Session 3

This presentation aims to give an overview of kulturminnesok.no and discuss the key functionality as well as the perceived benefits of the site in context of a distributed and collaborative documentation and dissemination of digital cultural heritage. It also tries to discuss a way forward for the site and its core concepts regarding added value, both in the context of the users and communities that are participating, as well as in relationship to the Directorate of Cultural Heritage and the broader cultural heritage management community.

Kulturminnesok.no is a website and a long-term project from the Directorate of Cultural Heritage in Norway. It was launched in 2009 in connection with the Norwegian Year of Cultural Heritage. Its main goal is dissemination of Cultural Heritage to the general public. It shows a subset of the information from the approximately 190.000 objects that is stored in Askeladden, the official and nationwide database for Cultural Heritage in Norway, as well as thousands of photos of these objects from the Directorate of Cultural Heritage´s photo-database. In addition to this the site also allows the general public to participate and register their own content in the form of user-generated Heritage objects, or upload photos on all kinds of objects as well as post comments and links. Since 2012 when the functionality for user-generated content was established, the site´s users have contributed with approximately 10.000 user-generated Heritage objects, 30.000 user-uploaded photos and hundreds of comments and links to other digital resources.

Using historical and anthropological approaches, this paper focusses on the potential for digital technologies to challenge deeply embedded colonial narratives and terminologies in South African museums. It draws on findings developed during a series of collaborative workshops with Zulu-speaking community members, conducted between 2016 – 2019. The seven workshops considered items held at the Iziko Museums of South Africa, specifically a collection of nearly one thousand items classified as Natal Nguni, or Zulu, during the colonial periods. This collection reflects colonial ideas about which items were worth collecting and whose knowledge was considered sufficiently valuable when cataloguing items. During the initial workshops, I encountered stark differences between the information colonial collectors valued and the values attributed to items and information by the communities. Our discussions also revealed other ‘on the ground realities’ that make it more challenging for this descendant community to engage meaningfully with digitised versions of this heritage: unreliable infrastructures in more rural areas; prohibitively high data costs; and literacy and language issues.

The final three-day workshop at Iziko Museum was an attempt to tackle these combined challenges. While the workshop emphasised the process and practice of developing alternative narratives, a tangible outcome was a simple digital tool, a Museum in a Box. Centred around a Raspberry Pi computer, it works with Near-field communication tags attached to postcard images or 3D prints of artefacts. When the tag contacts the shoebox-size Box, the artefact it is attached to starts “talking,” giving the oral history through the Box’s built-in speaker. The process of producing the Box—participants identifying artefacts that resonate for them, recording the oral histories they produce about the artefacts, photographing and 3D printing their selected artefacts—not only captured important and accessible data for the long-term, but also reiterated the fact that the Zulu-speaking partners are experts in the knowledge production process by taking seriously their choices and stories.