Video footage of all General Synods going back to 1988 and documentaries of all 11 Sacred Circles has now been digitized—converted from videotape into a format that can be processed by computers—and will soon be fully indexed in a free online archive that a leading scholar calls useful not just for church historians, but for all interested Anglicans.
Anglican Video—a ministry of General Synod that produces video resources, comprising senior producer Lisa Barry and project manager Shane Roberts—is leading the digitization project. Barry outlined the project in a Nov. 8 presentation to Council of General Synod (CoGS). Former church librarian Karen Evans, brought on board to identify and transcribe all the videos, called the digitization project “an incredible gift to historians” who now have access to church history not just on the printed page, but as Anglicans experienced it at the time.
Alan Hayes, professor emeritus of church history at Wycliffe College and member at large of the Canadian Church Historical Society, said the digitized videos—which are available online at archives.anglican.ca, complete with identifiers and official transcriptions—would assist historians in their work.
“I think it’s really useful,” Hayes told the Anglican Journal. “It’s not just for professional church historians. I can imagine lots of Anglicans being interested in that to look things up.”
Aside from preserving old video recordings and making them more accessible to researchers, digitization—converting them into data files—can prevent loss of quality in future migrations (though poor digitizing, such as the use of data compression to save space, can result in quality loss). Digitization also makes it easier to copy videos and allows them to be transferred electronically, so that they no longer need to be physically mailed.
The impetus for the digitization came in 2016, when a parish contacted Anglican Video looking for footage of the 1993 apology by then-primate Archbishop Michael Peers for the Anglican Church of Canada’s role in residential schools.
“That piece of video has been viewed literally thousands of times and we’ve had literally thousands of requests for it,” Barry said. When Anglican Video staff grabbed the video from their library to make a copy for the parish, they were aghast at the level of deterioration they observed on the tape.
“That was scary for us,” Barry recalled. “We realised that all of our 30-plus years of recorded footage, the tapes had started to deteriorate.” Anglican Video began checking all their tapes. While they had backed up footage of Peers’ apology and other important clips, Barry said, they realized they needed to find a long-term solution.
Through conversations with General Synod archivist Laurel Parson, they developed a plan to preserve their footage through digitization. The Anglican Church of Canada supports the project through a Ministry Investment Fund grant. Determining that they could not digitize their entire library, they chose to focus on digitizing each General Synod they had filmed, as well as their documentaries of each Sacred Circle.
Anglican Video has now reached both of these goals, digitizing every General Synod and every Sacred Circle documentary. However, the question arose as to how people could access the digitized videos and find what they were looking for.
Enter Karen Evans, who joined the project and began watching, naming and indexing all digitized footage. As of Nov. 8, Evans had indexed all but four General Synods, totalling 325 hours of footage; and all Sacred Circle documentaries, totalling nearly 14 hours.
A key objective, Evans told CoGS, is making sure that all material is accessible in a user-friendly way online. To this end, she said, “We want to create a text record that is complete, accurate and free of editing for interpretation.” Deeming summaries for each speaker or presentation insufficient, Anglican Video decided it was necessary to create authoritative verbatim transcripts of everything said in the digitized videos.
To aid in this process, they used the AI transcription software Simon Says, which includes time codes for new speakers; then carefully went through the transcripts to correct any errors. While transcription takes longer than producing summaries, Evans said, it is ultimately more efficient, since researchers who want to know exactly what is said in videos would end up producing their own transcripts.
“We wanted to produce a neutral record,” she said, noting that every researcher brings their own perspective or bias which might have coloured their impression of summaries.
“Every time you produce a summary, you’re making judgements,” Evans said. “You’re saying this is what’s important and perhaps even more importantly, what isn’t. We have removed that. What you have is a complete unadulterated record.”
The resource of video with transcriptions, Evans said, “continually illustrates how our path informs our present—with challenges, but also with hope and inspiration.”
Hayes says having access to indexed digital video footage from these General Synods and Sacred Circles will allow historians and others to see the dynamics of discussions over contested issues for themselves.
Researchers’ ability to study past synods has fluctuated over the history of the church, he says. In the 19th century, weekly Anglican church newspapers would report on provincial synods, and later General Synod, with speaker-by-speaker summaries of what was said.
By the 20th century, reports were getting briefer with less information, as Hayes says he found in writing a book on the history of the Anglican Church of Canada. By the 1920s and 1930s, he says, “some important decisions are being made where you’re relying on, really, skeleton notes in the minutes about who moved something and where it was reviewed.”
Even when the church press, by then the Canadian Churchman—later the Anglican Journal—provided more information, Hayes says, “you didn’t have a sense of all the different points of view that were being expressed and the passions that you could say were expressed. That’s been true ever since.”
Watching video and reading transcripts of every General Synod as well as Sacred Circle documentaries, he says, “is a great way to know who’s speaking and what they’re speaking about, what the issues are considered to be, what the pros and cons are, how much passion is going into it and how divided [opinion] is.”
Hayes says making the videos freely available online with official transcripts also shows the commitment of the Anglican Church of Canada to transparency—providing a way “to let people know that this is not stuff that happens in a corner behind closed doors secretly… They can watch it years later and know exactly what happened. I think that’s just good for the reputation of the church—to be transparent about decision-making.”
