Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects

Special Issue of the Journal of Material Culture The Journal of Material Culture is concerned with the relationship between artefacts and social relations irrespective of time and place and aims to systematically explore the linkage between the construction of social identities and the production and use of culture. Digital Subjects, […]

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Special Issue of the Journal of Material Culture: Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects

The Journal of Material Culture is concerned with the relationship between artefacts and social relations irrespective of time and place and aims to systematically explore the linkage between the construction of social identities and the production and use of culture. Special Edition edited by Amiria Salmond and Billie Lythberg Introduction […]

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Cry Rock: a short documentary about stories, memory and Nuxalk tradition

Synopsis [from the Cry Rock website] Less than fifteen Nuxalk language speakers and storytellers remain in Bella Coola, British Columbia. One of these elders is the director Banchi Hanuse’s 80-year-old grandmother. In a technologically obsessed century, it would seem easier to record Nuxalk stories for future generations, but Hanuse resists. […]

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Digital Memories: Exploring Critical Issues

This publication is available through the Inter-Disciplinary Press(many good things there – definitely worth checking out). Contents Introduction Anna Maj and Daniel Riha Part I: Theories and Concepts in Digitizing Individual and Community Memory The Trouble with Memory: Reco(r)ding the Mind in Code Laura Schuster (New) Media and Representations of the […]

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Connect a School, Connect a Community: Toolkit of Best Practices and Policy Advice

About Connect a School, Connect a Community From the connectaschool.org website: “Connecting all primary, secondary and post-secondary schools to ICTs by 2015 was one of the targets set by world leaders at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Connect a School, Connect a Community is a public-private partnership […]

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Connect a School, Connect a Community: Providing ICTs to Indigenous Peoples

This post was created to share a document called “Providing ICTs to Indigenous Peoples” which is part of a best practices toolkit created by the ITU’s Connect a School, Connect a Community initiative. But before I present the document, I’d like to step back and introduce it in context starting […]

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Digitising and handling Indigenous cultural resources in libraries, archives and museums

Abstract Indigenous cultural resources expose long memory trails which extend from understandings of origins to engagement with contemporary challenges. The tangible traces of aeons old intangible experience, they include practical and ceremonial artefacts housed in museums, sites of cultural significance, testimony and stories collected in libraries, and records of experience […]

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Aboriginal Culture in the Digital Age

Introduction The object of this paper is to bring a holistic perspective to the implications of ICT for Aboriginal ways of living, thinking and knowing. Is ICT the potent enabler for the promotion, renewal and enrichment of Aboriginal cultures as many claim? For example does ICT offer new possibilities for […]

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Digital Identity: The Construction of Virtual Selfhood in the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement

Abstract Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, […]

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Culturally Situated Design Tools

While solutions to the “digital divide” are often imagined as a one-way bridge, there are a variety of ways in which we can create a two-way bridge alternative. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) use information technology to “translate” from local knowledge and low-tech practice, to high-tech domains such as math, […]

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African Fractals, Virtual Bead Looms, and other Culturally Situated Design Tools

Culturally Situated Design Tools While solutions to the “digital divide” are often imagined as a one-way bridge, there are a variety of ways in which we can create a two-way bridge alternative. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) use information technology to “translate” from local knowledge and low-tech practice, to high-tech […]

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ICTs and Indigenous pedagogy: Techniques of resistance in chat rooms

Abstract This paper draws upon the ideas and scholarship encapsulated by a core unit at QUT in Indigenous Education. This unit was developed and written by Indigenous staff in the university’s Oodgeroo Unit and taken up for delivery for the first time in 2003. Staff in Teaching and Learning Support […]

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Information Technology and Indigenous Communities: symposium presentations

Donwload the symposium program (PDF) This 2010 AIATSIS Research Symposium was co-hosted with the Australian National University and the National Film and Sound Archive and in conjunction with the National Recording Project’s 9th Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance. About the Symposium Information Technology and Indigenous Communities (ITIC) explored the […]

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Indigenous Knowledge & the Cultural Interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge & information systems

Introduction I am aware as I begin this plenary paper that members of the library profession that are drawn to a presentation slotted under the theme, Indigenous Knowledge, are most likely interested in the systems and issues for managing information in that area. And as soon as I presume that, […]

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Digitised Indigenous Knowledge in Cultural Heritage Organisations in Australia & New Zealand

Abstract This research project investigates the digital collections from selected heritage organisations, exploring how and if the rights of Indigenous peoples are being protected by policy and protocol documents on the Web. It surveys selected heritage collections across Australia and New Zealand and explores digital collection policies at local and […]

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Sustaining Indigenous Culture: The Structure, Activities, and Needs of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums

Introduction Sovereignty, self-determination, and self-governance are primary goals of Indigenous nations worldwide—and they take important steps toward those goals by renewing control over their stories, documents, and artifacts. In the U.S., the last 30 years have been a remarkable period of reasserted and reaffirmed authority over such cultural patrimony through […]

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