Information Technologies & International Development journal special issue: Selected Papers from ICTD2012

Information Technologies & International Development is an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the “other four billion” – the share of the world population whose countries are not yet widely connected to the Internet nor widely considered in the design of […]

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Knowledge Traditions of Aboriginal Australians: Questions & Answers arising in a Databasing Project

In answering some questions about the place and role of databasing in Aboriginal Australian Knowledge Traditions, the paper gives some interesting insights into the nature and workings of Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions. I consider knowledge traditions of Aboriginal Australians comparatively, by referring to a particular contemporary way of ‘doing knowledge’. The […]

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Software for Educating Aboriginal Children about Place

In this paper I imagine how a piece of software (TAMI) that is yet to be built might contribute to learning of being in-place by Aboriginal Australian children. I take up an analytic toolkit that has been emerging in science and technology studies since the 1980s, of which perhaps the […]

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Computer Databases and Aboriginal Knowledge

At a recent workshop on Aboriginal knowledge in Darwin, several women from the local Larrakia community talked about putting their elders’ knowledge onto a database. One cautious non-indigenous researcher voiced some doubts about the overenthusiastic embrace of digital technology: “Indigenous knowledge lives in country, and in doing things together in […]

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Aboriginal Knowledge on the Internet

Aboriginal people have traditional ways of understanding knowledge: what it is like, where it comes from, how people make it, how it is remembered, celebrated, and made new, how knowledge belongs to people, and how secret and sacred knowledges relate to public knowledge. At the same time, Aboriginal people in […]

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Fracturing the Skeleton of Principle: Australian Law, Aboriginal Law, and Digital Technology

Aboriginal people in Australia today are constructing extremely diverse cultures. Increasingly, these cultures involve some aspect of digital technologies – videos, DVDs, CDs, digital photos, audiofiles etc. This paper is part of a wider project looking at how emerging Aboriginal digital environments are affecting the intergenerational transmission of traditional culture. […]

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Words, Ontologies and Aboriginal databases

This paper tells of a group of people working in the increasingly digitised context of teaching and researching Aboriginal languages and cultures in a university context, and in remote Aboriginal communities. The first phase involved the development of digital archives with CDs and a website for university teaching purposes. The […]

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Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments

According to Manovich, the database and the narrative are natural enemies, each competing for the same territory of human culture. Aboriginal knowledge traditions depend upon narrative through storytelling and other shared performances. The database objectifies and commodifies distillations of such performances and absorbs them into data structures according to a […]

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Digital Tools and the Management of Australian Desert Aboriginal Knowledge

This is a story of my work as a member of a small group set up within the CRC to develop a scoping study of Indigenous knowledge, its role in research and its protection under law. The group has mixed Aboriginal and nonAboriginal constitution, and is still ongoing, now trying […]

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Boundaries and accountabilities in computer-assisted ethnobotany

Designing software alongside ethnobotanists, and Indigenous owners and practitioners of traditional knowledge brings to light a range of issues which expose some of the assumptions underlying both western ethnobotany, and software design. Collaborating over the development of software to facilitate the use of digital objects in knowledge work, issues of […]

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Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management in Northern Australia: Non-coherence as a Virtue

This paper is a story of an Australian Research Council funded project involving Aboriginal knowledge communities, resource management, and digital technologies. We argue that in this work promoting non-coherence, both epistemic and ontic, is a virtue. In our presentation we will use our project website http://www.cdu.edu.au/centres/ik/ to show how non-coherence […]

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Designing Digital Knowledge Management Tools with Aboriginal Australians

The paper describes an approach to digital design grounded in processes of Indigenous collective memory making. We claim the research should be understood as performative knowledge making, and accounting it should also be performative. Accordingly we present four texts generated in the course of our research as an exhibit. They […]

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