digital archive

by Eugenia Kisin
Spring 2018
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

Shadow Lines is a digital database and mapping project that traces the movement of Native American-made objects into collecting institutions and between communities. Expanding on objects as the material of social relations, Shadow Lines explores the relational cultures of collecting, and how these intersect with complex histories of settler occupation, resource extraction, and knowledge production across ancestral and unceded Indigenous territories and within the discipline of anthropology—mapping, for instance, Penobscot landscapes, stories, and objects that trace a river’s movement in relation to a history of struggle over hydroelectric dams.

Shadow Lines is also itself a relational project. It was conceived in collaboration between NYU anthropologist Jane Anderson, UC Santa Cruz historian Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), and UMass Amherst archaeologist Sonia Atalay (Anishinabe). So far, the project’s archival and community-based research has been carried out in collaboration with the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Karuk tribes. It has also involved undergraduate and graduate students across the collaborators’ institutions in both research and data entry, as well as in the larger theoretical questions about how to do geospatial research in a decolonizing framework, given that mapping is so often deployed as a colonial technology of rule.

I joined the Shadow Lines team in 2017, hoping to expand the research on this project with Gallatin students. Jane and I were awarded a Gallatin Teaching-with-Technology Grant to hire a team of student research assistants and a data consultant to work on several prototypes, with the goal of producing several different database and digital interface possibilities for representing our research on objects, people, landscapes, and the links between them in a decolonial way.

“Over the course of the semester, I was struck by how the students worked with the data in ways that also extended the collaborative spirit of the project.”

In my Material Practices in Museum Anthropology graduate elective, students in Gallatin and Museum Studies, including two Gallatin undergraduates, worked with our data sheets and prototypes to propose future directions for Shadow Lines. As an anthropologist who works with First Nations and Native American artists on the Northwest Coast of North America as they engage their work in social and environmental struggles, I was (and continue to be) particularly interested in how the removal of objects from communities for museums might be related to the expansion of infrastructure for transportation and resource extraction, through the actions of particular collectors or through settler expansion into Indigenous-controlled territories. As with most Digital Humanities projects, these are scholarly questions of interest to anthropologists and historians; however, the geospatial tools are powerful and public ways of visualizing them with students and communities trying to reconnect with their cultural property.

Students in Museum Anthropology took these questions and digital applications on enthusiastically. Working in teams of four, students decided on a theme on which they wanted to focus a technological and museological intervention. These were: “Belongings,” a focus on the social lives of collections from the viewpoint of communities of origin; “Narrative,” which involved moving beyond geospatial data to focus on the relationships between anthropologists and institutions; “Accessibility,” which focused on building more accessible technology for Elders and users with disabilities, particularly visual impairments, through SmartScribe technology; and “Extraction,” which was centered on issues of representing trauma and affect in European collecting institutions around the forced removal of cultural heritage.

Over the course of the semester, I was struck by how the students worked with the data in ways that also extended the collaborative spirit of the project. For example, the “Belongings” group assembled a toolkit for future student research with museums that would facilitate the archival research process by listing the kinds of questions one should ask an archivist, and how to navigate the different departments in such institutions (e.g. the registrar’s office, library, special collections, etc.) to triangulate different lines of evidence; similarly, the “Extraction” group responded directly to our Penobscot collaborators’ calls for more research in Europe, and carried out initial catalog-based research with collections held at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris that had been misattributed to Abenaki peoples—a significant archival find that also emphasized the value of collections-based research in digital projects.

