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The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education

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Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in Digital Environments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Michael Christie
Michael Christie
Affiliation:
School of Education, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, 0810, Australia
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 34 , 2005 , pp. 61 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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