Digital Subjects,Cultural Objects: Special Issue introduction

Digital subjects

These questions are important because an increasing proportion of many people’s lives are now spent engaging (often unwittingly) with digital ontologies. The idea that we now live in a ‘digital age’ characterized by unprecedented volumes of information circulating at speeds and on scales never before imaginable is already so commonplace as to be prosaic. It is widely agreed that the internet has revolutionized communication, enabling more and more people to participate as producers as well as consumers of knowledge, paving the way, some argue, for ever more transparent and democratic futures. Others have sounded notes of caution, pointing to the persistence in many places of ‘digital divides’ between rich and poor, old and young, rural and urban, empowered and oppressed (e.g. Ginsburg, 2008), and to the uses and abuses of digital resources such as the internet and television as tools of government or corporate propaganda as much as for political and economic emancipation. What seems indisputable, though, is that as digital technologies become more accessible (in the form of computers, cell phones, cameras, Blu-ray and MP3 players and TVs, iPhones, tablets and Wiis) increasing numbers of people are becoming ‘digital subjects’ – social actors whose experiences, thoughts and relationships play out through and across an ever-expanding variety of digital platforms.

Among these digital subjects, as noted above, are many people concerned with issues that are often grouped under the rubric of ‘culture’ in its anthropological sense(s). For some, global digitization appears as a threat to minorities (Ess, 2002), encouraging cultural imperialism by extending the reach of corporate brands and imposing standardizations via platforms (like Microsoft Windows), formats (JPEGs, MPEGs etc.), interfaces (such as those employed by Facebook) and the languages primarily used for communication (notably English). Within the information sciences, similar concerns are voiced about the dominance of certain programming languages over others and the development of ‘meta-ontologies’ like Dublin Core and associated vocabularies such as OpenCyc (see http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/upperont-diagram.html) (Boast et al., 2007; Jones, 2008). Others couch their concerns in terms of the ownership and control of digital objects, in particular those that may be regarded as forms of cultural or intellectual property, and focus on developing ways in which accessibility, reproduction and re-use might be managed and policed (examples in Brown and Nicholas, 2012, this issue; Coombe and Herman, 2004; Sullivan, 2002). Still others see the internet and associated software and applications as an opportunity for heterogeneity to flourish, and dedicate themselves to the proliferation of culturally-marked digital objects, such as the Māori interface for Google, the use of digital platforms to broadcast culturally distinctive content (or to circulate it among limited groups), and the general mobilization and dissemination of their culture via digital channels. In these and other ways, digital worlds have become new sites for cultural production, and as such are of great interest to scholars of culture as well as to cultural producers themselves.

In academia, this interest has manifested itself partly in ethnographies of internet use or programming practice in specific places (Chan, 2004; contributions in Landzelius, 2006; Slater and Miller, 2000) or of transnational online ‘communities’ (Jones, 1995), as well as in studies of the cultures and politics of phenomena such as the Open Source Software and Creative Commons movements (Kelty and contributors, 2004; Leach et al., 2009) or analyses related to consumer usage patterns, funded by purveyors of digital technology such as Intel and British Telecom. Yet scholars are digital subjects too, and new technologies have transformed the methods they use in their research, as much as it has their objects of study. Anthropologists, for example, are increasingly involved in developing digital archives and research environments of the kind mentioned above, often working collaboratively with indigenous colleagues (Christen, 2005, 2006, 2007; Flick and Goodall, 1996; Pigliasco, 2009; Povinelli, 2011a, 2011b; Povinelli and Cho, 2008). Similar initiatives are proliferating in museums seeking to engage in more meaningful ways with ‘source communities’ and in tribal museums and cultural centres run by community organizations (Boast et al., 2007; Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007; Geismar and Mohns, 2011; Hunter et al., 2004; Phillips, 2005; Srinivasan, 2006, 2007; Srinivasan et al., 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). In disciplines such as history, as Newell (2012) explores in her contribution to the present issue, developments in database and internet technology have opened new possibilities for collating and organizing unwieldy bodies of evidence that in turn suggest novel ways of approaching historical questions (Rosenzweig, 2011; Seefeldt and Thomas, 2009; Turnbull, 2000; Turnbull and Fallu, 2008). The digitization of archival materials and rare published sources that were formerly difficult to access without expensive travel have opened up a range of historical specializations to a broader constituency of scholars, and is allowing connections to be made between dispersed evidence that once relied more heavily on a combination of luck and time available for trawling the archive (Cohen and Rosenzweig, 2005). Work in this and related fields, collectively described as the Digital Humanities, has already spawned new research groups, ¹ departments and university chairs.

