Welcome, everybody.
Kimberly Christen-Withey is an Associate Professor and Associate Director
of the Digital Technology Cultural Program, in the Department of English
and Director of Digital Projects
at the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies
at Washington State University.
Her work explores the intersections of cultural heritage,
traditional knowledge, intellectual property rights,
the ethics of openness,
and the use of digital technologies in and by indigenous communities globally.
She's worked in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia
over the last decade with the Warumungu community members on a range of projects
including a book, an interactive website, and a community archive.
Her collaborations with the Warumungu focused on alliance-making
in cross cultural projects.
Her book Aboriginal Business: Alliances in a Remote Australian Town
was published in 2009 by The School of Advanced Research
as part of their global indigenous politic series.
Currently, she is working on several digital humanities projects
that explore the ethical and practical issues of openness and access,
in relation to indigenous cultural protocols and digital archives.
These are to me crucial issues that the bureau faces
and I'm so happy to welcome Kim here.
(Kimberly Christen-Withey) Thank you.
I don't know if we want to keep the lights on, or off, or how you want to do it?
You just let me know how the slides look, but.
Oh, there you go!
Thank you to Neil and Trevor and everyone for inviting me here today.
I have to confess that I have-- I present and speak in a lot of places,
never in what appears to be a garage.
(laughter) But this is awesome.
Or, with a green screen behind me
so I'm feeling very sort of Hollywood here, this is great.
We're in the midst of, we don't have a physical space
for what will eventually be something like a digital humanities center.
We don't even know what the name of it's going to be at WSU yet,
so I'm scoping out all the places I go and this is just a fantastic space
that you all have created here, so it is indeed,
as Neil sort of foreshadowed, an exciting time to be here.
It's an exciting time to be thinking about the digital humanities in general.
And more specifically, really, I think about how we can all shape
what the trajectory of this still-emergent field.
It's still pretty new, we're still defining the contours.
There's a lot to love about digital humanities.
It's exciting to be or at least sort of imagine oneself on the cutting edge
of humanistic scholarship. You know, especially in universities
we often in the Humanities get pushed to the bottom rungs and the scientists
are the ones doing the creative and cutting-edge things.
So, digital humanities brings all that.
And digital humanities of course is rooted in fields dedicated to things
like textual analysis, historical examination.
And the present moment is filled with DH practitioners extending these
modes of inquiry to create visualizations with big data, right?
It's the thing, hot topic right now.
Wrangling, searching, and compiling sets of data for interpretation and analysis.
There's also a lot of alternative mapping projects that're really exciting,
that bring together literature, history, and geography to raise new questions
about the importance of places, nations, and cities
in the circulation of knowledge.
And of course, sort of one of the bedrocks, digital archives.
One of the things that digital humanities started out doing and does really well
that provide new ways of exploring, linking, annotating, and curating content
across and between fields of study.
And while we're doing this, I'll use the "we" since we're all here today
as digital humanities practitioners. We're not only creating things,
we're also defining a field that's interdisciplinary by it's nature.
And we're asking ourselves, what sets us apart?
What is digital humanities or what are?
And I'm going to move between the two today.
I don't like to stick in any one place.
So, I'm not going to go down that road. It's a persistent question though.
Who are we?
Who and what counts among us,
and how does that matter to our scholarship?
Whether it be how we publish, where we publish,
the theories we extend to our data sets and by what means we get tenure.
There's a lot of talk and debate,
will this digital humanities project count, to get tenure?
I have tenure so I have to no longer answer that question,
but it's a persistent question
and it's one that we're all grappling with.
And this kind of self reflection is necessary for any field.
It inspires growth.
It provides a fertile ground for collaboration, I think.
It can also often be daunting,
this type of self reflection.
And it can provoke some anxiety.
And in my very quick and very non-scientific sample
of quotes pulled from recent publications by thoughtful digital humanities folks,
looking to intervene, make a difference,
and engage a diverse audience of scholars and practitioners.
I see that things are critical.
They're pivotal. We need justification.
There's anxiety and uncertainty here.
Just reading these quotes makes you a little nervous,
just imagine reading all the articles that led to these.
This is an active debate and it can sometimes be tiring,
but it's also positive.
One answer to this anxiety about definitions and the state of the field
has been the creation of manifestos,
that seek to define a core set of ideals.
Ok, if we're going to be the digital humanities,
we have to have a core set of ideals.
