Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments

Fuente: ERIC Institute of Education Sciences
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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Christie, Michael
Format: Recurso educativo Open Access
Language:en
Published: 2005
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author Christie, Michael
author_facet Christie, Michael
Christie, Michael
collection Education Resources Information Center
contents Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments Christie, Michael Metadata Databases Foreign Countries Epistemology Indigenous Populations Indigenous Knowledge According to Manovich (2001), the database and the narrative are natural enemies, each competing for the same territory of human culture. Aboriginal knowledge traditions depend upon narrative through storytelling and other shared performances. The database objectifies and commodifies distillations of such performances and absorbs them into data structures according to a priori assumptions of metadata; that is the data which describes the data to aid a search. In a conventional library for example, the metadata which helps you find a book may be title, author or topic. It is misleading and dangerous to say that these databases contain knowledge, because we lose sight of the embedded, situated, collaborative and performative nature of knowledge. For the assemblages of digital artefacts we find in an archive or database to be useful in the intergenerational transmission of living knowledge traditions, we need to rethink knowledge as performance and data as artefacts of prior knowledge production episodes. Through the metaphors of environment and journey we can explore ways to refigure the archive as a digital environment available as a resource to support the work of active, creative and collaborative knowledge production.
format Recurso educativo Open Access
id eric_EJ959911
institution ERIC Institute of Education Sciences
language en
publishDate 2005
record_format eric
spellingShingle Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments
Christie, Michael
Metadata
Databases
Foreign Countries
Epistemology
Indigenous Populations
Indigenous Knowledge
Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments Christie, Michael Metadata Databases Foreign Countries Epistemology Indigenous Populations Indigenous Knowledge According to Manovich (2001), the database and the narrative are natural enemies, each competing for the same territory of human culture. Aboriginal knowledge traditions depend upon narrative through storytelling and other shared performances. The database objectifies and commodifies distillations of such performances and absorbs them into data structures according to a priori assumptions of metadata; that is the data which describes the data to aid a search. In a conventional library for example, the metadata which helps you find a book may be title, author or topic. It is misleading and dangerous to say that these databases contain knowledge, because we lose sight of the embedded, situated, collaborative and performative nature of knowledge. For the assemblages of digital artefacts we find in an archive or database to be useful in the intergenerational transmission of living knowledge traditions, we need to rethink knowledge as performance and data as artefacts of prior knowledge production episodes. Through the metaphors of environment and journey we can explore ways to refigure the archive as a digital environment available as a resource to support the work of active, creative and collaborative knowledge production.
title Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments
topic Metadata
Databases
Foreign Countries
Epistemology
Indigenous Populations
Indigenous Knowledge
url https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ959911