Knowledge Work and the Databasing of Human Rights : Witness and Digital Economy of Suffering

This essay argues that knowledge culture today is integral to the global archivization of human rights violations. Taking as its subject of analysis the website Witness, it argues that new forms of narratives emerge on a daily basis from across the world, constituting a new knowledge form about the world, that websites like Witness constitute a non-official and user-generated archive of testimony that demands an ethical engagement. The database, it argues, is a central ‘genre' of human rights discourse in the new knowledge economy. A ‘narrative' emerges from the database through a collection of trajectories used/followed by the reader. I suggest that this matter of user-choice is a call for an ethical engagement with the database of the suffering Others. It creates a new geography - of suffering - for us to explore. Witness is the space where the suffering Other appears, and calls upon us to respond ethically