This kind of research has capitalized on several decades of investment in digitization on the part of libraries, museums, galleries and archives, which have sought to exploit the possibilities offered by digital media for managing their collections, as well as for increasing public access to and developing knowledge about the material they hold. In the process, these institutions have created countless digital ‘surrogates’ of objects, images, publications and manuscript material, in the form of database records, electronic transcripts, digital images, sound files, video footage and even 3D scans, all of which are seen to add value in an auxiliary sense to the original object. Yet such innovative solutions throw up as many problems as opportunities – given that researchers often need to collate material of different types from different sources, for example, how is this technically possible when institutions have catalogued their collections using different programs built on different platforms? When platforms become outmoded or obsolete, how is the transition to new ones managed (is it managed?) and what protections are in place to ensure important data are not lost? Given that restrictions are sometimes placed on the ways in which certain kinds of material objects may be handled, for reasons of culture or conservation, should the same not also be true for digital material, as Brown and Nicholas (2012) suggest here? What provisions exist for audiences to comment and contribute their own knowledge to the information stored by institutions? Who should own and control the dissemination of that knowledge? And what is the nature and value of digital objects themselves, both in relation to the original items they ostensibly ‘stand for’, and in their own right, as cultural and historical artefacts?

Cultural objects

Whereas much of the literature exploring these questions focuses on North America and Australia, a number of people have been thinking through these issues in interesting ways in New Zealand, especially in relation to the digitization of Māori cultural objects, including artefacts, images and manuscript material held in archives and museums. In August 2008, for example, Hinureina Mangan convened a conference at Ngāruawāhia to discuss the digitization of taonga Māori, broadly defined as ‘those possessions that [Māori kin groups] consider to be the most precious and valued, and are handed on to succeeding generations to ensure … identity and whakapapa [genealogy, oral histories] remains intact’. In light of ‘the increased interest by [Māori kin groups] to have their taonga tuku iho ² digitized or captured on some electronic format’, Mangan urged conference participants to consider the role of Māori principles such as tikanga, kaupapa and kawa in the digitization process, and how these might affect the ability of Māori groups to engage confidently with new technologies and to quickly disseminate traditional knowledge amongst themselves. Looking to the future, delegates were asked ‘what might the technologies look like’ in 2050 and whether they thought that cultural principles would play ‘a significant role in the protection, preservation, maintenance, storage and dissemination of [digital] taonga tuku iho’ (Mangan, 2008). Similar issues have clearly been raised within national and civic institutions like Auckland Art Gallery, which until recently requested visitors to its online collections database to restrict their viewing of Māori digital images to ‘study areas only’, noting: ‘The presence of food and drink or display in inappropriate ways will denigrate their spiritual significance’ (Francis and Liew, 2009; see also Brown, 2008).

Whereas some Māori (and institutions) are thus concerned to establish protocols to ensure that digital subjects deal with digital objects in culturally appropriate ways, others style their own approach to digital taonga as more ‘pragmatic’. As Ngata et al. (2012) explore in this issue, Toi Hauiti, a working group of the tribe Te Aitanga a Hauiti on the East Coast of New Zealand, has been developing innovative digital projects over the last decade that are primarily designed to facilitate their kin-group’s economic, cultural and artistic revitalization and development. For them, a digital object’s taonga status is relationally defined, so that what might be a taonga for one person is ‘just an artefact’ for someone else. This has implications for the ways in which people interact with digital objects, and how they circulate, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all approach to these dynamic and potent things may not be the best way to define what is, or is not, ‘appropriate’. Hauiti’s digital creativity has ranged from ‘tele-tangis’ – traditional funerals broadcast live over the internet – through school children building interactive 3D environmental simulations of local landscapes, to a planned full-scale hologram reassembly of an ancestral meeting house, Te Kani a Takirau, the carved panels of which are physically distributed among several international museums. Now engaged in a collaborative project with an interdisciplinary team at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge to build a digital repository designed to reassemble tribal taonga dispersed across the world, Hauiti are leading the field in New Zealand and beyond when it comes to ‘virtual repatriation’.

