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.