No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Storytelling photographs, animating anangu: how Ara Irititja - an Indigenous digital archive in central Australia - facilitates cultural reproduction
... for "preserving, organising and repatriating digital or digitized media and cultural knowledge" in accordance with cultural protocols. This platform was then licensed to a number of external organizations, including the Northern Territory Library, the State Library of Western Australia, and the CLC (Gibson, 2009;Hughes and Dallwitz, 2007;Thorner, 2010;Thorner and Dallwitz, 2015). The Northern Territory Libraries Community Stories project, in collaboration with Local Government Shires, has provided a number of communities with computers preloaded with the KMS for the purpose of uploading and managing their own cultural materials. ...
This article considers how Indigenous peoples in Central Australia share and keep digital records of events and cultural knowledge in a period of rapid technological change. To date, research has focused upon the development of digital archives and platforms that reflect Indigenous epistemologies and incorporation of protocols governing access to information. Yet there is scant research on how individuals with little access to such media share and hold—or not, as the case may be—digital cultural information. After surveying current enabling infrastructures in Central Australia, we examine how materials are held and shared when people do not have easy access to databases and the Internet. We analyze examples of practices of sharing materials to draw out issues that arise in managing storage and circulation of cultural records via Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, mobile phones, and other devices. We consider how the affordances of various platforms support, extend, and/or challenge Indigenous socialities and ontologies.
Cultural institutions have long employed a range of copying technologies to safeguard and improve access to archival materials. This paper moves discussion beyond debates about institutional copying focused on a specific technology and raises questions about the trustworthiness of copies of archival photographs. This study uses differences between a source photograph and four copies to show that copying practices shape how copies of archival photographs can be used. It is situated within the Australian legal context of native title to sharpen the interrogation of the trustworthiness of copies; and, to demonstrate one implication of how copying shapes the evidential value of photographs. It considers how a witness may respond if asked to testify that one or all of these copies are trustworthy or to outline their shortcomings as evidence. It explains that while standards for microfilm copying documents valued creating trustworthy copies, the transition to digital copying was a missed opportunity to re-establish those standards for creating digital surrogates of photographs. While questions raised have yet to be tested in legal native title procedures, this paper argues that the promise of photographs for native title outcomes will come to rest with the trustworthiness of institutionally created copies.
Ara Irititja is an enduring and multifaceted project that returns and collectively documents Anangu historical material and preserves it for the future. This paper explains why the archival project has been so effective in engaging Indigenous communities and what it is doing to ensure its longevity. In particular, the paper provides details about a new pilot project which has resulted in a software application entitled Ara Winki No. 1, ‘a whole lot of stories’, specifically for use on portable electronic devices, which delivers historical and cultural content of relevance to Anangu in local languages and works to connect the existing archive to younger generations.
This report arises from research conducted for the ARC LP (130100733), Aboriginal
young people in Victoria and Digital Storytelling. It responds to the increasing
use of digital technologies to provide access to all kinds of information that
reside in collecting institutions, which relates specifically to Indigenous people,
their culture and heritage. While individual collecting institutions have their
own policies, procedures and protocols concerning access and distribution of
digitised material, there remain many new avenues for consideration regarding
the production and control of digital content. This is particularly the case with
respect to the explosion of digital-born material (such as the digital stories made
by Aboriginal young people for the ARC LP) and how it is collected and managed
now and into the future.
Here, we discuss the management and use of digital collections in relation to the
experiences of curators, collections managers, archivists, production managers
and librarians, including members of the Aboriginal community in southeast
Australia, who currently work in collecting institutions or with digital
collections. We highlight their concerns and ambitions as we seek to understand
how the current suite of collection policies and protocols contributes to new and
progressive approaches to the care of these collections.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.