This unusual collection is based on the eight-hundred-and-four illustrations from the two-volume book From memory to marble: The historical frieze of the Voortrekker Monument, co-authored by Elizabeth Rankin and Rolf Schneider (Cape Town and Berlin: African Minds and De Gruyter, 2020). It includes not only the Monument and the frieze but also many related documents and artworks. The corpus aims to promote studies of controversial monuments, with a focus on visual interpretation.

The authors thank Grant Parker who conceived the idea of turning our book’s visual narratives into an online resource. We are grateful to Christiaan Bronkhorst and Dillon Gisch, who helped us at an early stage to understand the challenges of a digital visual archive and the dynamics of metadata, and who set up the initial repository of data. And we are grateful to Russell Scott who created so many of the photographs that populate the database. But our greatest debt is to Anja Krieger, a true partner in this project. It was she who created the online database itself, not only with outstanding technical skill, but with an exceptional understanding of the topic. She created insightful groupings and layouts to facilitate access to the database in more diverse ways that we could have imagined. We are also grateful for the support we received from Cathy Aster and Arcadia Falcone at Stanford Digital Repository and Stanford Libraries and Alex Keener at Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, who made the digitizing process possible.

Numerous archives, museums, research institutions and universities in South Africa, Europe, New Zealand and the USA sponsored different aspects of From Memory to Marble, listed in Acknowledgements pp. xi-xiii.