Digital Heritage, Knowledge Networks, and Source Communities: Understanding Digital Objects in a Melanesian Society

Abstract

This article investigates digital heritage technologies from a Melanesian perspective. It explores—in the context of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea—the types of values placed on digital surrogates as a means to engage critically with recent debates on “digital” or “virtual” repatriation. It raises the question as to whether digital knowledge resources such as 3D digital objects are really seen as secondary or “second best” to the original or whether digital technologies reproduce, in new form, an economy of objects that sustains knowledge and revival practices. As a way to address this, the Mobile Museum pilot project was launched in January 2012 to help support the Nalik people of New Ireland reconnecting with and researching their cultural heritage in Queensland museums. This article demonstrates, in contrast to recent calls for an ideological return to the status of the museum object as put forward by Conn (2010), how ethnographic objects should be understood in terms of their performativity, mobility, and virtuality, which render them operative far beyond the physical realms of museum institutions. [digital heritage, digital repatriation, ethnographic collections, cultural revitalization, Melanesia]

Digital art history in 2021

“…A. Bell et al., 2013; Ngata et al., 2012; Were, 2014), the concept has expanded to include digitization of all kinds of colonial collections (Schmidtke, 2018), digital aggregators or portals produced by and for source communities (Werla, 2019), as well as high‐profile projects that make a digital argument for physical repatriation (Hickley, 2020). Drawing on models like the Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels), art historian Robert Wellington envisions a future in which institutions “preserve cultural concepts in local languages within [their metadata] vocabularies and ontologies to affirm the cultural sovereignty of the people who hold an historical stake in the shared artifacts of material culture” (Wellington, 2020).…”

Digital Museum Objects and Memory: Postdigital Materiality, Aura and Value

“…They are, after all, the reason that the majority of institutions exist. In preceding decades, there has been a great deal of conversation, and concern, pertaining to the fact that the presence of digital objects obfuscates the primacy of the physical object (Anderson, 1999; Were, 2014). Many attribute this to the presence of digital technologies, whether provided by the museum or through the visitor (i.e.…”

“…In this space, cultures, explicitly or implicitly, enter dialogue with one another. As objects that provide a visible “performative dimension” their aura is acted out, tangibly, for all to witness (Were, 2014, 141). The back and forth conversation, sometimes hidden in clicks and searches, sometimes visible in comments or collections management systems, remains an influencing factor in each culture’s memory formation and its translation across cultures.…”

Interruptions: Challenges and Innovations in Exhibition-Making

“…There are also questions, in light of debates on cultural essentialism versus hybrid identities, on the relevance of terms like "source community" in providing attributions for certain materials, including those designated by some archeologists as "belongings. " Digital projects have been posited (Geismar 2012;Wellington and Oliver 2015;Were 2014) as holding the potential to widen audiences both in terms of age and socioeconomic backgroundalthough importantly this does not apply to people with little or no digital access or literacy.…”