For the Moriori people of Rēkohu (the Chatham Islands, west of New Zealand), digital technologies also offer a way to gather and weave back together the kaupapa or fabric of their scattered heritage. In their contribution to this issue, Solomon and Thorpe (2012) describe the methods and technologies that Moriori are using to preserve their taonga for present and future generations, as teaching tools vital to the revival of artistic traditions like tree carving, and as media through which to promote knowledge of their environment, history and their endangered native language. Using a software system gifted by its Aboriginal Australian developers together with a methodology for tagging video-recorded interviews filmed in local landscapes, alongside laser scanning of their unique rākau momori (dendroglyphs), Moriori are developing an extensive database of cultural landscapes, elder stories, traditional practices and digital records of their taonga. They are now embarking on a digital repatriation project to bring records of Moriori artefacts in international museums together onto an intranet accessible to the Islands’ people. The idea is to form curatorial partnerships that allow the exchange of information in digital form between the museums and this much-studied yet often misrepresented indigenous community.

Māori and Moriori people are thus taking a lead in the innovative practice and reconceptualization of new technologies for their own purposes, a process which has a long history in relation to earlier indigenous technological innovations (Brown, 2008; see also Brown and Nicholas, this issue, and Henare [Salmond], 2007). And these are not isolated examples; in 2006, for instance, representatives of some 20 Māori iwi or tribal organizations gathered at a conference at the national museum in Wellington to discuss each others’ taonga database projects, designed to record and reassemble knowledge about dispersed ancestral heritage. ³ The meeting focused on practical issues such as how to develop relationships with museums as well as the choice of software and collection management systems tribal groups might use to store information about their taonga, now and in the future. Delegates also discussed how indigenous researchers could work with their communities to determine the purpose of their database projects and to establish different levels of access rights to the information stored therein. ⁴ These ‘grass-roots’ initiatives continue, and have meanwhile given momentum to further Māori-driven experiments in digitization; for instance, a project to compile an international inventory of Māori taonga in all the world’s museums. Led by Arapata Hakiwai at Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum, the ‘Virtual Repatriation’ project plans to electronically compile records of objects harvested from diverse collections management systems in order to bring these objects and the knowledge they embody back to Māori people in digital form.

‘Virtual’ taonga and digital reciprocation

Like Toi Hauiti, Moriori people and others have taken up the term ‘digital taonga’ to describe digitized aspects of their culture, a usage that raises important questions about the fundamental nature of digital objects and their relationship to the ‘physical’ objects they may reference. Brown (2008), for example, appears to support a distinction between ‘real taonga’, defined as cultural properties that are valued as originals, on the one hand, and ‘virtual taonga’, intellectual properties ‘which can be replicated perfectly with each copy being as valuable as the first’, on the other. Elsewhere, however, using the analogy of photography (a technology quickly appropriated by Māori for their own purposes in the early 20th century), she indicates that the same properties held to inhere in ‘real’ taonga – such as mana, tapu, ihi, wehi and wana ⁵ – may also inhere in their digital surrogates. Like some photographs, furthermore, Brown (2008: 63) suggests, digital objects may have their own mauri (life force, life essence), so that, as ‘born-digital’ objects like the augmented and virtual reality programs discussed below proliferate, ‘they will also be regarded as taonga’ in their own right. This sense, that there is nothing ‘virtual’ about digital taonga – at least in Māori terms – is strengthened by her discussion of how Māori kawa (behavioural principles and protocols) might be extended into the digital domain, in the production, storage and display of Māori digital objects, a theme also picked up in Ngata et al.’s contribution to the present issue.

Digital objects were perhaps first specifically identified as taonga in Wai 262, a longstanding claim for government recognition of, and reparation for, resources lost through colonization (Solomon, one of the contributors to this special issue, is legal counsel for some of the claimants). In the amended Statement of Claim lodged by the Ngāti Porou tribal confederation (including Te Aitanga a Hauiti) it is asserted that, under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, Ngāti Porou are guaranteed ‘te tino rangatiratanga ⁶ over, and full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of all taonga’, including artistic works and cultural taonga, specifically embracing ‘documentation of Ngāti Porou mātauranga me ngā tikanga ⁷ in any medium (whether photographic, audio only, audio visual, written or otherwise recorded and whether by analogue or digital means) and wherever expressions (or reproductions of copies thereof) of Ngāti Porou mātauranga me ngā tikanga are stored, collected or otherwise housed’ (Waitangi Tribunal, 2006). ⁸ This phrasing deliberately incorporates both digital surrogates (records of other taonga) and ‘born-digital’ objects, such as the computer-animated characters with Māori names that were the subject of a Māori legal challenge against the Danish company Lego in 2001 (Coombe and Herman, 2004).