We may not have to have a cannon, but we have to have something we stand by
and manifestos are a good way of doing that, of staking your claim.
The digital humanities 2.0 manifesto, created by a group of scholars at UCLA,
suggest that the digital humanities bring together,
"An array of convergent practices that explore a universe,"
"in which print is no longer the exclusive or normative medium,"
"in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated,"
and, in which, "digital tools, techniques, and media"
"have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge."
So there's a lot going on there, print has been displaced.
We have these new production and dissemination tools,
and theories, and methods behind them,
but they go on to define the borders of this universe.
The contours, the how we're going to make ourselves different.
Arguing that the digital is the realm of "the open source open resources."
"Anything that attempts to close this space"
"should be recognized for what it is..."
"...the enemy."
Their words. (laughter)
I have two boys, so this is my enemy in my house.
(laughter) You may have other ones.
Certainly, as a manifesto, some of this is inflated prose, right?
Manifestos by their nature are meant to inspire action.
They want to mobilize people around something that we need to stand for.
And in American culture, there's no better way to do that
than to have an enemy, an us and a them,
so we know where we are.
So, the us knows the them
and we can mobilize resources around that.
So part of this seemingly vigilant focus on open access, I think,
comes from a general and often unreflected love affair with the ideal of openness.
The ideal of openness and not necessarily
a critical apprisal of the cultural or historical basis of openness.
So, the ideal of openness has deep roots
in liberal scholarship, where the digital humanities is growing from.
And of course, progressive notions of academic freedom and research.
So this is not necessarily a negative form or connotation and it's not necessary
to say that open access should be something we strive for in certain cases.
But while we're loving openness so much, I think we have forgotten that open
is only one form of sharing.
There are in fact many modes of sharing,
only one of which is complete openness.
And we already practice these modalities
of sharing in our everyday lives, online and offline.
Long before Facebook ever gave us the choice, people had varied
social and cultural protocols to filter how and with whom we shared information.
Sharing and circulating knowledge
is an integral part of the digital humanities,
and Todd Presner has suggested that there have been two waves, thus far,
of digital humanities scholarship.
First, large scale digitization projects and technical infrastructure projects.
These focus mainly on text
and making them open and accessible to a general public.
So, we have a library, let's open up some of these collections.
Let's digitize them, let's get them online.
Let's create the infrastructure to do that.
He suggests that was the first wave of digital humanities scholarship.
With what he calls DH 2.0, he suggests a move to producing,
curating, and interacting with materials,
particularly those that are born digital.
So these overlap and I don't think that he would suggest,
and I'm not suggesting that either of these waves are complete.
They're still both going on. They crash into each other.
I don't want to suggest another wave here.
Instead, what I'd like to suggest and what I'd like to throw out
is more of a beacon,
somewhere in the distance as these waves are crashing.
A reminder that as the waves are going on,
as we mingle, as we digitize, as we create,
as we curate, as we archive,
that we also, and at the same time,
unpack the underlying assumptions
about this gaze that we are producing.
Digital humanities project are producing
a way of seeing and being seen
and the act of looking as a process of knowledge acquisition.
We see it.
We get the knowledge from it, right?
These are quite literally grounded in a new visual field
that we're all taking part of and creating.
In their recent book,
Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture,
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue that there is
"an economy of looking, whether tacit or explicit,
"in all cultural practices."
So practices of looking then, are deeply embedded
in our own cultural logics and our social structures,
and as such, I want to suggest today that these are deeply ethical acts
and they're worthy of our attention because so.
Our practices of looking tell us more about how we understand the world
than what we're seeing.
We need to examine how technology,
particularly the technological tools that we're creating and culture,
not only our own culture, the various cultures interact.
And more importantly, how these modes and cultural practices can inform
our uses of technology to create various types and tools for looking.
One way of doing this, not the only way,
but one way of doing this is moving away from this center of digital humanities
that Presner and other have defined and that I started out with.
That's the center, that's the core of digital humanities to date.
If we move off to the margins, where subaltern, post-colonial,
and indigenous projects are asking us to see and look differently,
we might be able to integrate those back into the center.
So, in 2002 after seven years of working with the Warumungu Aboriginal community
in Australia's Central Desert, together we embarked on a collaboration
to create a digital archive
based on their own cultural protocols for viewing,
circulating, and creating knowledge,
both tangible and intangible.
This all started when the gentleman in the middle here, Michael Jampin Jones
and I and a group of other people went to the National Archives.
