【Tunisia】Archival Practices and History Writing in Tunisia, from the Print Era to the Digital Revolution

To enable historians and archivists to work under better conditions, a national research program on the history of the national movement was launched in 1981. From this program, created in collaboration with French academics, emerged in 1989 the Higher Institute of the History of the National Movement (ISHMN), which became in 2014 the Higher Institute of Contemporary History of Tunisia. One of its objectives is to “repatriate” microfilmed copies of archives held in France, particularly those of the General Residence. Some Tunisian researchers have used it in their working methods (Belhedi, 1983; Guemara, 1987). Within the ISHMN in particular, the experiment was attempted over several years by Kmar Bendana and Habib Belaïd, who reported on their attempts to build a thematic database from microfilmed archives through several issues of the semi-annual bulletin.

Simultaneously, historical research experienced a new boom since the 1990s: the number of researchers has increased significantly and approaches have diversified. Equally important are international university cooperation programs – particularly with France – which have greatly facilitated the mobility of researchers between the two shores of the Mediterranean and the creation of foreign research centers in Tunisia. These same programs gave the Tunisian research world, unlike its Algerian and Moroccan counterparts, the possibility to consult from Tunis microfilmed copies of some archival fonds held in France concerning the colonial period. Whether for automatically capturing texts, processing serial data, or quickly consulting reference directories, the use of computing has become indispensable.

During my modern history studies at the University of Tunis in the early 2000s, I was curious and sensitive to the stories of my older colleagues about the conditions of historical research in Tunisia. Despite the general tendency to praise the ease they had in consulting the fonds held at the National Archives of Tunisia (ANT) and in France (consultable at the ISHMN on microfilm), most of these historians criticize the poor equipment in digital tools at our university institutions, as at the ANT or the National Library. Colleagues of our generation still have fond memories of the lectures given between 2005 and 2010 by Jean-Pierre Dedieu, a computer scientist and modern historian specializing in Spanish studies from the University of Lyon, during his visits to the universities of Tunis and La Manouba, or even to the ANT. He always managed to dazzle us by presenting the software he had developed for electronic mapping, network analysis, or when he mentioned the luck of Latin American researchers who consulted archives held in Spain via the internet.

Meanwhile, the ANT microfilming workshop has been converted, since 2012, into a digitization workshop. It provided the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) with a digital copy of the documentation required by transitional justice, such as the archives of the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), the State Security Court, and some departments of the Ministry of the Interior. In parallel, entire series, especially those already microfilmed, have been digitized to serve historical research, such as the historical series (or H), series A and E, private archival fonds, and the entire collection of microfilms, totaling 5,500 reels. This vast project has digitized 1.5 million documents. These highly diverse fonds are currently viewable on screen in the research room at the ANT and will soon be made available online on the new portal “archives.nat.tn”.

The current Director General of the ANT, Hédi Jalleb, who began his career as a historian-researcher at the ISHMN in the late 1980s, recalls this episode with great enthusiasm:

Interview with Hédi Jallab, Director General of the ANT, “Accelerate digitization and allow online consultation”.