Launch of the Digital Archive of Donetsk Oblast Entry Steles
Ave Team is launching Ave Digital Archive — a website that documents the cultural heritage of Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Belarusians, and related communities. It accompanies Ave Digital Museum and preserves the materials used in creating its exhibitions. The first archive is a collection of photos and videos documenting the condition of the steles at the entrance to Donetsk Oblast. They will help us to reconstruct the inscriptions and stickers left by soldiers, volunteers, and residents of the oblast.
Most of the materials were collected by a group of volunteers who came together in a dedicated Telegram group. Using these materials, we built a timeline in FigJam, which allowed us to compare various details on the stele and establish the approximate date on which the collected materials were captured. Social media and news outlets also served as sources — for example, reports by Suspilne News or images provided by the Service for Restoration and Development of Infrastructure in Donetsk Oblast.
The first and main stage of work on the archive was dating the media. This was complicated by the fact that a Telegram chat is not a very convenient platform for working with media: photos and videos of the stele in the "Photos," "Videos," and "Files" tabs were mixed with digitized inscriptions, volunteer reports, and other images sent by users. Duplicates also frequently appeared across the different tabs (files, images, videos, links), slowing the work down. It became hard to find one's way among similar photos after short breaks, let alone after several days off, since separating processed materials from the rest was nearly impossible.
At first, dating was done simply by writing the date into the file name and then sorting the files into "exact dates" and "undated" folders. Some photos had a visible timestamp or available metadata, and some were taken from dated posts or news articles, but most photos required the archive's curator to determine the date by comparing the visible inscriptions and stickers with dated materials.
Over time, dating photos became a habit, and a skill developed for distinguishing time periods by small details such as specific stickers, inscriptions, and the like. Google Drive allows such features to be noted directly on the image by circling the element and adding a comment. Where clear information was lacking, some photos were dated with a range between two known dates.
We often had to examine various contextual details in the photo itself:
- Is it similar to others, which would place it closer to them in time? Sometimes people sent many media files without any description, so determining whether they were taken on the same day required comparison — of the sky in the background, for example.
- Is there any graffiti with clear dates?
- Are there any indications of a particular time period (say, a small Christmas tree during the New Year and Christmas holidays, or a link to well-known events such as Volodymyr Zelenskiy's visit, the stele being covered with netting, and so on)?
Later, we launched our own platform with a convenient interface tailored to the needs of the project. Each photo or video was tagged with its date and information about the visible parts of the image divided into equal squares, the visible letters of the inscription, and other elements — all to enable convenient indexing for the project's volunteers.
The website also hosts a separate archive of the Kramatorsk stele for the few photos found in the media, but the Pokrovsk stele remained the main focus.
After removing duplicates, 274 media items were collected. These are photos and videos featuring the stele at different times and from different angles, taken by both professional photojournalists and amateurs. They record the various inscriptions, stickers, sheets of paper, flags, and everything else that testifies to the monument's place in the history of Donetsk Oblast and Ukraine.