The Bitter Aloe Project TRC Explorer
Tools for querying, understanding, and interpreting the testimonies and data gathered by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — the court-like body established after the end of apartheid to bear witness to gross human rights violations, grant amnesty, and offer reparation.
The Bitter Aloe Project provides a deep, data-driven examination of these records, allowing researchers to semantically query the testimonies and draw new insights from a pivotal period in South Africa's history.
SAHA-Infocomm Database
Query the 20,786 human rights violation records of Volume 7 of the TRC final report by description, victim, organization, place, and more.
Map
Plot Volume 7 records on an interactive map with multiple color-coded layers, each with its own filters, timeline, and data table.
Timeline
Browse the dated human rights violations of Volume 7 chronologically, filtered by year.
Testimony Reader
Read complete hearing transcripts — amnesty, human rights violation, and special hearings — with links back to the SAHA archive, including opening statements.
Keyword Search
Classic BM25 search across all 675,940 segments of TRC testimony.
Semantic Search
Machine-learning search over the testimonies. Queries are embedded in your browser with the same sentence-transformer model as the original app — no server involved.
Topic Explorer
Explore the 267 Top2Vec topics of the Volume 7 records: search by topic, by statement, or by keywords.
NLP Demo
See the project's custom named-entity heuristics — HRVs, organizations, police stations, events — highlighted in Volume 7 descriptions.
All analysis on this site — sentence embeddings, topic models, and named-entity annotations — was precomputed, so the site is fully static: it needs no backend and every search runs in your browser. Sources link back to the SABC-SAHA TRC archive.