In light of such high-profile instances, where Māori have emphasized the value of digital objects as taonga, as well as similar moves on the part of other indigenous groups internationally, ⁹ it is perhaps unsurprising to find museums and archives seizing on the idea of ‘virtual repatriation’ as a potential way of responding to claims made on the part of originating communities for greater access to – if not the physical return of – parts of their cultural heritage held in these institutions’ collections. Indeed, museums and similar organizations in New Zealand appear to have been quite receptive to Māori initiatives to assemble digital archives of their dispersed taonga, as the National Museum-sponsored 2006 taonga database meeting, and Ngata et al. (2012, this issue) attest. Elsewhere, in places such as Canada and Australia, museums have even spearheaded the development of digital environments designed to encourage access to their collections on the part of ‘source communities’, ¹⁰ such as the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) ¹¹ based at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of British Columbia, an initiative co- developed with the Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council, and the U’Mista Cultural Society, involving partnership with several international museums. Another example is the Australian Museum’s Virtual Museum of the Pacific, ¹² which, like the RRN, incorporates social media components designed to ‘enable Pacific Island community members, researchers, and the general public to add comments, discuss objects and upload their own stories, images and even videos’ (Van Olffen, 2009). In some ways, it is surprising to see museums so willing to publicize their data, given prevalent institutional concerns to retain reproduction rights and associated controls over material in their collections. Yet, as Hogsden and Poulter (2012, this issue) explore in their discussion of museums and ‘digital contact networks’, curators clearly see benefits in collaborating with tribal groups and others on projects that may increase their own store of knowledge about the material they hold. On the other hand, it does not seem far-fetched to hypothesize that some museums may regard ‘digital repatriation’ as an alternative (rather than a precursor) to the ‘real’ return of artefacts that some tribal groups clearly have in mind as the endgame of carefully cultivated institutional relationships.

Looking at the effects of digitizing museum objects on issues of access, ownership and meaning, Hogsden and Poulter focus on the problematic ontological status of digital objects, exploring their distinctive relational capacities. Noting how the ‘real’ and the digital object are often treated in both theory and practice as diametrically opposed, they argue that this separation limits the affordances of digital forms, constraining the ways in which people can approach and use them relationally. Analyzing projects based at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) and the British Museum, they offer the model of the ‘digital contact network’ – reciprocally networked systems in which control and ownership of content and access protocols lies with each individual node. In exploring these still unfolding case studies, they argue that such networks enable the unique qualities of digital objects to emerge, providing platforms for effective engagement and what they call ‘digital reciprocation’ – as opposed to ‘digital repatriation’.

Virtual and augmented reality

Another, related, set of initiatives involving digital taonga reveals contestable differences – as well as similarities – between so-called ‘digital surrogates’ and ‘born-digital’ taonga. These projects – described and analyzed by Brown (2008), among others – involve Māori researchers and their colleagues developing multidimensional Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) presentations that incorporate ‘virtual’ objects, people and environments – some based closely on reality, others less so – into dynamic, interactive displays in which audiences participate (to varying degrees), often within museum settings. Brown has written about Virtual Patu, a project that produced a 3D digital version of a Māori patu (in this case an unprovenanced wahaika or cleaver in Canterbury Museum) which was made accessible via the ‘Magic Book’ augmented reality interface developed by the company HIT Lab; she has also discussed Te Āhu Hiko (The Digital Form), an experimental project in which Māori performers were digitized three-dimensionally, ‘then electronically inserted into a Māori animated environment, to be played back as an AR display’, also at Canterbury Museum. A third project, SimPa, based at Otago Polytechnic, seeks to develop 3D computer games incorporating Māori stories, in an effort to ‘convey and strengthen Māori culture, tikaka and knowledge using innovative and cutting edge technology’ (Mann and Russell, 2010).

