3. Presenters
Kate Thornhill
Digital Scholarship Librarian
University of Oregon Libraries
April M. Hathcock, JD, LLM, MLIS,
Director of Scholarly Communications and Information Policy
New York University Libraries
Meredith Hale
Metadata Librarian, Assistant Professor
University of Tennessee
Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana
Intellectual Property Manager
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
5. Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing
Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
https://healers.uoregon.edu
About the Digital Project
● Started in 2016 by Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos & Ana
Maurine-Lara at University of Oregon, partnered with
UO Digital Scholarship Services in 2019 after
receiving internal digital scholarship library award
● Over 7 years researchers built relationships with
healers women healers in rural and urban
communities in the Dominican Republic, the Pacific
Northwest, Cuba and Puerto Rico
● Main goal is to give voice to women healers and
ethically document their experiences
● Audio interviews with healers documenting stories and
Healer Gathering Grounds image collection that
displays plants used in cultural practices
6. Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing
Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
https://healers.uoregon.edu
Doña Lydia (left); Abbebe Oshun (top-left); Milady and Amelia
(bottom-right)
Research Methodology
“Deep Listening - a part of, extending beyond
ethnographic participant observation and into the
realm of being in loving community. To listen deeply is
to also listen to dreams, to listen to “the counsel of
spirits and ancestors”. - Abebbe Oshun, 2016
“Deep listening and walking required us to shift from an
emphasis on video clips in our original project
description to audio clips that are not completely clean
of contextual noise. We found that the requirements of
the microphone to secure sound from our interviewees
created an uncomfortable situation in spaces where
knowledge is mostly produced through communal
conversation, questions, and interactions with the
human world and plants.” - Reyes-Santos and Lara,
2019
7. Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing
Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
https://healers.uoregon.edu
IP Protection Methodologies - Centering the Community &
Deep Listening
● Apply ethics of care and do not harm within the open scholarship knowledge sharing
ecosystem
● Listen & ask faculty researchers questions about ownership
● Sharing of closed system traditional knowledge ritualistic methods is not an option
● GPS data was not collection when gathering ground plants were photographed
● Educate Faculty about Copyright & Licensing - What impact does sharing cultural
knowledge and materials have on the healer communities?
● Creative Commons is not a material culture sharing solution
● Educational Use only for the entire project and digital assets. Contact Alai and Ana for
additional purposes.
8. Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing
Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
https://healers.uoregon.edu
Where is Carribean
Women Healers Project
going next?
Awarded W. Mellon Foundation
Just Futures Grant as part of the
formation of a Pacific Northwest
Just Futures Institute
10. Voices Out Loud:
Sharing LGBTQ+ Oral Histories from East Tennessee
Meredith L. Hale, Metadata Librarian, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
mhale16@utk.edu, @UTKDigCollBot, @artrunbrarian
VRA Virtual Conference, March 25, 2021
12. My IP Background & Philosophy
● Tennessee participates in DPLA and supports use of rightsstatements
● Completed CopyrightX course
● Earned Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians
● Aim to balance making information as accessible as possible with the
rights of creators
14. Documentation
“Your participation in this study is voluntary; you may decline to participate without
penalty. If you decide to participate, you may withdraw at any time. If you withdraw
from the project before content collection is completed or before your work is
added to the QHS Archive, your interview/items will be returned to you or
destroyed. If in the future you wish for your interview/items to be removed from the
physical or online QHS Archive, please contact the archivist listed above. We will
edit or void the Deed of Gift, remove it from the QHS Archive, and return or
destroy the submissions at your request.”
Hello and welcome to Session: Power & Respect: Giving Back IRP Rights to Vulnerable Communities.
We want this to be a welcoming space, so please follow the Conference Code of Conduct. Any form of harassment will not be tolerated and may result in removal from virtual Conference.
While we are each coming together in this virtual space from different geographical locations, our panel would like to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional Indigenous keepers of the land, waters, and air, on which we each reside. We give honor to these nations and communities who continue to steward these lands even in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. We also honor all the Black, Indigenous, Asian, and other People of Color communities who continue to struggle for dignity in our societies saturated in white supremacy and oppression.
As a courtesy to our speakers, please keep yourself muted and we encourage you to turn off your video during the presentation.
Please use the chat feature to submit questions at any time. I will be monitoring questions as they come in and ask them to the presenters during the Q&A portion of the presentation. If you would like to ask a question anonymously, please chat with me directly and make sure to indicate that this is an anonymous question.
Intellectual property rights should be recognized as more than who owns this and can you use it. It’s not just can you use it, but should you?
IPR professionals must move beyond the considerations to legal rights and shift to establishing moral right best practices that can influence how we think about ownership. This is not a session about the modernization of copyright. This is not a session about taking rights away from individuals. This is a session about giving rights back to vulnerable communities.
Defenders of strict IPR present all the ways in which these rights protect the creator or inventor, however, IPR also fails. IPR often fails to protect, to represent, to preserve the stories, identities, and ownership of vulnerable communities.
