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.

This essay focuses on human rights and their contemporary epistemological forms in the digital age. Beginning with the assumption—informed by the work of Michael Ignatieff (2001), Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (2004), Anthony Langlois (2005) and Joseph Slaughter (2006)—that human rights discourses demand a narrative, the paper explores knowledge work in human rights. A human rights discourse, I believe, is initiated when a `claims narrative' is articulated by victims and those whose human rights have been violated. Such claims narratives and their political poetics constitutes the subject of this essay. My illustrative `text' here is Witness (www.witness.org), a website devoted to the recording and archiving of human rights violations from around the world. The Witness archive is constructed almost entirely through uploads from individuals who have seen and recorded some such violation. It is not an organized body in the sense of a `company', but nevertheless is an instance of an `incorporated' set of people, data and processes because it loans camcorders to groups who lack access to digital technologies. Its stated aim is: `WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations'. It was founded in 1992—a year after the Rodney King beating—by musician Peter Gabriel and (ahem!) Reebok Human Rights Foundation as a part of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. It has acknowledged donations from a host of bodies and organizations. The videos uploaded are used (in Witness' own words):

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Digital Economies, Global Archivization, Ethical Engagement, Contemporary Epistemological Forms, Political Poetics, Globalization, Digitization Projects, Global Civil Society, Informational Economy, Corporate Reportage, Global Information Society.