What these projects have in common is an interest in generating more complex and involved experiences for digital subjects than those offered simply by viewing photographs or text, via digital technology that in some ways seeks to replace intimate engagement with ‘real’ persons, objects and environments, often where such encounters are not possible. Similar examples are examined by Newell (2012), in this issue, who considers what is lost in processes of digitization as well as what may be gained. Discussing examples from the UK, Australia and the Pacific, she explores how the proliferation of digital objects created by museums and archives is transforming the ways in which people, including scholars and members of indigenous groups, engage with the past. Against the celebratory tone of much writing on the use of digital media in scholarship and museums, she sounds a note of caution, offering critical insights into the unintended consequences of making the sifting of sources easier and collections more accessible. While, on the one hand, digital research environments allow people to virtually assemble collections from a range of geographically scattered locations, thus enabling new juxtapositions and encouraging greater awareness of the multiplicity of possible subject positions, including indigenous perspectives, on the other hand, such technologies allow people to avoid the kind of systematic combing of archives or opportunistic browsing that can produce serendipitous discoveries and deeper contextual insights. Affect is another thread running through Newell’s analysis, and she paints an evocative picture of how digital objects may, or may not, recast the emotional and sensory impact of ‘the real thing’. Taking the example of Oscar’s Sketchbook, a program developed as an interactive display to accompany the fragile book itself in a temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Australia, she explores how digital technologies cannot replace the physical objects they reference, but can sometimes become, for some people, ‘artefacts of complex pasts in their own right’.

Indigenous Australia, as Elizabeth Povinelli (2011a: 161) has noted, is indeed currently experiencing a ‘virtual explosion (or, a virtual explosion)’ (original emphases) of innovative digital projects that seek to represent, to Aboriginal people and others, the legacy of colonial histories. Discussing initiatives to develop what she calls digital ‘post-colonial archives’, Povinelli raises the same issues of ontological incommensurability that were introduced at the beginning of this introduction. Claiming that the job of indigenous archive projects ‘is not merely to collect subaltern histories’, she argues that they must also address the meta-ontology of ‘the archive’ itself, which in turn generates a series of pressing questions for anyone developing a digital repository:

What kinds of managements – trainings and exercises of objects and subjects – are necessary for something to be archived? Does an object need to become ‘an object’ within a certain theory of grammar before it can be locatable? What kinds of manipulations simply make the objects within the archive more usable but never touch their status as an archived collection, say … when the creation of a digital index mandates the Web-based document be marked with metadata? Rearranging the stacking and boxing; providing an index; providing metadata that allows search functions: why don’t, or how do, these acts of reassemblage touch the status of the archive?

Povinelli’s aim is to foreground the ways in which cultural and scholarly repositories have played instrumental roles in projects of nationalism, inclusion and exclusion, defining publics and their Others, and standing as monuments to states, colonies and empires. To archive is a political act, part of a politics of recognition that decides who and what is significant, and who and what doesn’t matter (see also Geismar and Mohns, 2011). More than merely what may be represented, what ‘is’, in the ontology of the archive, is that which is recognized as worthy of inclusion. Digital archives are no exception, and, in discussing examples of projects that attempt to push code beyond its philosophical and ontological limits, she cautions us not to forget that ‘all digital commons, colonial or post-colonial, must be written in a code that assumes the social is a set of rules that can be written to operate independent of social context’ (p. 164; see also Povinelli, 2011b: 11).

For Povinelli, however, such ontologies have a certain (albeit conservative and slow-moving) dynamism, and it is therefore worth trying to push the envelope. Among the projects she discusses that challenge the ‘specific circulatory matrix’ of new media are those developed by anthropologist Kimberley Christen and her Central Australian Warumungu collaborators. In ‘Digital dynamic across cultures’, for example, ¹³ Povinelli notes, visitors must negotiate ‘two forms of sociability: stranger sociability and [Warumungu] kinship sociability’ to access content, the availability of which shifts between one site visit and the next, precluding the possibility of visitors being able to ‘systematically … know “the Other”’. The point is for readers to experience (rather than simply be told about) Warumungu protocols for sociality and the circulation of knowledge, including their potentially frustrating limits and restrictions. Instead of being able to freely navigate content at will, they are forced to adopt a certain (digital) subject position vis-à-vis ‘a differently organized social world in which all people, except “you”, have a place based on territorially embedded kinship and ritual relations’ (Povinelli, 2011a: 157). This adds up to a subtle and performative critique against ‘those who would argue for all intellectual knowledge to circulate freely in an open information commons’ (p. 162), in favour of ‘a system of “protocols” that limit access to information or to images in accordance with Aboriginal systems of accountability’ (Christen and Cooney, 2006).

