March 2004: Technical is Political

In March 2004, we held what we called a ‘technical workshop’. We invited other groups involved in doing indigenous databasing. To keep track we recorded people when they were talking, and took photos.

Here we have arranged the words that people spoke and wrote, and the images we captured, according to what we understood ourselves to be doing. We also added words to help things make sense.

Workshop agenda.pdf 120K

• Meeting with and listening to other groups that do databasing with and for Indigenous organisations and communities.
• Struggling to specify what’s important in indigenous databases.
• discussing map interfaces between computers and people who use them in doing collective memory
• discussing other sorts of interfaces
• Discussing the Larrakia project
• Discussing Yingiya’s project
• Discussing Waymamba’s project
• Discussing the audit of databases with indigenous knowledge
• Other ‘stuff’

Waymamba Yingiya and Bryce

1. Introductions:

Michael Christie
Welcome to our workshop for the ARC project which is looking at ways of making databases and digital technology useful for Yolngu and other Aboriginal people in terms of keeping knowledge strong and teaching young children about traditional knowledge. This week will be working at 2 angles.

We have invited computer technicians to look at technical issues, and invited Yolngu to look at useability issues. These two angles will during the week to come “sometimes be coming together and sometimes be done apart” just as they have been all the way through.

The politics and the technics of doing collective memory with computers are inseparable Added by Helen Verran in curating this exhibit

Yingiya
What I’m going to say is what we are about here it’s always been my deep feeling inside I went away to Melbourne through my young manhood times , important learning times, I got too carried away in Balanda world and nearly lost my Yolngu way. My aim is always focussed on keeping Yolngu and Balanda. to grow together and if there is anything we can do to do this, to keep that Yolngu and Balanda . growing up together instead of one dying now and one growing or vice versa. I’m still about to open new doors and see what’s in it”

Waymamba Gaykamangu
My idea I’d like to see if what we are doing now or what we are aiming to do in a couple of months time or maybe next year we go and introduce it to the Aboriginal communities where they can look for themselves and hear what we are doing and see what they think about it.”

Michael Christie (SAIKS)

2. Talking about Audit subproject link

Gary Scott
“From what I’ve discovered so far about indigenous knowledge collections, is that most of the knowledge has been collected in collaboration with Aboriginal people and organisations and often at the request of the Aboriginal people”

Michael Christie:
“In reflecting upon what Gary’s showed us and what Yingiya had to say, it seems that in terms of the info’, many of these databases are to do with species, places and names spread all over the Top End. But we have to consider how knowledge becomes ‘information’, only as it is extracted from its context.
Whereas the knowledge that Yingiya is talking about is located in specific places and specific to country.

I think the point is that the info that they’ve got there is like sitting down and talking to a Djambarrpuyngu person about the turtle and they say “the turtle this, and turtle that”. And they (the researcher) are writing it all down and (the researcher) doesn’t realise that turtle here is actually different from turtle over there. And so that there’s some thing about where it is and who’s telling the story which is really important to Yolngu that Balanda forget about. Thats an ontological issue And the well-meaning researcher takes the information and puts it into the database and they lose that whole idea of people having a right to speak to a particular place.

And we see Yingiya’s brother Mangay on the video telling stories in place. The sorts of information that Mangay is trying to make sure people get straight, is actually quite different from the sort of information that these Balanda guys have been putting onto their databases. Because Mangay’s stuff, and what Yingiya’s been talking about, is definitely located in land but I shouldn’t be talking like that about your brother

Yingiya
Talking about the turtle story and how it is related to country, how it happened here, is different to how it happened there. It’s not so much about different turtles, it’s the same species , might be same species but how it happened over here is different how it happened over this way. It might be similar but they’ve got different story, connections

And actually you can’t separate stories and turtles in the sciences either but most people who deal with scientific knowledge forget that. Perhaps it’s because the working stories, eg about what a species actually is, or how an ecosystem is defined, are usually taken for granted. Added by Helen Verran curating this exhibit

Helen
It is interesting to think of the ‘politico-cultural geography’ of this ‘collected knowledge’. What would a social map or an “institutional topolography” of the story that Gary has presented look like? The data is localised in terms of the needs of the institution that collected it..and those stories aren’t told

We can think about these collections as giving insight into particular institutional places To know about that knowledge you have to know why they were collecting it

Yingiya

3. Focussing on the Technical

Finding some firm doable projects for Bevan to take back to DSTC: The DSTC (Distributed Systems Technology Centre) in Brisbane is a National IT Research and Development Centre focussing on the needs of the Government, Defence, Health, Telecommunications, Finance and Education Sectors.

