Indigenous Knowledges: Our Experimental Digital Approach
As we know, pilot projects provide the freedom to experiment and work out which strategies and approaches work best. This opportunity for exploration is particularly welcomed when the topic at hand is as challenging as exploring decolonising solutions for heritage collections in the digital sphere. Our team for the ‘Indigenous Knowledges’ pilot project is certainly embracing the space we have to develop a more experimental digital approach to connect with our partners across international boundaries.
The project is funded by a joint funding scheme ‘New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions’ by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US (NEH) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK. We have outlined more detailed project aims, which you can read here — but our digital approach is critical. At the very heart of this project, we explore how digital scholarship and tools can develop a reciprocal, consultative model to connect collections to source communities.
As the funding scheme is transatlantic, we are unsurprisingly a global project team. Wellcome Collection is partnered with Diné College, the first tribally accredited collegiate institution in the US, as well as two academic institutions, The University of Arizona and the University of Kent, who are the Project Investigators. So, with a team spread all over the world, what platforms and tools are we using to share our ideas and work? How are we building our tools online collaboratively and reciprocally to capture insights from all of our partners?
Digital curation and collaborative practice
One of our first project activities was to convene an in-building showcase to explore Wellcome’s collections. This was one of only a few occasions we scheduled to meet in person and was designed to provide the UK-based project group a curated ‘tour’ of our material across chronologies and geographies. It was also the opportunity for colleagues to share their thoughts (and feelings) about the ways that individual experiences of health can be re-discovered with collections material present in the room. Through 2021/2 at Wellcome Collection, we have taken part in the Social Justice Curriculum where we engaged with the problematic roots of the collection and how they can portray entrenched ableist and racist ideas about people who are disabled or from other cultures. This programme has led to us to consider a range of perspectives in activating the material for our audiences. The showcase was, therefore, an opportunity to think deeply about the chosen items (maps, early printed books, manuscripts, films, diaries, posters and zines) by considering these issues. It was a safe space in which to discuss ways in which the material can be presented in the future.
Currently, the Wellcome Collection team have repurposed the online planning tool Trello as a creative online curatorial platform. The free tool allows us to share our research on collection items, as well as replicate our in-person showcase.
Looking at the screen shot of the Trello board above, we developed a visual storyboard where we can guide our partners in the US virtually through our showcase. The online participants then encounter the materials in the same order as the in-person participants — they begin and end their journey mirroring how we collectively walked through each item to the next.
As a Trello board is not able to translate the materiality of the object to the reader, we have recently invested in a visualiser here at Wellcome Collection. Visualisers are document cameras that connect to a laptop which allow you to display real-time video or images of anything placed on the document camera plate. As visualisers can convey the materiality of our collection dynamically, our audiences can engage in our material in a more practical and visceral way. The person handling the material can use various buttons to magnify specific textual features, such as tears in the page and discolouration. For smaller items and texts, the participants can engage with the item beyond the capability of presenter-led talk. In September, when the project’s Research Fellow Rhiannon Sorrell visits, we will experiment with the visualiser to engage with our collections, especially any Navajo nation material, so this can be shared with off-site stakeholders.
Digital design sprint
We are working closely with Local Contexts, a global organisation who address attribution, access, and use rights issues for Indigenous cultural heritage. Through a ten-year iterative process of working with Indigenous communities, Local Contexts have developed various community-driven tools, such as the ‘Hub’, labels and notices to bring back cultural authority to Indigenous communities in the record. Here at Wellcome Collection, we are trialling ‘Open to Collaborate’ notices, whereby institutions can mark their intent to build relationships of trust and collaboration with Indigenous communities. This is the beginning of our journey to incorporate Local Contexts’ tools into our catalogue and website.
We held our first design sprint afternoon in May to continue this work with Local Contexts. The hybrid workshop brought together Indigenous Knowledge partners, the Local Contexts team — who shared the ins and outs of their various digital tools and Hub platform — and we also invited colleagues from the British Library and Endangered Knowledge Programme at the British Museum.
Design sprints originate in the world of digital user experience (UX) design and are typically run over a whole working week with each day dedicated to one of 5 distinct phases: Understand (or Empathize) — Sketch — Decide — Prototype — Test. A design sprint is a well-established working practice for Wellcome Collection’s Digital Engagement teams, but this format is much less familiar to colleagues based in Collections & Research. Also we only had an afternoon at our disposal, so we focused on just the Understand and Sketch phases: Following an introduction to the Local Contexts Hub, Jonathan Tweed, Technical Product Manager at Wellcome Collection gave us a ‘behind the scenes’ snapshot of the Wellcome Collection website and shared how Wellcome Collection’s catalogue pipeline has been designed so that other data sources, such as the Local Contexts’ digital infrastructure, can be integrated in future. He explained how a pipeline integration could be built with the Local Contexts Hub API which would enable Local Contexts rights labels to be displayed alongside catalogue data used on wellcomecollection.org.
We were then able to sketch out some initial mock-up designs of what the labels might look like on our catalogue using some example items from our collections selected by our Collections Information team. The sprint served as a first step in developing how we can work together in a hybrid setting.
Next Steps
Taking on learnings from this sprint afternoon, we are scheduling our next Local Contexts collaboration with much more time for colleagues and project partners to fully engage with the issues at hand. Plans are taking shape for welcoming Rhiannon Sorrell for her residency and then also Sarah French, Research Assistant, for her Wellcome placement. We intend to work with Rhiannon and Sarah on a cohort of material relating to the Navajo Nation. In our next Stacks post, we will chat with Sarah and learn more about her role.
