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00:00 Hi, my name is Fouad Lawal.
00:07 I am the project lead at Archiving.
00:09 Our mission is to make Nigerian history accessible by digitizing old newspapers.
00:13 I am trying to take all this information from this to this.
00:35 By seeing everybody's images, this is the work.
01:05 Publishing did not really become mainstream in Nigeria online until the late 2000s, early
01:11 2010s.
01:12 And the people that were in print, the bulk of publishers could not, for the most part,
01:18 even afford the work of bringing all of their archives online.
01:22 And so what we end up with is this massive repository of history that very few people
01:28 have access to.
01:29 And so the question became, if I have this need, how many more people have this need?
01:35 And that's pretty much how we got started.
01:37 [Video plays] [Applause]
01:57 It is those little things, because whenever we think of history, we tend to think about
02:12 big things, politics, leadership.
02:14 But it's also the small things, like how did we date in the '70s, and what were we eating,
02:20 when did Jollof rice become mainstream, right?
02:23 When did we start fighting over Jollof rice?
02:25 It's definitely not the '60s, right?
02:27 So when I think of misinformation and even disinformation, I think of it fundamentally
02:36 as serving one purpose.
02:37 There is a massive information vacuum, and our archives are going to fill it up.
02:49 Documentation is very, very important because it helps preservation of information, especially
03:06 lost information or not enough information that is there on the internet, because most
03:12 of these things we are documenting, you can't find them in real details or in its originality.
03:19 [Video plays] [Applause]
03:20 >> Thank you.
03:44 >> We spent the last few months digitizing the archives.
04:03 The team has been doubling down, like just enforcing and ensuring quality control.
04:07 And now we want to take the very first version of those archives out to everyone.
04:13 What it will help them do is most important thing, search for papers and view the papers.
04:20 What we would have done, even though it is the very, very early version, is that we've
04:23 saved them a five-hour trip to a library from five hours to five seconds.
04:44 [Applause] [Video plays]
05:13 (propeller whirring)