So Tennant Creek, if you imagine Australia,
Tennant Creek is almost exactly dead center.
It's 500 kilometers north of Alice Springs
and 1,000 kilometers south of Darwin.
So it's almost right in the middle of the desert.
So we drove to Darwin to look at the National Archives
and we looked at physical collections and then we sat and looked
at their database of things that they had digitized.
As I sat with Jampin, we saw images of deceased relatives.
We saw pictures of sacred sites and initiation ceremonies
that should not be seen by a public audience.
Jampin and others were distressed
at this sort of public presentation of their cultural protocols.
The Australian archives, like many worldwide in the 1990's,
embraced the possibility of digital technologies
to make their collections open to the public.
Without examining the colonial collecting logic that populated the public domain.
So not only in Australia but in settler nations around the world,
it takes some historical amnesia for us all to forget that the public domain
has never been a welcoming space for indigenous peoples,
whose cultural materials found their way into public and private collections
by dubious and often violent means.
This was certainly true for the Warumungu
and the collections we saw at the National Museums throughout Australia
as well as in their online databases.
So, a lot of the museums throughout Australia have heralded this call
and they are bringing communities in to look at the collections
and if there are items that they don't want to be seen,
oftentimes now, there has been a change over the last 10 to 15, 20 years
where museums will oftentimes not display items if communities don't want them to
and you will see, and this is where Australia is a little more the forefront
than the United States, you will see warnings on collections,
sometimes online but also offline,
that there's material in here that you may not want to see.
So the collection's not necessarily taken down but there are warnings.
It's a step.
For the Warumungu community, cultural materials and knowledge
are shared within a set of cultural protocols,
driven by their relationships to places.
Very specific places on the landscape.
Where they were born, where they were conceived,
where their parents lived, etc.
And their ancestors, human and non-human,
and kin, the contemporary Warumungu people.
These variables determine multiple types
of information circulation.
So they combine and move.
In the Warumungu context, there's this continuum between open and closed.
There's rarely anything that's just completely open,
or anything that's completely closed and shut off.
There are several factors that go into actually defining this continuum.
There's death, when people die often for various amounts of times,
pictures, images, songs that they sung,
everything will be taken down but eventually it will come back.
Ritual affiliations, so the knowledge that you have of particular rituals.
Country, like I said, the physical places on the landscape.
Your kin groups and gender is a big influence
in the way that information circulates.
There's always men's business and women's business.
Now, this isn't a type of patriarchy.
This isn't a form of oppression, in fact, it's a complementary system.
Men's business and women's business work together.
They don't necessarily know exactly what the other is doing,
but in order to ensure the growth and continuation of the community
and of knowledge, they both have to do their business.
It's interesting and that's where the title of my book comes from
that they chose the word in English, "business,"
to talk about their ritual practices
because that's what's important.
Right? That is what keeps things going.
So, it's an interesting choice in English to use that word.
So for example, there may be some songs that are only accessible
and to be sung by women from a certain kin group,
at a certain place.
Or there might be a water hole that is cared for by a certain kin group
at certain times and if someone dies
you don't sing their songs at that water hole
for a certain amount of time.
And so on, and so on.
The point is that there are multiple social and cultural factors
that go into the diffusion and creation of knowledge.
So over several years, we worked to take this sort of offline system
and make it flexible enough to accommodate any set of cultural needs.
Rather than working from a Western paradigm
that information wants to be free and open to all,
what indigenous communities around the world remind us is that, in fact,
information and knowledge is always grounded.
It's rooted to local places and people even as it travels and moves.
When it travels, it gathers stories, narratives, histories.
It joins people together as they seek to make their worlds more meaningful.
How people define these travels are driven by their cultural values.
For the Warumungu and other indigenous people,
this is based on not seeing, or partially seeing,
or seeing differently.
This is one of my favorite types of images.
The first time I saw this was at Uluru in the Central Desert in Australia
at the Visitor's Center.
The Aboriginal population there had gone into the Visitor's Center
and taken cardboard and duct tape and taped over a bunch of images
of an elder who had passed away.
So you have this very stark example
of this is our cultural practice.
You shouldn't be looking at this.
Right? And so it was the first time I saw that and I'm thinking,
"Wow, it's very material practice for us to actually jolt you out of that."
When you go to a visitor's center, a learning center,
you want to go there and learn about the other people, right?
And here we were learning about a viewing practice.
