[Icommons] Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

joy.garnett at gmail.com joy.garnett at gmail.com
Tue Jan 29 13:20:13 EST 2008


Interesting conundrum.via:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2008/01/aboriginal-arch.html


Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

[image: _44388755_digitalplanet203]<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7214240.stm>

*via BBC News,  Tuesday, 29 January 2008*:

*Aboriginal archive offers new
DRM*<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7214240.stm>

A new method of digital rights management
(DRM)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management>which
relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal
Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based
in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing
within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive,
offering a new take on
DRM<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management>

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World
Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles
came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really
interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken
from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but
around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this
information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it
themselves."     Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State
University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting
a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu
community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and
set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain
images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community
cannot view material from another without first seeking permission.
Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.


[image: _44388756_digitalplanetinside203_2]<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7214240.stm>

*Offline website*

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system
that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they
could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it
was not only about preserving the information into a database in a
traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their
gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is
described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video
clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and
documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making
the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with
restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an
opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope
of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history
can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.
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