Access and Control in Digital Humanities

Shane Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Access and Control in Digital Humanities explores a range of important questions about who controls data, who is permitted to reproduce or manipulate data, and what sorts of challenges digital humanists face in making their work accessible and useful.

Contributors to this volume present case studies and theoretical approaches from their experience with applications for digital technology in classrooms, museums, archives, in the field and with the general public. Offering potential answers to the issues of access and control from a variety of perspectives, the volume acknowledges that access is subject to competing interests of a variety of stakeholders. Museums, universities, archives, and some communities all place claims on how data can or cannot be shared through digital initiatives and, given the collaborative nature of most digital humanities projects, those in the field need to be cognizant of the various and often competing interests and rights that shape the nature of access and how it is controlled.

Access and Control in Digital Humanities will be of interest to researchers, academics and graduate students working in a variety of fields, including digital humanities, library and information science, history, museum and heritage studies, conservation, English literature, geography and legal studies.

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INTRODUCTION

Access and control in digital humanities

Shane Hawkins

Digitally mediated experiences now play an essential role in modern life, including many areas of academic research and higher learning. As humanities scholars developed research profiles that expanded into digital fields in the final quarter of last century, a body of theory and methodology began to develop around topics of crucial interest to academics and digital humanists.¹ Concerns over issues of access and control in digital humanities (henceforth DH) are perennial. At some stage of their work, all digital humanists are likely to confront a series of important questions related to control, data management, the limitations of access, and considerations regarding how access is subject to competing interests of stakeholders or the growing body of international law that touches on DH initiatives: for example, is access necessarily a “good” that all researchers want; who is allowed to access the data, exactly how, to what extent, and who controls it; what challenges do we face in making DH accessible; open source data is not necessarily accessible, so how does one make it accessible and useful? Given the collaborative nature of most DH projects, scholars must be cognizant of the various and often competing interests and rights that shape the nature of access and how it is controlled. The interests of museums, universities, archives, and some communities all place claims on how data can or cannot be shared through digital initiatives. At the same time, the area of intellectual property rights and digital rights management seems to be on an inevitable path to confrontation with the legal world of patents, copyright, and trademark. Digital humanists must ask themselves what rights of possession and reproduction are involved in their projects, and acknowledge the growing interest in the legal aspects of DH in the international community of scholars.

The present volume is intended to explore these issues and draw attention to such problems. The essays that follow present case studies and theoretical approaches based on experience with digital humanities in classrooms, museums, archives, in the field, and with the general public, and they engage with the problems of access and control from a variety of perspectives.

Soft machines and other(ed) corpora

In thinking about issues of access and control, we draw particular inspiration from those working in DH from the perspectives of Indigenous Studies and Disability Studies. Access and control are prominent areas of concern in these fields, both of which have developed rich and thoughtful responses to the challenges inherent to digital humanities. Indigenous scholars and others working in the field of Indigenous digital humanities are attuned to the conflicts that have arisen between the heirs of digital utopianism and open access and Indigenous communities concerned about the use and distribution of cultural artefacts and other materials in ways that contravene cultural practices and traditional knowledge.² This conflict calls attention to the discourse of openness as common good that is often an uninterrogated political stance and largely divorced from historical considerations, in which the benefits of access to knowledge and its circulation are treated uncritically as positives. As Christen points out (2012, p. 2879),

This framing of the digital landscape promotes a type of historical amnesia about how the public domain was initially populated. In the United States, the rise of public domain talk is linked to Westward expansion and the displacement of indigenous peoples; the use of this discourse signals an erasure of the destructive effects of colonization and obscures its ideological underpinnings.

In reaction to such tensions, one recognizes the need to frame information as socially embedded and complicated by numerous factors arising in the communities who create, curate, share, and use it in manifold ways. These communities are necessarily subject to a network of interdependencies and power relations, and when imagining the ethics of access regimes, one must bring to bear a historical perspective that recognizes Indigenous loss of control not only over elements of material culture but also over Indigenous knowledge and the forces driving how and why it is shared. Without careful interrogation, the field of digital humanities risks simply extending or replicating the prior exclusion of Indigenous communities from the information commons, much as those communities have been historically excluded from access to their own cultures. For Indigenous people, the digital and political are not merely entangled, they are inseparable.

The response to these realities has been to actively engage in ways to create “culturally appropriate conditions for access”, rather than to acquiesce or to accept a binary open or closed framework or maximal open access by default. Advocates for this approach speak of “creating approaches to access that incorporate cultural protocols”, especially protocols that are dynamic, negotiable, situational, sensitive to culture, supportive of their interdependencies, and what Christen calls “the mire of fine-grained and overlapping types of relationships that predicate access” (2012, p. 2885).

In this volume, Bohaker et al. present their work on a large collaborative database of Indigenous cultural heritage from Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat sources. They draw attention to a wide range of access and control issues and note that the management of information and communications technologies is a question of power and governance and of relationships of trust and accountability. Indigenous cultural heritage material is often scattered among separate institutional collections as the result of imperial projects of colonization, depriving items of context and distorting or eliminating their histories, and creating access challenges for community members and researchers. Curating that material culture presents its own challenges when, for example, technological requirements and barriers in design can render databases inaccessible to some communities, or when the idea of intellectual property seems at odds with Indigenous epistemologies, and intellectual property laws “do not adequately reflect or protect the forms of knowledge and the network of relationships that produce and sustain it”. The chapter asks where we are to locate the ethical parameters for sharing materials in the digital age, and it looks to local cultural protocols for direction in managing access to knowledge in order to avoid replicating colonial power structures and assumptions about freedom and openness that ignore history. The digital humanities can embrace relations of interdependence and work towards the decolonization of Indigenous knowledge: “the protection of knowledge and its material manifestations are thus predicated on social relations”.