So not seeing seems counter-intuitive,
not only to the work of the humanities, but libraries, archivists,
because we rely so deeply on texts and circulating images
and making them open for everybody.
But if we start here, we may find new ways of defining the digital humanities.
So in 2005, based on these practices and my work with the Warumugu,
several Warumungu community members and I worked with the Vectors team
out of USC, lead by Tara McPherson,
who's wonderful, who many of you probably know.
And we created the Digital Dynamics of Cross Cultures Online Space,
as part of the, I think it was the second or third issue of Vectors
when it came out, way back in 2005.
Our goal was to use the medium itself to disrupt the message.
So the default viewing protocols online and underpinning many DH projects
is search and you will find, right?
Search has become this framework for the ecology of information sharing
on the internet.
Like colonial frameworks of searching,
the expectation of online search is that
you will find what you're looking for
and you can use it and take it for your own purposes.
Right?
It's that same sort of paradigm.
This is what our students do, this is what I do.
I got this on there, right? I search. Google.
This is what comes up in their image archive.
So our Vector site is meant to challenge this mode of knowledge collection
and it's attempt at ethical assumptions.
So when a viewer begins, they begin in a place.
So these are representations,
and all of the artwork was done by Warumungu artists,
so each of the circles is a place.
And when they first did this, we did not have them in correct
geographical relationship to each other.
They said, "No, no, no. We don't want people to be able to know"
"exactly what the place looks like"
"but they always have to be in place."
So they still have to be at the proper coordinates.
And one of the things Jampin reminded me was that all knowledge is placed
and all places have knowledge.
So you can't know without being there.
So, we start in place and a viewer starts there.
And then, you click on a place and these are your tracks.
The site will chart your tracks as you move throughout the place.
You will get a textual introduction overview of the place.
So this place is Manga-Manda. It's an old Christian mission
where children were taken, a stolen generation.
Some of you may have heard they were taken away from their families
not too far from Tennant Creek,
taken to this mission to learn European skills.
So you'll get a little bit of information there
and then you can click on the nodes off to the right.
And then you'll get some more specific information about what happened there.
You might learn something about the ceremonies
and what we're trying to do here is start you down the path,
this sort of expectation of an online site
is that you're going to be learning something, right?
You're going to be learning something about Warumungu culture,
that's what you're here for.
And so we start to fulfill that expectation.
Except that we don't.
So as viewers continue to maneuver throughout the site, you're stopped.
A photo may be partially covered because the person in the picture
has recently passed away.
Or you might be watching a video,
(woman speaking on video clip)
and it'll stop.
Or you might be listening to a song,
(traditional chanting audio clip)
and it'll fade in and out, depending on the content.
(chanting audio clip begins again)
We purposely did not translate any of the videos, or songs,
or anything and we got this sort of feedback from some anthropologists
when the first site came out,
but we can't understand what they're saying.
And I tried to explain, well because it's not really about what they're saying.
We're actually trying to teach you about
your own learning practices and cultural protocols.
And this was an anthropologist
and he's like, "But I can't hear what they're saying!"
(laughing) So we had a long debate on an anthropology blog about that.
But the site is designed in such a way, there's an algorithm
that a random sampling of material
will always come up with one of nine protocols.
And the protocols were chosen by the Warumungu community,
related to circulation and access.
So in each case though when a viewer is stopped,
we don't want to just stop them and have them be frustrated.
We do want to frustrate them for a moment
but then you'll go to or learn about this protocol site.
And you'll get a short explanation.
So, why is it that I can't see this?
Well, in some cases, custodians for country are gendered
and so it goes on to define that and what that means.
And then the Warumungu artist that we worked with also created
short animations for several of the protocols.
So you'll get a touch tool explanation or you'll watch a short animation
about the protocol.
So you're starting to see, ok, it's not that the site isn't working,
it's not that I should be learning this and I'm learning that,
the hope was that as users maneuver throughout the site,
they'll grapple with their own biases
about information freedom and knowledge sharing online.
Through a set of alternative looking practices.
Where not looking, or averting your gaze
or being denied access is a type of ethical behavior.
It's not a repercussion,
it's not a penalty,
it's not an error.
It's a different type of looking behavior.
So by presenting all of this information
throughout a set of Warumungu cultural protocols.
The site's internal logic, challenges many of the presumptions
about knowledge acquisition and looking that we all hold.
And this project in 2005 was the catalyst for the creation of Murkutu CMS.
So Murkutu due is a free and open source solution
for managing and sharing digital heritage,
built with and for indigenous communities worldwide.