In a project to turn her own archive of fieldwork-generated video footage, sound files and images into an Augmented Reality ‘land-based “living library”’ of geo-tagged media files, that ‘would be playable only within a certain proximity of a physical site’ (Povinelli, 2011b: 10), Povinelli and her co-developers sought to ‘challenge dominant archival logics’ at the level of code by ‘securing’ the digital archive ‘to an alternative sociology and geontology’ through which their Aboriginal collaborators defined the purpose of their own emplaced and embodied knowledge (Povinelli, 2011a: 160). The idea, she writes,

was to develop software that creates three unique interfaces – for tourists, land management, and indigenous families, the latter having management authority over the entire project and content – and provide a dynamic feedback loop for the input of new content and media. (Povinelli, 2011b: 10)

In aiming to create new kinds of digital objects that could accommodate, for instance, ‘in-place beings’ called nyuidji, the spirit of specific people absorbed in the land who may appear to living people, Povinelli became frustrated at how digital media ‘does not open itself up to make room for a new object so much as it makes a demand on how the object gives itself over to the spacing’ (Povinelli, 2011b: 10). Reflecting on lessons learned from this experimental stage, she points out that

all objects that are placed into our augmented reality project are treated according to specific software routes that create semantic worldings. No matter which semantic ideology underpins this routing – such as the new Ontological Web Language (OWL) – it nevertheless demands that the entextualized memory and knowledge conform to it.

She goes on to neatly encapsulate a persistent meta-ontological quandary for indigenous deployments of ICTs:

Although many postcolonial archives and digital projects seek to develop software that would encode local protocols of information circulation and retrieval – such as restrictions based on kinship, gender, or ritual status – it remains that, in order to be part of the global condition of the contemporary internet, such information must be universally available before it can be sorted based on user particularities. In other words, user protocols – the software that takes into account local social principles of circulation and retrieval – are always secondary and subordinate to the structure of the Web itself. (Povinelli, 2011b)

A similar critique of universal metadata standards and metaontological vocabularies in relation to indigenous uses of the internet is offered by Boast et al. (2007), who explore the potential of Web 2.0 social media technologies such as RSS, blogs, tagging and folksonomies to allow multiple ontologies to flourish in a virtual environment otherwise dominated by Enlightenment principles of freedom and transparency of knowledge. They too however come up against the same impasse as Povinelli, acknowledging that tagging, for example, ‘retains the meta-ontological model of many disparate ontologies resolved by one dominant descriptive ontology’. They go on: ‘It is access to this descriptive ontology, or its relegation to “one among many”, that we advocate here’ (Boast et al., 2007: 401, emphasis in original). While Boast et al. were unable to offer a specific solution to this problem, Helen Verran and Michael Christie (2007) have addressed the same issue in a project to develop a software program called TAMI (Text, Audio, Movies, Images), designed to allow indigenous groups to assemble and perform their own media accounts of place. Povinelli (2011a: 158–159) notes that:

TAMI would use novel base-code to flatten the ontological pre-suppositions of the metadata organizing most digital archives … The only a priori ontological distinction Verran and Christie hope would be in play in their database would be the distinction between texts, audio, movies and images.

Whilst this project has not yet been fully realized, it appears that similar activity surrounding the development of the Semantic Web is starting to successfully address at least some of these issues of ontological multiplicity and incommensurability, as noted earlier in this introduction.

The examples in this special issue show that, for tribal groups seeking to reunite their material heritage, now distributed among museums and archives across the world, digital applications are of great interest as vehicles for reassembling these far-flung (potential) taonga, creating ‘virtual’ objects and environments with which their young people can engage and interact, and allowing aspects of their identity to be promoted and disseminated among themselves and (sometimes) to broader audiences. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, further sparking the interest of younger generations, they are also increasingly seen not only as crucial to preservation and conservation but to ongoing creative development. Yet tensions inevitably arise when cultural heritage is treated as a creative resource, whether by its ‘owners’ or (more problematically) by those considered as outsiders.

