Mark Turin (Anthropology, Cambridge)
Digital Documents and Himalayan Heritage: the Politics of PDFs, Collaborative Collections and Vanishing Videos
In the course of conceiving, building and maintaining an online digital repository of ethnographic documents relating to the greater Himalayan region <www.digitalhimalaya.org>, I have become a willing agent in the rehabilitation of often inaccessible and uncatalogued ‘documents’, and their subsequent dissemination to an ever wider public. In the process of digitisation, ‘objects’ can be transformed into ‘documents’, taking on levels of authenticity and orthodoxy which they may not have had in their analogue forms. The curious paradox of online open access collections is that they exist both everywhere and nowhere at once, at once infinitely replicable and apparently permanent yet tragically impermanent if not backed up and regularly migrated.
On occasion, apparently sensitive documents, such as the 16mm film of the Tibetan Army on a training exercise in 1932 we host online from the Frederick Williamson collection, do not turn out to have the valence that we in the archive imagined. To our surprise, access to this footage is not blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall. How and why does the passage of history depoliticise some documents but repoliticise others?
Intellectual property rights and traditional models of informed consent, which underpinned generations of ethnographic fieldwork, are increasingly inadequate modalities for grappling with the complexities of curating contemporary collections. The resurgence in field linguistics ‘documentation’ programmes, which generate gigabytes of digital ‘documents’ in a wide variety of media formats, has been underwritten by an increasingly collaborative engagement with the communities from whom these documentary products derive. What happens when the source community’s aspirations for the utility of, and access to, such documents is at variance with those of the documenter? Or when we receive requests to amend or withdraw online documents by which the author no longer stands, or when a party feels misrepresented? How will print-on-demand technology transform the availability and longevity of previously marginal documents? Should documentary production be so transparently ‘demand’ driven?
This paper will address some of these issues.
Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in descriptive linguistics from Leiden University where he was affiliated to the Himalayan Languages Project. He has held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities. After many years of residence and research in Nepal, he was appointed Chief of Translation and Interpretation at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), a position which he held from 2007 to 2008. He continues to direct the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge in 2000, and directs the World Oral Literature Project, a Cambridge-based initiative to document and make accessible the oral literatures of indigenous peoples before they disappear without record. He writes and lectures on ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, collections management and anthropological archives at the University of Cambridge.
On occasion, apparently sensitive documents, such as the 16mm film of the Tibetan Army on a training exercise in 1932 we host online from the Frederick Williamson collection, do not turn out to have the valence that we in the archive imagined. To our surprise, access to this footage is not blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall. How and why does the passage of history depoliticise some documents but repoliticise others?
Intellectual property rights and traditional models of informed consent, which underpinned generations of ethnographic fieldwork, are increasingly inadequate modalities for grappling with the complexities of curating contemporary collections. The resurgence in field linguistics ‘documentation’ programmes, which generate gigabytes of digital ‘documents’ in a wide variety of media formats, has been underwritten by an increasingly collaborative engagement with the communities from whom these documentary products derive. What happens when the source community’s aspirations for the utility of, and access to, such documents is at variance with those of the documenter? Or when we receive requests to amend or withdraw online documents by which the author no longer stands, or when a party feels misrepresented? How will print-on-demand technology transform the availability and longevity of previously marginal documents? Should documentary production be so transparently ‘demand’ driven?
This paper will address some of these issues.
Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in descriptive linguistics from Leiden University where he was affiliated to the Himalayan Languages Project. He has held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities. After many years of residence and research in Nepal, he was appointed Chief of Translation and Interpretation at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), a position which he held from 2007 to 2008. He continues to direct the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge in 2000, and directs the World Oral Literature Project, a Cambridge-based initiative to document and make accessible the oral literatures of indigenous peoples before they disappear without record. He writes and lectures on ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, collections management and anthropological archives at the University of Cambridge.
