Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
On June 14th 2011 I gave a talk at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. Very many thanks to Mike Ananny and Amar Ashar for organizing this.
The talk was webcast and archived in as many media forms as one could ever want! They are all here.
Abstract:
Ethnographies of Access, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Virtual Museum
Museums and academic institutions are rapidly digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to the public and to communities from which they originated. These practices both amplify the public nature of institutional collections, and create opportunities for re-thinking how collections should be shared online. In (post) colonial contexts, the virtual museum is a productive location of Aboriginal self-representation, where global heritage policies and institutional practices interface with Aboriginal paradigms of knowledge circulation, ethics, and control. Based on collaboratively designed virtual museum projects with Dane-zaa and Inuvialuit communities in Canada, I show that access to digital collections can both facilitate the reclaiming of intellectual property rights and copyright of cultural heritage––including the right to restrict circulation of cultural property––and support the design of archives and virtual exhibits on Aboriginal terms. These projects highlight Aboriginal remediation of digital collections as alternative modes of thinking about the design and activation of networked technologies in diverse cultural and institutional contexts.