Sharing and storing digital cultural records in Central Australian Indigenous communities
Access status:
Open Access
Type
PreprintAbstract
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 ...
See moreThis 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.
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See moreThis 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.
See less
Date
2021Publisher
New Media and SocietyFunding information
ARC LP140100806Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0Faculty/School
Sydney Conservatorium of MusicDepartment, Discipline or Centre
Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)Citation
Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella, Linda Barwick, and Jennifer Green. “Sharing and Storing Digital Cultural Records in Central Australia.” New Media & Society 23, no. 4 (2021): 692–714. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954201.Share