Digitization and intellectual/cultural property

Here we arrive at the hotly contested nexus of (digital) power and property relations, where indigenous claims over cultural properties frequently conflict with intellectual and other property rights asserted by individuals and institutions, and where Open Source activists may find their popular politics of resistance to entrenched capitalist and legal power structures rejected by the very minority groups they may once have regarded as natural allies. As museums and archives make their collections more and more publicly accessible, they increasingly have to justify the rights with which they are legally invested over the material they hold, and to field claims for access to information and the repatriation of artefacts from people who dispute those rights, and who regard parts of the collections as different kinds of property, belonging to themselves. Similar discussions go on in cyberspace, among individuals and interest groups holding widely diverging views on the ownership of digital objects and what constitutes ethical management in relation to the usage, reproduction and copyright of these forms. Kelty (2004: 505) and others, for example, have drawn attention to paradoxical aspects of the Open Source and Creative Commons movements, noting how ‘the practices of alternative property creation and circulation represented by free software or Creative Commons [may be] less alternative than the practitioners would like to think’. Citing Coombe and Herman, who analyze the Māori vs. Lego controversy, Kelty goes on to note that ‘Rather than opening up any true space for alternative cultural practices, [the authors] suggest that this alternative simply re-inscribes the same “limited liability, responsibility, and accountability that its corporate nemesis has traditionally assumed”’ (p. 505). Similar charges have been levelled at the Māori legal minds behind Wai 262 and Lego controversy, for appropriating ‘foreign’ concepts of intellectual property (Van Meijl, 2009b). There are no obvious political alliances here, in a world where politically left-wing theorists are surprised to find themselves on the opposite side of the fence from the minorities whose rights and equality of opportunity they thought they were defending. (This uncomfortable position is of course not peculiar to practices surrounding digitization; the large and burgeoning literature on the relationship of cultural and intellectual property rights in general is substantially preoccupied with the ways in which such rights conflict – see, for example, contributions in Geismar, 2008, and Van Meijl, 2009a).

In the final contribution to this issue, Brown and Nicholas present a comparative study of the social and legal measures employed by Canadian First Nations and Māori peoples in the protection, preservation, repatriation and promotion of their digital cultures. They show how indigenous initiatives that resist or respond to the digitization and electronic dissemination of cultural ‘objects’ can be seen as a continuation of reactive, and sometimes creative, social processes that have endured for almost a century. Their comparison also reveals the limited utility of conventional legal measures in protecting indigenous cultural and intellectual property, which generally fall outside the protection of copyrights and patents. Brown and Nicholas’s analysis highlights some of the difficulties of adapting traditional protocols – native and otherwise – to novel technologies and vice versa. Decisions about access and dissemination of knowledge that would formerly have been directed by whakapapa (genealogy, or, more specifically, one’s position within a family hierarchy) are now being bypassed, determined increasingly instead by who has better access to digital resources. Again critiquing the ‘free information’ ethos of the internet, they ask how the mana (authority) of elders can be kept intact in the face of rapid technological development.

Conclusion

Together, the articles in this issue offer insights into the latest developments in the field of digital technologies as they relate to the social sciences and humanities, and especially their deployment by indigenous groups and institutions in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK. The focus of most authors at least in part on New Zealand adds a new and largely unpublished dimension to the literature in this area, and allows some interesting points of comparison to emerge. Of particular interest, for example, is that while many Māori groups, like their North American and Australian counterparts, have seized on digital media as tools of cultural continuity and dynamism, there has not been the same level of interest in (or perhaps rather resources available for) physical repositories such as cultural centres and tribal museums. The concept of ‘digital taonga’ poses similarly provocative questions, in this case about another ‘digital divide’ – between digital objects as mere representations and ‘the real thing’ – suggesting that the ‘virtues’ of ‘virtual’ objects (Strathern, 2002, see also Ngata et al., 2012, this issue) might again be profitably addressed. The notions of ‘digital contact networks’ and ‘digital reciprocity’ introduced by Hogsden and Poulter (2012, this issue) are also ripe for comparison with other, similar initiatives in other settings.