Imagining an Indigital Interface: Ara Irititja Indigenizes the Technologies of Knowledge Management

Abstract

Ara irititja exemplifies how indigenous ontologies are reshaping the technologies of information and cultural heritage management. A project that began in 1994 with the digital repatriation of photographs, oral histories, film recordings, and documents to remote communities in central Australia, Ara irititja is transitioning from an object-based FileMaker Pro database into a multimedia knowledge management system. in this article, i build on two years of anthropological fieldwork to interrogate three tools of knowledge preservation and transmission often taken for granted and/or presumed neutral-databases, archives, and the internet-to argue that they can and must be actively reworked as contemporary Aboriginal people imagine, produce, and safeguard their own cultural futures. 1

Local archives and community collecting in the digital age

“…Arch Sci (2012) 12:191-212 197 The Ara Irititja software is now being re-developed to be more than a stand-alone database but will be able to operate from a central server and deliver digital content to communities across central Australia (Thorner 2010). The digitization of archival material supports greater access by community members when content is delivered locally.…”

At home on the outstation: Barriers to home Internet in remote Indigenous communities

“…Statistics alone, however, tell us little about whether the situation is one of straightforward market failure, or whether this population is, in fact, choosing not to access and use the internet for other reasons. As Rowse points out, quantitative analysis of Indigenous exclusion can render Indigenous sociality invisible (Rowse 2010, 177) Discourses of digital divide and social exclusion sit alongside another narrative that portrays digital communication as a means of cultural empowerment (Thorner 2010;Kral 2010). This strand of work sees participation in digital technology as a means to maintain culture and enhance lives through creative engagement, even while in real terms the level of participation is low compared with the mainstream population.…”

Making Histories ‘Ngapartji‐ngapartji Way’: Exploring Collaboration, Exchange and Intercultural Histories in a Colonised Settler Nation

“…Figure 3 shows a screenshot of information about the Bush Banana). 18 This non-linear and interconnecting structure aptly reflects the complex relationships between people, place and Tjukurpa 19 in Anangu culture. While conventional archives approach sources as relatively static collections of historic materials, Ara Irititja is a dynamic database that allows Anangu to view materials but also to add, expand or correct information and historical details, take photographs or record video or audio in real time and in words and ways of their own choosing.…”

“…In her discussion of Ara Irititja as a manifestation of this kind of reconceptualization, Sabra Thorner argues that photographic archives in particular are being increasingly appreciated for their openness to reinterpretation and that as a result of the recent theoretical shifts 'colonial archives are being reimagined as spaces whose structure and contents are newly available for resignification'. 26 The creation of a digital space that users can interact with, demonstrates that knowledge is not just 'found' in an archive; it is a space where knowledge is actively produced as people bring their own interpretations to bear on the materials encountered there. An archival project like Ara Irititja addresses some of the limitations of academic history and the 'archive' as institution, and in doing so works to transform conditions of seeming impossibility into spaces of possibility.…”

“…29 My time spent with Anangu so far has revealed the Rose photographs to be agents capable of producing emotion, knowledge and kin relations. 30 Reading Rose's text while spending time getting to know people in Imanpa (See Fig. 4), a community intimately connected with the world represented in The Wind of Change, I found myself looking at people's relationships to and across country in the wider landscapes of Rose's analysis; people in these places, often spread out over vast distances, are connected in a much wider landscape of meaning and significance.…”