Reading or Video 

Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness

 

The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a common resource, scholars, activists, technologists, and local source communities have generated critiques about the extent of information freedom. This article injects both the histories of collecting and the politics of information circulation in relation to indigenous knowledge into this debate by looking closely at the history of the meme and its cultural and legal underpinnings. This approach allows us to unpack the meme’s normalized assumptions and gauge whether it is applicable across a broad range of materials and cultural variances.

Christen, K. A. (2012). “Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication, 6(0), 24.

Reading or Video 

Indigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, Libraries and Archives: Crises of Access, Control and Future Utility

 
Anderson, Jane. 2005. “Indigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, Libraries and Archives: Crises of Access, Control and Future Utility.” Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36 (2): 83–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2005.10721250.
Community of Practice, Reading or Video 

Active Collections

 

The Active Collections website serves as both a community of practice and a core reading. The website’s goal is to “generate discussion and action across the history museum field to develop a new approach to collections, one that is more effective and sustainable.” The Active Collections Manifesto is an excellent place to start, but the website is also rich with case studies, roundtable reports, and a proposed research agenda. Active Collections asks: “Out of all the objects in your collections, can you only think of a handful that could be used in transformative exhibitions and programming? Are you slowly being buried alive under an avalanche of objects that only sort of serve your mission?”

Active Collections was also published as a text:

Woods, Elizabeth, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones, eds. 2018. Active Collections. New York: Routledge.
Reading or Video 

Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue / Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville

 

Drawing on exploratory research of online ethnographic records for particular types of Aboriginal bags in North America, we confront the absence of affective knowledge in museum catalogues and documentation. Although curatorial, ethnographic, and Aboriginal understandings of these items teem with affect, we find affect to be almost wholly lacking from available online records. We ask what the effects of this absence are for descendent Aboriginal communities, for museum publics, and for affect theory. We also look at an example where affect has a presence in online records, the Glenbow Museum, and consider the ways this creates opportunities for comparative and historic affective study.

Krmpotich, Cara, and Alexander Somerville. 2016. “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue.” Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 178–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12123.
Reading or Video 

The Treatment of the American Indian in the Library of Congress E-F Schedule / Thomas Yen-Ran Yeh and Eugene T. Frosio

 

This historical reading from 1971 critiques the Library of Congress Classification system’s treatment of indigenous peoples, highlighting issues such as segregating American Indians from the United States, arranging American Indian history with bias, and representing American Indians as “savages.” Yeh offers proposals for improving the classification system, which is followed by comments and rebuttal from Frosio of the Library of Congress.

While the article offers interesting documentation of the long debate librarians and catalogers have had regarding ethical description and representation of indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, it is definitely dated from a modern standpoint (for example, though it criticizes calling indigenous peoples “savages” and erasing their contemporary history and existence, the article also privileges problematic concepts like assimilation and United States government rule “civilizing” American Indians.

Yeh, Thomas Yen-Ran, and Eugene T. Frosio. 1971. “The Treatment of the American Indian in the Library of Congress.” Library Resources and Technical Services 15 (2): 122–31. http://archive.org/details/lrtsv15no2.
Reading or Video 

Research Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom

 

The Research Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom resource, developed by a FemTechNet initiative called the Center for Solutions to Online Violence, suggests basic guidelines for how to ethically study and use of social media in classrooms. It also includes a list of questions to pose to researchers and educators preparing to engage in social media research. While these guidelines don’t explicitly refer to cultural heritage and information systems, they provide excellent guidelines applicable to any partnership involving digital collections.

Digital Alchemists, and Center for Solutions to Online Violence (CSOV). 2016. “Research Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom.” http://femtechnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Research-Ethics-For-Students-Teachers_Social-Media-in-the-Classroom_DA-CSOV_2016-1.pdf.
Reading or Video 

#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics / Moya Bailey

 

Moya Bailey shares her experience collecting Tweets using the #girlslikeus hashtag and how she incorporates ethical practices when researching vulnerable communities, specifically trans women of color. Although this is not specifically a code of conduct, Bailey provides an explicit case study for how to be respectful, collaborative, and center a community’s needs over the researcher’s needs.

Bailey, Moya. 2015. “#transform(Ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9 (2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000209/000209.html.
Reading or Video 

LEEDh: Leadership in Engaged and Ethical DH Projects #d4d / Giordana Mecagni

 

Based off of discussions and her own contributions during the Design for Diversity Opening Forum, Mecagni produced these guidelines for Digital Humanities (and other disciplines) projects to work ethically and responsibly with communities, particularly marginalized communities.

Mecagni, Giordana. 2017. “LEEDh: Leadership in Engaged and Ethical DH Projects #d4d.” Giordana Mecagni (blog). October 20, 2017. https://giordanamecagni.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/leedh/.
Reading or Video 

Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation / Kimberly Christen

 

This article highlights the importance of partnerships in digitization projects in relation to indigenous communities. While digitization and the advent of technologies that make information and items widely available, the groups, in this case indigenous communities, should always be consulted before items are made widely available in an effort to ensure that the item should be included online and that the appropriate description is included.

“In the last twenty years, many collecting institutions have heeded the calls by indigenous activists to integrate indigenous models and knowledge into mainstream practices. The digital terrain poses both possibilities and problems for indigenous peoples as they seek to manage, revive, circulate, and create new cultural heritage within overlapping colonial/postcolonial histories and oftentimes-binary public debates about access in a digital age. While digital technologies allow for items to be repatriated quickly, circulated widely, and annotated endlessly, these same technologies pose challenges to some indigenous communities who wish to add their expert voices to public collections and also maintain some traditional cultural protocols for the viewing, circulation, and reproduction of some materials. This case study examines one collaborative archival project aimed at digitally repatriating and reciprocally curating cultural heritage materials of the Plateau tribes in the Pacific Northwest.”

Christen, Kimberly. 2011. “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation.” The American Archivist 74 (1): 185–210. http://hdl.handle.net/2376/5704.

See also, Honoring the Dead: A Digital Archive of the Insane Indian Asylum by Stacey Berry

Reading or Video 

Adapting the Brian Deer Classification System for Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute / Raegan Swanson

 

This case study examines Aanischaaukamikw Cree Culture Institute, a Cree museum and resource center in the Oujé-Bougoumou, Quebec, and the institute’s adaptation of the Brian Deer Classification System for use in their library. It gives an overview of the process of adapting Brian Deer for Quebec-focused classification in a small Aboriginal library, detailing the research, planning, testing, and implementation of the project. The value, merits, and disadvantages of adapting the Deer Classification System are addressed.

Swanson, Raegan. 2015. “Adapting the Brian Deer Classification System for Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53 (5–6): 568–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1009669.