Oklahoma Cultures Digital Initiative

The BBC has recently provided impressive coverage of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive project. It has appeared in two textual stories online as well as in an in-depth radio piece on the show Digital Planet featuring an interview with our friend and project organizer Kim Christen. The easiest way to access all the BBC materials is via Kim’s weblog Long Road. It is great that numerous non-specialists are getting the project’s deeper messages about cultural diversity and alternatives to all-or-nothing access protocols.

Under the “worthwhile sources noted” banner, I would like to point out two books of documentary photography by native Tulsan and Stanford University undergraduate Alison Zarrow. With very different subjects, Ms. Zarrow’s two books each contribute to the appreciation of Oklahoma’s culture history in unique and valuable ways. Her first book is titled Abandoned Tulsa and was published by Furnace Press in 2006. (Find it on the Furnace Press site here.) The publisher’s website describes the book well:

[It] shows us her hometown from a unique perspective. Focusing solely on the abandoned and neglected, Zarrow brings Tulsa’s forgotten architecture back to life. Abandoned Tulsa takes the reader inside a variety of vacant structures: the birthplace of televangelism, a Camelot-themed hotel, a deserted bowling alley, and more. Part urban adventure, part historic record, Zarrow’s documentation spotlights the last human traces inside rapidly decaying buildings. Photos of fading signs and collapsed furniture provide a poignant narrative of inhabitations before and after the owners moved on. Zarrow’s personal observations of these visits are framed in a historic context, providing an illuminating view of Tulsa’s social and architectural development.

The book is filled with beautiful, haunting, surprising photographs. For those who know Tulsa, it is especially engaging.

Her more recent project is a book titled Wish You Were Here: Oklahoma’s All-Black Towns 100 Years after Statehood, which she published through Blub.com this year. (Find it here.) While sharing with her earlier book an interest in photographs of historic, sometimes neglected, structures and the built environment more broadly, Wish You Were Here also includes compelling, humane images of people and social life that testify to the continued vitality of important Oklahoma communities such as Boley, Taft, and Rentiesville. Oklahoma’s rich tradition of black rodeo is given special attention and is the subject of some of her most compelling photographs–several of which can be seen in her online portfolio, found here. The photography project that led to Wish You Were Here was supported by Stanford’s Hass Center for Public Service.

In support of her book projects, Ms. Zarrow also maintains, in addition to her portfolio, a weblog, which can be found here. It is to be hoped, that Ms. Zarrow will keep her camera lens trained on the richness of Oklahoma’s cultural heritage. She is to be commended for finding multiple ways of making her work accessible, including in open formats online.

I have just discovered a weblog containing a rich collection of photographs of Oklahoma cultural landscapes. Called Jason’s Photo Blog it features the photography of Jason Bondy who, a web search indicates, works in exhibits at the Oklahoma Historical Society when he is not taking and posting his photographs of Oklahoma material life. His site is a simple blogger weblog and it mainly presents his images rather than elaborate text. I’ve only seen a tiny simple of his work, but wandering through his archive seems well worth the time of anyone interested in the material culture or built environment of Oklahoma. More efficient than browsing in his blog would be consulting his Flickr site here.

In an earlier item, I highlighted the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive project. Today the project team made available a demo version of the archive. According to an announcement that Kim Christen has circulated:

You can test it, upload content, make your own user profile and test out adding restrictions to content etc. We’ve populated the archive with some content already so you can see how the search functions and interface work even without uploading any content yourself.

The demo can be accessed directly at: http://demo.mukurtuarchive.org/ or you can navigate to it from the Mukurtu website (http: www.mukurtuarchive.org) by clicking on the “demo” tab and then clicking on the “go to the online demo” button.

For now, we’d love it if people tested out the archive and gave us feedback.

I look forward to trying it out myself.

In a related development, the project was mentioned favorably in a recent interview of Robert Leopold, Director of the National Anthropological Archives, that has just appeared in the January 2008 issue of Anthropology News.

Though modest in comparison to projects in medicine and in hard sciences such as physics, the OCDI is a kind of collaboratory, that is, “an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.” This definition was offered by the University of Michigan’s Gary Olson in a 2004 article by Eric Bender published in MIT’s Technology Review. Olson directs a project at Michigan called Science of Collaboratories, which is studying the phenomena among scientists and developing resources for their improvement. While there are countless collaborative projects in the social sciences and humanities that are using digital tools, not that many are explicitly framing their work in terms of the collaboratory concept as it has developed in medicine, science and technology research. One that has, from which a great deal can be learned, is the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC). Led by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, Christopher Kelty, and James Faubion and linking about nineteen scholars in numerous institutions, ARC is (as described here):

a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.

Two papers made available on the ARC site are of special relevance as they address the general nature and potentials of laboratories and collaboratories in the human sciences. See Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff’s  2006 ARC Working Paper “What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?” and Paul Rabinow’s 2007 ARC Concept Note “Steps Towards an Anthropological Laboratory.” Extremely helpful  and productive is Chris Kelty’s discussion of ARC on the weblog Savage Minds, which can be found here.

For a quick introduction to collaboratories in general, consult the wikipedia entry here.

While the OCDI’s core work is getting rolling, we have been using this site’s weblog function to point to some relevant projects and sources of relevance to (and inspiration for) the OCDI’s goals. So far, these have all had a direct Oklahoma tie in. In this post, I am pointing to a project that represents one of the kinds of projects that the OCDI hopes to foster in Oklahoma contexts. It is the Makurtu Wumpurrarni-kair Archive Project (and its associated digital tools) being developed in a collaborative project led by our friend and Council for Museum Anthropology colleague Kimberly Christen of Washington State University. As the project team describes it:

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a browser-based digital archive created by the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, N.T. Australia in collaboration with researchers Kimberly Christen, Craig Dietrich, Chris Cooney, and Tim Dietrich.

The archive, housed at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, contains photos, digital video clips, audio files, and digital reproductions of cultural artifacts and documents. The content in the archive is defined by access parameters based on a set of Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing and distribution of cultural knowledge. These protocols provide the basis for the archive’s internal logic and architecture.

Kim has very productively described the project and its wider significances in a number of venues, including her weblog Long Road, in guest postings to Savage Minds, and in a number of very valuable research publications. I can’t do the project justice in a brief post. It is remarkable and worth looking at up close. The key point to note here is that the Warumungu community archive is built with software tools (and community collaboration principles) that will be portable to other communities and collaborations within which they can be adapted to local cultural values and needs.