Jane and I will continue to teach with Shadow Lines as our partnerships with our collaborators deepen. We also have plans to link the project with other research and teaching: Jane’s project Local Contexts, a system of TK (Traditional Knowledge) labels and legal resources that Indigenous communities may use to mark and extend existing protocols around the digital access of cultural materials; and Eugenia’s interests in contemporary artists’ work with collections as a practice of cultural resilience, exemplified in Penobscot artist, anthropologist, and educator Jennifer Neptune’s reproduction of a beaded ceremonial chief’s collar held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Shadow Lines has been a useful teaching tool for activating such relations around museum collections, as we grapple with what decolonizing digital pedagogy can be in the context of the university.

by Lisa Daily
Spring 2018
(Teaching-with-Technology Grant Awardee)

The idea for the class emerged from my own burgeoning research in the field of humanitarianism and digital media, especially with a critical interest in this idea that virtual reality is the “ultimate empathy machine”—technologies that finally enable spectators to realize their true empathetic potential to care for suffering distant others. To study this current fascination with VR/AR in the humanitarian-sphere, however, required that students first understand several interrelated histories: that of humanitarianism—its institutionalization, its paternalism, its decision-making processes and messy politics—and developments in technologies of representation and circulation. Thus, the course was as much a historical survey of humanitarianism as it was about the technologies of representation that serve to document, bear witness, inform, and advertise humanitarian crises.

After an opening 4-week unit on histories of humanitarianism, the course focused on visuality as it develops within capitalism to address issues of scopic regimes, attention, and the subjectivity of vision in the modern era. Next, the course turned to a unit on The Violence of Looking/ Looking at Violence in order to begin thinking about issues related to suffering, what it means to bear witness, photographing atrocity, collective memory, and “the famine formula.” While our texts did not explicitly historicize images, through lectures I discussed the transition from painting to early photography (especially with the case of photography in the Congo Free State), and then on to film, documentaries, social media, celebrity involvement, and concerts such as the 1985 Live Aid concerts. This unit also brought up the idea of “compassion fatigue” and the ways in which markets and competing humanitarian organizations must vie for this attention from potential spectator-consumer-donors. The final unit, Digital Cultures & the Age of Solidarity, critically engaged with shifts in donor-responses to humanitarian appeals, what Lilie Chouliaraki deems a “new emotionality” of the “ironic spectator.” This unit examined case studies such as KONY 2012, hashtag activism and other social media engagements, celebrity interventions, and then virtual and augmented reality.

Technology functioned in the course in a variety of ways: the course had a Web Publishing site for readings, blogging, and news sharing; students partook in a semester-long digital media archiving project; three students worked with digital content through embedded internships at Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, and Shared Studios, a fascinating tech-portal company; several students opted for a creative final project that sought to ‘intervene’ in some way to existing media discourses of particular humanitarian crises; and we engaged with numerous virtual reality “experiences” using cardboard VR goggles.

Building a Digital Archive

Whether it be monitoring media coverage of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria or following the ongoing crisis of the Rohingya, the purpose of the digital media archiving project was to track a particular humanitarian crisis broadly conceived through its online media coverage as well as the circulation of related images, modes of representation, hashtags, humanitarian organization action, state actors, and so forth. Students were asked to monitor how a particular event/crisis was being discussed online, who was having those conversations, where, and in what context. Additionally, students pursued independent research so as to learn about the historical, political, economic, and social context(s) of the crises, their emergence(s), and conjunctures. While the digital archive is never complete, students were asked at the conclusion of the semester to review their archival content and offer a reflection on its findings and limitations. To track archives, most students used a pre-made Google Form (thanks to Bruno Guaraná!) and others established Tumblr pages. The openness of the assignment allowed students to pursue particular themes, events, and places of interest to them; projects were wide-ranging, from solitary confinement to queer humanitarianism, from the Puerto Rican recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to conflict minerals in Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the South African water crisis and Day Zero to The New York Times coverage of the Syrian war since 2011.

For most students, these archives then resulted in a final project that was creative or research-based. For instance, one student offered a comparison between Colombian news and how American news talked about Colombia (especially noting its stereotype as the land of Narcos and now narco-tourist destination). Her final project, “The Gap,” is a creative project using Sutori software and provides a timeline for these comparisons. Another student, Rayyan Dabbous (Gallatin sophomore), analyzed NYT coverage of the Syrian war, noting key terminology in the news spectacle of how Syria was discussed. Impressively, this final paper, “A Syrian Game of Thrones: infotainment and New York Times’ Spectacular Coverage,” was subsequently published in Salon Syria (May 18, 2018) and reprinted by Open Democracy.