Now Murkutu literally means in Waramungu "dilly bag."
So as we were creating the first iteration of Murkutu,
which was just for those collections that we got back from the National Museums
that we went to and from.
We got back collections from missionaries, school teachers,
other people who have worked in Tennant Creek.
The first iteration was just going to be a community archive.
It was browser-based, it was standalone,
it wasn't online, it was just for the community.
And when they were naming it,
Jampin said that he wanted to name it Murkutu.
And I had never heard the word before
and I worked in the community for over 10 years and he said
the dilly bag was a safe keeping place.
Elders kept sacred items in the dilly bag
and as younger generations, you had to approach the elder
to find out about that knowledge and about those items,
so about your cultural heritage.
However, it was also incumbent on the elder
to open those up and share that,
otherwise, the knowledge would die.
And that was his word in English, the knowledge would die.
So it was actually about creating a dialogue and reciprocation,
sharing cultural knowledge, not shutting it off or closing it down
but sharing it properly is how Jampin put it.
So the dilly bag we thought is a good metaphor
for the way that Murkutu functions.
Murkutu centers around protocols.
These are the heart and soul of Murkutu.
They allow any community, however defined,
to determine how materials are shared through fine brain levels of access.
So that slide I put up with the ritual, gender,
for the Warumungu, those would be the protocols that they define
within their instance of Murkutu.
We're working with the Zuni libraries, they use clans.
All the groups, and that was the thing.
One of the things we grappled with early on.
We couldn't just use a cookie cutter set of protocols.
Oh everybody'll have gender, no!
So it had to be flexible enough that any community can define whatever
and that they're flexible enough to change.
So it was interesting with the Warumungu community
at first that deceased protocol
was very strict
and over the last five or six years, we've seen it so thumbnails are ok.
But bigger versions aren't.
So, right? Because people change.
And our protocols is for viewing and circulating knowledge change
and so, as a database, Murkutu also had to be that flexible to change.
But within the content management system,
I can add any protocol to any single item
or in a collection and with one click
that protocol will be added across the field.
So within Murkutu this happens in a really simple interface.
And you choose "add your cultural protocol"
and then you add your protocol over here,
define it however you want, so this is a youth protocol.
And then there's three sharing protocols
that allow you to create those levels of access.
So there’s s community level, there's what we call community strict,
which is something where you'd have to be a woman from that country, right?
And in that kin group, you have to have all three of those protocols met,
to see something.
Whereas, if it's just a community protocol,
you can be any of those and you will see it.
So the protocols overlap and create these sort of Venn diagrams.
But one of the other things that I worked with the designers on
and the folks that were architecting this
was, I gave them a two-click mantra when we started, which is
if anything takes longer than two clicks,
we're going to lose people.
We're dealing not only with literacy issues,
but digital literacy issues as well.
So this is a matter of design and functionality, too.
Who's your audience? Who's the user base?
What do they need?
We knew there was a need. We also couldn't create something
that people wouldn't be able to sit down and use.
And interestingly, in the communities that I work in,
both in the Pacific northwest and in Australia,
I don't ever see people sitting at the archive,
at the computer, by themselves.
It's always in groups, whereas,
you know, you think of the archives, you go in and
(whispering) you're quiet, you sit and you just do your own thing.
No! It's about sharing stories and telling what's happening
and looking at these things.
So, in this case, our philosophy has always been to make
the technology bend to the culture, as opposed to the other way around.
Where generally we say, "Ok, well, we know that's your cultural value"
"but the technology will only do this."
That's what started us down his road.
I was a graduate student in 2002 and I said, "Oh I'm sure we can just buy"
"some software to do this."
Ok 14, you know, 12 years later!
Now, we're creating software. I mean, I was a cultural anthropologist,
I didn't write a line of code. That's not me.
But the cultural ideal behind it, and I worked with great technologists
who understand that this idea, bending the technology to make it work
so that people don't have to relinquish
their cultural values for this sort of open and shut model that we have.
So for me, it's not necessarily about building technology, but building trust.
And of course there has to be trust in the technology.
It's a big thing and I've seen this with the work that I do
in the Pacific northwest with the tribes when I started working at WSU,
we used Murkutu to create something called
the Plateau People's Web Portal.
And at the first couple meetings with the tribal representatives,
they said that, "And are you going to be here, Kim?"
I was like (gasp).
