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Wrapping up the project
Helen and Michael were invited to speak at an International e-learning symposium hosted by the Knowledge Design Forum at the RMIT in Melbourne on December 3, so we took this opportunity to meet over a few days to collect our thoughts, to decide on how to wind up this website as a permanent record of our project, and to make plans for future work.
We printed out all the pages from the website and tried to find ways of indicating where we had ended up in all the various branches of our work, without being too conclusive. It is now quite a large website, and to read it all at one sitting is to realise its diversity and its messiness, the subprojects which took off in different directions, the ones that faltered for one reason or another, the relatively hidden work of many Aboriginal people like Waymamba who were always available for advice, support and reflection, the hidden frustrations of technical breakdowns and vast distances.
We have already begun work thinking through and finding support for further work. We are keen to continue to develop TAMI and are seeking funding. We are keen to continue to think through how digital technologies can support knowledge management on the ground in such a way that it enhances sustainable livelihoods on country and allows local Indigenous knowledges to be engaged at the global level on local terms.
We decided to open a new section of our website while we closed of this section which has been supported by the Australian Research Council. Trevor has produced a new image which reflects our new interest in the flows of digital objects. The digital objects do not contain knowledge, they contain traces of knowledge-making episodes, but they are also the raw materials from which new knowledge can be made, collaboratively, within communities, and across communities.
We start the new section of the website with a short statement of where we are, and where we hope to go, and what it might take for us to get there.
What follows is a short summary of what happened at the e-learning symposium.
Bill Cope had opened the conference with a key question: How can the digital environment be used to create new and more powerful forms of learning?
We had the opening page of this website on display, and Helen introduced our talk by saying that the IKRMNA project was in a sense dedicated to this question, except in a specifically Indigenous Australian context. By following the uses to which Aboriginal people put digital technologies in everyday knowledge work, we could see how boundaries were becoming dissolved between teaching and learning, or between software design and use, or between knowledge work as constitutive and representational.
Michael showed the very messy whiteboard diagram from our first planning sessions and talked about all the comings together and movings apart, about finding common themes while preserving diversity.
Our work always implied some attention to digital technology, although we came to the project with more experience in Yolngu knowledge practices than in digital technology and resource management.
We talked about the partners at the Herbarium, the NLC, and the Yothu Yindi Foundation, and then about the Aboriginal people we found beginning to use computers and cameras in their own ways for their own purposes.
We could understand this work only as we found it situated in the local – local place and local agendas. These were cultural/political/religious agendas to do with
• intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge (including religious culture associated with ancestral songs, and narratives) and its practices
• ways of advocating particular positions about history, culture or the environment in which Yolngu were already involved, and doing the politics of knowledge work which that involved.
• surveillance or witness to do with land and ceremonial practice.
Helen then talked about our methodology and the particular role of the website. We fell upon the website as a central part of the methodology for keeping some tabs on the complexity, while we tried to produce some generalisable findings. The methodology which involved fluctuating between participant observations and negotiated interventions allowed us to work with Yolngu (and other Aboriginal people) on projects through which they controlled the knowledge work, while we intervened strategically with discussions about databases, software, hardware, with buying computers, with holding workshops, following some up, abandoning others.
Michael introduced the audience to a few of the ‘emerging solutions’ by taking them for a tour of that part of the website. In our seminar, however we were most concerned to talk specifically about the TAMI software in terms of the conference theme: How can the digital environment be used to create new and more powerful forms of learning?
We talked about how the project had started with a hope that the many databases of ‘Aboriginal ecological knowledge’ may be of use to Aboriginal people doing knowledge work on country. We talked about the audit of the 38 databases we had found which contained ethnobotanical, ethnozoological, linguistic, genealogical, environmental, and cultural information.
We talked a little about our initial efforts to work with Yolngu and databases, for example for the new database which was being built for the new Galiwin’ku knowledge centre. Databases were breaking out all over the place, but were frankly of little interest to the Aboriginal people who owned the knowledge which they contained.
We then talked a little about Yolngu cosmogony, about the knowable world being brought into life by the talking, signing, crying and other human activities of the ancestors. Language still has an important constitutive power in the Yolngu world. It doesn’t just represent the world, it actually creates new possible worlds. This of course is not a magical belief of Aboriginal people, it is quite true and it is as true of the work of English in the white Australian world as it is in the Aboriginal world. It is also significantly true in the IT world, where strings of ones and zeros form the substrate from which all knowability is generated. (And because the Aboriginal and computer metaphysics are fundamentally similar we should be able to avoid using western metaphysics as a translation mechanism between the two.)
For example, in the structuration of metadata. As soon as software designers assume that the world out there is already structured in a sensible way, they are tempted to take on the task of coding that structure into their software – hence the complex metadata regimes of all the current (large and small) databases. If we resist that temptation we do our best to avoid any pre-emption of the conditions under which digital objects can be found, configured and deployed.
Further, the facts in the database have their structure by virtue of their relation to one another, rather than to the outside world. They lose their connection to practice, to place, and to people.
The knowledge practices of Yolngu are essentially local, they understand the connections and constitutivities of elements (species, land forms, weather, histories, etc) as manifest locally and responsively, yet databases exhibit a pressure to generalise, to be extensible, to be future-proof.
Also the important politics of scale and withholding/sharing and accountability tend to be ignored or subverted by a conventional database.
Having problematised the uncritical use of database software for knowledge work, we turned to the question of software design, and revisited the image of dissolving boundaries with which we had started our talk.
Databases instantiate the routine notion that there is a necessary split between the designer and the user. Much of the design work which is crucial to knowledge work – negotiations over metaphysics for example – what counts as evidence, how do we justify our right to speak, how to de argue for aesthetics or triangulation in the prosecution of truth claims – has already been pre-empted by database design.
How then do we find a software solution which allows for arguments over metaphysics to be always on the table?
Michael opened the electronic proof of concept for TAMI, and talked about its various affordances, its individual or family-level scale, its single interface, its ontological flatness, its open and optional metadata, its flexible configurations of digital objects, its display space, and the friendly text searchers and uploads.
After ten minutes of questions and discussion we talked briefly about where we hoped to proceed:
• continue working with Yolngu exploring knowledge, technology, and sustainable livelihoods on sustainable country.
• continue to seek funding for iterative negotiated development of TAMI software, and
• An examination of the knowledge economy where digital objects flow into around and out of Aboriginal systems of governance, into communities, and globally.
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