Virtual Reality

“One of my goals in the class was to encourage students to not only think about VR as a spectator (as with the goggles), but also to think about that which is not seen through the content itself, such as the infrastructure of the technology, its production, and economic relations.”

As a cultural studies scholar, I firmly believe that understanding a particular object of study must come before any analysis. Thus, to teach critical thinking—about media, virtual reality, humanitarianism, or any other field—first and foremost requires that students are able to describe the object of analysis: its usage and circulation; the ways in which it is talked about and by whom; its cultural and historical context(s), its economic, political, and social factors; its construction and infrastructure; and any ideologies that are placed upon the object (and by whom). Towards this end, students needed to engage with the technology itself. One of my goals in the class was to encourage students to not only think about VR as a spectator (as with the goggles), but also to think about that which is not seen through the content itself, such as the infrastructure of the technology, its production, and economic relations.

With funds from the Teaching with Technology grant, I bought cardboard VR goggles for the class so that students could experience virtual reality. We watched (“experienced”) approximately 10 films, including numerous films produced for United Nations, International Refugee Committee, The New York Times, and Aljazeera. I included two films that might be considered not “humanitarian,” although this is a term we sought to complicate throughout the semester: “After Solitary,” by PBS’s Frontline, which focuses on prisons and solitary confinement; and, “Across the Line,” by Planned Parenthood, which tries to convey what a woman walking into a Planned Parenthood might feel as protesters shout at her. Both films are quite different than most humanitarian virtual reality films and thus, I wanted students to have a comparison to different modes of engaging VR.

With the virtual reality unit not occurring until later in the semester, many students were already thinking critically about how and what is represented within humanitarian disasters and were aware of the shifting content of representation—away from images of those suffering (in-crisis) and towards the joy they experience upon receiving the support of humanitarian intervention (post-crisis). Students acknowledged the compelling stories of the VR films, but easily identified curated content that had come up in previous discussions (a primary focus on women and children; stories of individuals rather than masses of, for instance, refugees; little contextualization—visually within the space as well as in terms of the crisis itself). We also discussed the intended spectator of the films—were we the ideal viewer of these films, as scholars in the field? Students suggested that an unknowing subject was more likely the intended viewer with the VR offering a compelling and emotional introduction to a crisis. Finally, we thought about our own positionality within the virtual reality experience. Unlike 2-D representations on our phones, a newspaper, or a gallery wall for instance, the spectatorial body is supposedly embodied within the world of the image’s subject; it is “more natural” than other regimes of representation. Hence, part of the experiment with bringing virtual reality into the classroom was to engage students in affect—their own feelings and their own bodily reactions to this type of watching. Notably, and as expected, several students got motion-sick from the virtual reality. The majority of students discussed their awareness of the technology—that it was not as neutral as one might assume as compared to our phones or a photograph. One student mentioned how the cracks in her phone screen served as a constant reminder of the technology, as did particular moments of disruption—a text message ping or a news alert. Partly, these effects might have been because of the cardboard goggles, which are somewhat awkward and cumbersome to hold as students watched several films in a row (40 minutes or so). Arms grew weary. Emotional (& motion-sickness) breaks were needed. Those of us who have used permanent goggles (Oculus, etc.) discussed the differences between the two types of screening and its possible effects. Goggles that are strapped to the spectator’s face—a technological extension of the human body—provide a more streamlined viewing and proffer less opportunity for the technology to insert itself (cracked screens, text message notifications, advertisements on YouTube, for example).

By way of conclusion, I’ll turn to a student reflection about the VR experience, “dizzy but also enlightened.” As reflected in student evaluations and self-reflections, the incorporation of technology into the course was a great success, although also a total experiment that I’ll continue to refine in future semesters.