Copyright is innately colonial in practice and structure. Think of the company with a trademark on “Cherokee,” appropriating an entire tribe’s identity. Or the recent ruling granting ownership of exploited black bodies to the white photographer and denying their descendents the opportunity to reclaim their ancestory. How many years has traditional knowledge been used by big pharma to produce mainstream drugs at huge profit to themselves and loss to those communities that it came from.
Because there are so many interesting intersections within the projects and experience of all our presenters, Ww have decided to stray from a traditional format in favor of a more authentic conversation and discussion. First amongst our presenters and then we will invite you all to participate.
Kate:
April:
Meredith: Meredith is the Metadata Librarian at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She manages the creation and sharing of MODS metadata for digitized special collections materials on campus and provides technical support the Digital Library of Tennessee, the state’s DPLA service hub.
Sriba:
Thank you Chelsea
Today I will be briefly speaking about the Caribbean Women Healer’s digital humanities project support by the University of Oregon Libraries Digital Scholarship Services Department
Project that started many years ago by Alai Reyes Santos and Ana Maurine Lara, two researchers at the University of Oregon, before being awarded an internal digital scholarship project award in 2019.
The main goal of this public digital humanities project is to document and showcase the traditional knowledge of women healers who live in rural and urban communities in the Dominican Republic, the Pacific Northwest, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. More specifically, it presents a glimpse into their religious and spiritual practices through oral history clips and an image digital collection representing over 200 medicinal plants used for spiritual and healer practices.
Before I speak briefly about the project in the context of intellectual property rights, understanding the research methodology used by Alai and Ana is importance.
To quote an elder - “Deep Listening is part of, extending beyond ethnographic participant observation and into the realm of being in loving community. To listen deeply is to also listen to dreams, to listen to “the counsel of spirits and ancestors”
Deep Listening is what seeded the collaboration between the researchers and digital scholarship team. It helped to frame what digital modalities and techniques types and choices could be applied to support the public sharing of healer wisdoms and knowledge.
While I worked with Alai and Ana in the early stages of their documentation process, care and protection for the healers was central to the digital methods and techniques used in the project. At the time we started working together, digital humanities was new to Alai and Anna. And how we approached protecting the healers and decolonization their knowledge, needed flow through the entire project.
Together we took deep considerations for what does it mean and what to effect do our choices have on healers if we were to license all content with a Creative Commons license.
Having conversations about copyright and licensing colonization in a digital humanities project context was new for the researchers. While discussing the historical context of the Caribbean Diaspora, some questions we explored included:
What impact on healers would there be if certain information about medicinal plant locations shared online?
What impact does sharing oral histories in video vs audio form have healers?
What information cannot be shared publicly about closed knowledge religious systems?
What photographs of healers are okay to make available on the Internet?
Major outcomes from these conversations included
Educating each other about risk connected to reuse of healer knowledge and material culture.
Stopping digital cameras from collecting longitude and latitude GPS data about plant images, and deciding not to make a digital map with plant locations
Oral histories would be audio clips, and not entire interviews. Many healers practice directly from their homes so video could potentially be an invasion of privacy
Not using a Creative Commons license. Instead we decided to have listed in a footer that the project could only be used for educational purposes, and contact the researchers for additional use.
Over the next 3 years, Digital Scholarship Services will continue to partner in the creation of the Caribbean Women Healers. The project has now been funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Grant, and will become part of the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute that centers environmental-racial justice. Digital Scholarship Services will be redesigning the website, developing classroom lesson plans about the making and ethics of documenting oral histories, digital assets management practices, and educational resources to support researchers copyright and licensing connected to digital humanities projects involving the public.
Check out full website
Project emerged in part at 2019 Triangle Schol Comm Institute in NC
Not solely focused on IPR but on relationship-building, acknowledging the colonizing and capitalist traditions inherent in Western concepts of intellectual property ownership
8 overarching principles
Informing 3 main areas of work: 1. Building empowering relationships 2. Developing anti-oppressive description and metadata 3. Engaging in ethical and inclusive dissemination and publication
Acknowledgements: Particularly Donna Braquet (Project Co-Chair), Lizeth Zepeda (Diversity Resident), but thanks to all who have been involved!
Digital Collection can be accessed here: https://digital.lib.utk.edu/collections/islandora/object/collections%3Avoloh
(Public) participants included Bharat Mehra, Gary Elgin, Chad Goldman, Gordon Ross, Ulika Scout, Ed White, Gene, Ali Heming, and Nathan Bowman
Used first name only on request
‘At the time of the interview” language recognizes that identities can change over time
Rights holder (DC) or roleTerm of “Copyright holder” in MODS
Consent form for IRB Study run by Donna Braquet. Alesha Shumar, university archivist also contributed to forms.
All consent forms were added as private datastreams associated with the item in Islandora
Three oral histories (from four participants) were kept completely private
Islandora datastreams that included personal addresses were kept private for all contributors
We keep all of our metadata on GitHub and the repository has been made private so that names of participants are not findable by the public