Human Rights Watch is a world-renowned non-profit group committed to ending human rights abuses across the globe. To accomplish this, researchers gather eyewitness testimony and other evidence on the field to issue statements and reports on ongoing human rights violations. I worked as an intern under Multimedia Manager Nicole Martin to aid in managing this vast archive. My main responsibilities were to catalog a wide variety of digitized recordings and multimedia projects and to transfer tapes to digital formats. My work led to over a hundred hours of previously inaccessible materials becoming available to the organization. These projects included research on election transparency in Kenya, civilian casualties in the Russian-Chechen conflict, education of young girls in Afghanistan, violence against migrants in Greece and Turkey, and discrimination against those both disabled and HIV-positive. This internship taught me the importance of archives in preserving cultural memories and historical authenticity in an entirely new way. I learned excellent cataloging skills, how to deal with various tape formats, and valuable lessons in emotional maturity when dealing with difficult subjects and images.
Yonah Bex Gerber at Human Rights Watch