Written by Bevan Koopman

Bevan and Michael

working drawings of some database ideas

Chief Investigator, Helen Verran

Helen wrote some reflections on what happened during the days of the workshop reflections_hrv.pdf 160K

4. Mark Crocomb and Maree Klesch for the Wadeye/Port Keats Knowledge Centre.

“At Wadeye, Port Keats we’re a bit lucky. We’ve got a Knowledge Centre with the help of the NT Library Service, but we’ve also got a Museum and a Language Centre. So the Knowledge Centre is where the general community can go, a public place. The Knowledge Centre is in the middle of town just a year old. It’s only the elders and the language workers and trainee's work in the Language Centre and Museum. They’re in the old hospital so that’s sort of a keeping place in the data recording and documentation. They’re all in the old morgue, so its in a good ‘posi’. Mark’s the curator. There’s a whole lot of stuff that we haven’t organised yet.

We were working on languages, negotiatiing orthographies for languages that had not been written before, and what we did with all the resources the recordings, the videos, the pictures the written texts, that came out of that language project was to try straight away to get it up to a standard where it could be fed back into the community. The masters are always kept in the best format we’ve been advised on, and the rest is distributed.
We have to be flexible with everything Macs and PC. We’re also doing new recordings and people are very happy to record and there’s a rush on because we’re at a generational time when much of this is critical if it’s to be passed on. People are telling stories and people are even negotiating permission to tell a story that is not theirs if they feel that its important and they know the primary owner has passed on. If they ask you for help you can do it, but...

People are very interested now the Knowledge Centre is there. Everyone’s into “Data collection” now that there’s a public place. It used to be that people told stuff and sang stuff but it just went into an archive somewhere, went nowhere as far as the people were concerned. People are working and thinking harder about what gets put out, and how. Asking questions and making decisions on what to get...

Part of our job is to provide training, and right now there’s a workshop going on where younger people are practising recording and transcribing Elders, the middle aged, and young people. They work in their clan and language groups..Some people are listening to their languages for the first time. During the war lots of people came into Port Keats and they stopped talking their own languages. Now they’re teaching their kids and recording it too”

Mark Crocromb and Marree Klesch

5. Linda Barwick is project Director of PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) which is located at ANU, Melbourne Univ and Sydney Univ.

She offered warnings about hardware borne out of long experience. The pitfalls and traps of using technology in collection and storage of video and audio materials.

Linda has been involved in the Belyuen language centre. She showed the Macintosh that does sterling service for the community in producing CDs with lists of songs that people choose themselves using I-tunes proprietary software. It’s run by a young man from the community who has trained himself up to use music software. The CDs are in hot demand.

Linda Barwick

6. Paul Josif (NAILSMA)

“This is not about storing information for the sake of storing information, in a kind of whitefella project: “Yes we’ve got that isn’t that a fantastic project we’ve categorised all this stuff”. But to look it in a way that expresses that particular location. A strong element from our (Northern Land Council) point of view would be the ability for that to be used as a land and sea management tool. For people to use computers and other stuff to access and input in ways that will be useful to them generally in managing country

One thing is to have it ready to counter things that just come out of the ‘ether’ like this National Indigenous Fisheries Survey. The information was in the hands of white people. The survey was put out by people who wanted to make their own outfit look good, and in doing that they created a body of information which damned Aboriginal people generally

So the converse of that is Aboriginal people holding and being able to access their own information about such things and be able to come up with it immediately to counter such discussion papers.
Another thing is using videos in fire management. You can look at this over a number of parameters, so you could actually be looking at a particular location and what’s happened over time changes in vegetation, and changes relating to people-on-country. There’s marker places for example those big trees which grow in the gullies. Are they being adequately protected in the sorts of hybrid fire regimes that are now developing? These videos are not sorted in scientific ways. There’s no need to translate anything to English. They’re all in language with their stories and that makes them rich and useful for the younger generation learning country. And you can put all sorts of other things with them.

But if you want to use them as evidence to answer scientific questions then the fact that they’re there in that computer with that date and with talk by those people that’s very powerful evidence that also speaks to science about the efficacy of Aboriginal land management"