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Tuesday, December 08, 2009
An update
Guys, I'm still here. It's true. Except now instead of spending my time on the internet crying about how hard it is to write 10 pages about changing notions of culture and tradition, I'm flailing around in a stack of articles about the galvanic scale, grades of plywood, and relative humidity levels. Suffering in silence is the new blogging for no reason, I guess.
(I'm also writing a "major research paper" for the entirety of this school year. It's not a thesis because there's no committee and no defense, but it's still large and scary. This is my crappy abstract:
Museums are increasingly making use of emerging technologies to digitize their tangible and intangible cultural holdings, but many of their collections include material that is considered sacred by indigenous source communities. Problems arise when digitization projects encounter such material and the restrictions that often accompany it. A common solution to this problem is to simply omit the materials from the database, but some projects, particularly in Australia, are attempting to find solutions that are a compromise between safeguarding sensitive information and giving back knowledge to source communities. This is a relatively new practice (as of the first decade of the 21st century) that merits further investigation and critical examination, and this paper intends to do so using Australia as a framework. Models of knowledge databases used by Australian cultural institutions and the communities they serve will be examined by tracing their history and considering how they attempt to negotiate with culturally sensitive materials and the politicized issues that accompany them. Notable projects of the past and present included in the discussion are the Kimberley Website Project of the Berndt Museum, the database of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies website, and the Ara Irititja database project. Assessing their successes and failures can provide insight for future projects, or aid in creating much-needed guidelines and standards for working with sensitive indigenous knowledge.
So there you have it. All of my writing is being sucked away into this abyss that I'm probably not even going to present at any conferences.
I've been thinking about changing what this site does for me sometime--maybe when I graduate this spring. As of now, I'm not really using it and there's a frightening amount of horrific information about me festering here. Don't unsubscribe to my RSS feed just yet--we'll see.
1:54 PM
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