Given that Bohaker et al. offer a particularly Canadian and North American vantage point, it may be useful to contextualize their chapter somewhat by drawing parallels to some well-established work in Digital Humanities and Indigenous Studies in Australia and New Zealand.³ The best known of this group is perhaps Mukurtu, a content management system that began as a collaboration between the Warumungu Aboriginal community (Northern Territory, Australia), Kimberly Christen, and Craig Dietrich, and has developed into a free and open source platform for Indigenous communities around the world. It is discussed here in the chapters by Bohaker et al. (who describe their decision not to adopt the platform), Yokoyama, and Friedman. As Yokoyama points out, Mukurtu provides communities with graduated access mechanisms that not only allow them to control their digital heritage but also to determine how material is curated and shared in accordance with such culturally relevant determinates as age, gender, or kinship. Many of the problems that Mukurtu was created to deal with are identified by Bohaker et al. in their own work with the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC). They point out that questions of access, control, and dissemination are fundamentally about power. One of the challenges of their project is to overcome methodological approaches and a database structure that rely on Western ontologies and fail to accommodate Indigenous ways of knowing.

Other scholars have articulated challenges similar to those identified by Mukurtu and GRASAC. Hart Cohen (2005) discusses the creation of a digital repository from the rich archives of the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs with the participation of the Arrernte (Aranda) community (Mparntwe or Alice Springs Region).⁴ Cohen writes that in its early years, the Centre curtailed access to its collection severely, but with the advent of new technologies and under new management, the collection was made more accessible and came to be viewed “more as a focus for knowledge and information about Aranda people and less as a gatekeeper for objects”. There is an awareness here that issues of access and control relating to archives are linked to questions of power and a recognition that community engagement with the project must be “symbiotic”, that the differing approaches to the material must find a way forward that is “compatible” and “consensual”, and involves “a process of creatively negotiating the knowledge interests and relationships of both the archive and the lay knowledge that surrounds it” (p. 49). Christie (2005) reflects on his collaborative work developing a language and literature database with the Yolngu (northeast Arnhem Land). In the process of creating data management systems that will allow Aboriginal people to control, configure, and use their own resources in local contexts, the question arises how best to develop digital technologies that “enhance rather than inhibit Aboriginal knowledge traditions” (p. 52). Noting that it is crucial to “understanding how information architecture both reflects and enacts a politics of knowledge” (p. 55), Christie stresses that databases bear their own assumptions about knowledge and the fundamental nature of the world and warns against “pressing Aboriginal knowledge through the sieve of Western objectivist ontology” (p. 60). Glowczewski, in discussing the Central Australian Lajamanu community (Northern Territory) among others, argues that the control of data can be a necessary means of empowerment: “one key to the survival of Indigenous cultures is to find ways to control the circulation and the staging of the products of Indigenous creativity in old and new media” (2005, p. 24). Mechanisms of access such as databases or websites must take into account the social and cultural logic of meaning production in these communities, and it must respect “the various levels of knowledge and expertise, some of which must remain secret” (p. 26). Again, this is an iterative process and involves “a constant re-evaluation of how each image or representation … impacts on social justice, equity, tolerance and freedom” (p. 25). “It is necessary”, writes Glowczewski, “to know the rules of association that constitute the philosophy, the ethics and the imperatives of survival for a particular group” (p. 26).

Analogous concerns have been raised by scholars who articulate disability approaches to DH and issues of access, in which there is a strong focus on intersectional and cross-disability approaches. Here access is understood as a much more complex phenomenon than is sometimes recognized. It can be imagined as a process rather than a discrete event, and one that is problematic, subject to negotiation, and which requires interpretation and re-interpretation. Furthermore, since it is a social process that involves an “interpretive relation between bodies” (Hamraie 2018, p. 452), and which must be situated in specific historical contingencies, access is necessarily a process that evolves without culmination in a defined ending—as a process it is persistent, or perpetual. We see that Indigenous approaches to access seek to centre the needs of Indigenous communities and bring to bear Indigenous knowledge. In a similar fashion, disability approaches relocate marginalized parties, “foregrounding disabled people as experts (rather than subjects of knowledge)”, and create a “leadership of the most impacted” (Hamraie 2018, pp. 459 and 462).⁵

Tanya Titchkosky has written with great clarity on the subject of access from the perspective of Cultural Disability Studies. While her 2011 book, The question of access: disability, space, meaning, was concerned most directly with the conceptualization of access in contemporary university life, her work might be thought of broadly as a phenomenology of disability. As such, her interrogation of the concept of access offers many possible insights to scholars in DH. Her point of departure is to ask whether we ought to conceive of access as something more than a “substantial, measurable entity” (p. 3), and whether or not it may be taken instead as a means of perception. As perception, she argues, access is relatable to notions of social life a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: access and control in digital humanities
• Part I Access, control, and DH in academia
• Part II Networks of access and control
• Part III Access, control, and immersive media
• Part IV Access, control, and Indigenous knowledge
• Part V Access, control, and the law
• Index