I mean it was really about, and nine years later, I'm still there
but it took several years just to establish
that we could all work together,
that we're not going to take your stuff and leave.
They've been burned by researchers and universities before.
And so it really is, so the technology should inspire that trust.
So the protocols really have to work and people have to see them working.
So our Murkutu team works directly with groups to encourage
these types of relationships.
We worked with the Smithsonian,
we've worked with other collecting institutions to bring these materials
back to communities and not just hand them back on a hard drive,
but actually have a relationship together.
In December, we launched MIRA,
which is a mammoth example of what can be done with Mukurtu.
MIRA is a collaboration between Mukurtu,
the Center for Digital Archeology at Berkeley,
and the Canning Stock Route Project team in Australia.
MIRA has over 40,000 digital heritage objects,
providing the most comprehensive database for the artwork, stories, and histories
of the Aboriginal people who live on the Canning Stock Route,
which is the major colonial artery
that cuts across the Australian continent
and affected hundreds of Aboriginal communities, disrupted their lives,
disrupted their cultures and their languages.
MIRA uses Murkutu's customized fields
to provide a rich and detailed set of linked content in what we call
in Murkutu digital heritage items.
And you can link them together to create digital heritage stories,
including video narratives by artists in their country,
individual pages for artists and contributors,
richly and multiply-narrated stories with text, audio, and video.
And all of these were curated by hundreds of Aboriginal community members.
They're the experts. That's the difference here.
These are curated by the Aboriginal members themselves,
in different languages and with different sets of protocols
across these images.
So one community happened to have some protocols,
another will have another set of protocols.
It pushed us to our limits
and now within Murkutu, every field can have a protocol attached to it.
So you may be ok with someone seeing this painting,
you may not want them to hear the song or see the map.
So you can still get to this page but those fields will be hidden.
So now our protocols are every single field,
every point of metadata can have its individual protocol.
That's a new feature in Murkutu, stemming from the MIRA project
and we're really happy about that.
And because this project really took us out
and worked with hundreds of Aboriginal communities,
we started looking at this on the go recording in curation.
So we launched Murkutu Mobile in October 2012 for iphones.
We just got an NEH grant and we will soon be also
releasing it on Android as well.
But this allows users to instantly upload content to Murkutu sites,
keeping their protocols embedded at that level.
So they're never without their protocols.
They can also add their stories. They can talk into it.
They can do an oral history interview right there in the field
and link it to the photo of the person,
geo locate it, and upload all of that.
If they're offline, once they get back online, they can sync it.
And it'll go right into their instance of Murkutu.
All of this, in fact, all of the development of features of Murkutu
happens around what we call community agile software development.
So the notion of agile software development is already there, right?
We add the community to it, so every feature,
every upgrade of Murkutu comes from what the community wants.
They can vote things up or down.
So, this type of mobile was something everywhere we went.
We did some workshops across New Zealand
and everywhere we went people said, "What about mobile? What about mobile?"
And the reason why is kids.
They want to get their kids involved
in creating and sharing heritage and not just uploading it to Facebook.
They want this stuff to remain within their communities;
they might also be on Facebook but they want stuff in the communities.
So I think that projects like Murkurtu can help us define the present future
of the digital humanities as a field, whereas one of my mentors,
Donna Haraway, reminds us,
"We become answerable, for what we learn how to see."
As we move forward, carving out this field
and creating it's contours, we should remind ourselves
to hold multiple, challenging, and often times conflicting perspectives
about knowledge and it's value for the many publics that we engage with.
Aboriginal practices of masking,
deleting, defaming images, objects, and artifacts
disrupts this act of looking
and the privileging of seeing as a precursor to knowledge acquisition
that we hold in this Western tradition.
They help us see that communities have different ways of knowing
and that culturally responsive technology can be leveraged to achieve their goals,
without giving up what makes them different.
Collaborations between scholars and the many communities we move between
can, and should, keep these tensions in place; let's not give them up.
As we seek to create a productive center for the digital humanities,
where we think differently
about this seemingly benign act of looking,
it's one thing to call attention to difference,
it's another to alter our visual practices,
challenge archival curation practices,
and question modes of access.
Moving forward, I think digital humanities scholars can be at the forefront.
We can play a role in defining a new economy of looking,
where localized project scales, divergent ethical systems,
varied access models, and collaborative tool-making
come to the center and, therefore, enliven
and expand the digital humanities for all of us.
Thank you.
(applause)
So I know that was a lot.
(laughter)