Numérisation des archives yéménites contemporaines en exil. Le défi des « papiers d'Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân »

Abstract

In 2009, the archives of Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân (1909-1996), a professor and leader of the modernization and national movement in Yemen, joined the IREMAM, a French scientific laboratory in the south of France, where they are now stored. They are waiting to be shared – as Ahmad Nu‘mân himself wished – among academics in Yemen and elsewhere in the world. This objective implies a digital provision of the archives on Internet which comes up against financial and geopolitical constraints and which imposes the elaboration of a communication strategy to support its realization, around other archives concerning Yemen. The current war in Yemen has an impact on the choices that have to be made when presenting the archives and when selecting the most urgent documents to be diffused online. The angle adopted in the communication strategy for the Ahmad Nu‘mân archives – the struggle for education in contemporary Yemen as a political tool for mobilization and state construction – strongly defines their identity, but it also gives impetus to specific networks around them, with a view to the future reconstruction of peace in Yemen.