Building out a cooperative digital humanities for Central Asia
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Presentation on opportunities and limits for building out collaborative digital humanities projects and infrastructure in Eurasia / Post-Soviet Central Asia, presented at the Central Asia Research Forum online in October 2021.
![Building out a cooperative digital
humanities for Central Asia
Celia Emmelhainz, UC Berkeley [now Smithsonian]
Rebekah Ramsay, University of Central Asia [now UC Berkeley]
Presentation for Central Asia Research Forum, October 2021](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/carf2021cooperativedigitalhumanitiesforcentralasia-220907193159-8019c742/85/Building-out-a-cooperative-digital-humanities-for-Central-Asia-1-320.jpg)
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Building out a cooperative digital humanities for Central Asia
- 1. Building out a cooperative digital humanities for Central Asia Celia Emmelhainz, UC Berkeley [now Smithsonian] Rebekah Ramsay, University of Central Asia [now UC Berkeley] Presentation for Central Asia Research Forum, October 2021
- 2. Outline of our talk - Ideas from CESS 2020 Roundtable on “Digital Humanities for Central Asian Cultural Heritage” - Great projects in process - Challenges with collaboration - Opportunities: - Interoperability - Distributed digitization - Structured metadata - Closing questions
- 3. Last Year’s Roundtable: Issues “The links go bad. 60 interviews disappeared on me!” “I tried to find places on the map, but more than half of the names have changed." “Online search was so bad, the physical card catalog system was more efficient.” “We need backups in multiple countries, so if support goes down in one place, we have another.” “Local residents are afraid of how their information might be used if politics change.”
- 4. Last Year’s Roundtable: Ideas “On social media, I’ve had people say, oh, that’s my grandmother in this photo! They can correct captions from the archive, using their expertise.” “Facebook is extensively used in Mongolia… we wanted the data to be publicly accessible, so that it might inspire craftspeople or commerce, not just research.” “We need small files that can be viewed on a smartphone. That’s how people access the internet in the village!” “WeChat, WhatsApp… DH [digital humanities] needs to be accessible on the phone!” “People post food and craft production on Tik Tok, showing what they think is important to document and share.”
- 5. Last Year’s Roundtable: Key findings A need/desire for: - Opportunities to collaborate on DH projects - Care for political sensitivities in the CA context - Desire to connect with local students and faculty, both in humanities subjects and in computer science - A need to get archives available and shareable on social media - A desire to create tools that can be used by residents online to create their own projects -- not just research! - An interest in more robust DH theory and ethics
- 6. Great projects in process: University-based: ● Nazarbayev University, “Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan” ● University College London, “Central Asian Archaeological Landscapes” ● University of Central Asia, “Endangered Languages” Project ● AUCA, “Untold Stories of Stalinist KG” and “Digital Cultures Concentration” National institutions and archives: ● Kazakhstan National Electronic Library ● Kazakhstani “Literary Portal” ● Collections in Peripheral Histories list of online primary sources (Sept.2020) International associations: ● “Observatory of Cultural Heritage” Alerte Héritage ● Open Central Asia Photo Archives ● Central Asia Protest Tracker (Oxus Society) Community-based associations: ● Esimde (for example, project on Dekulakization Repressions in Kyrgyzstan) ● “Sanzhyra” Cultural & Historical Research Center (Bishkek), oral histories of village elders
- 7. Need for: collaboration - Between individuals at a distance - Between nearby institutions - Across country borders - Across global inequalities - Working with governments and NGOs - Issue of where funding comes from
- 8. Need for: accessibility Need for ability to: - Access materials - Transcribe - Annotate - Re-use - Use screen readers - Use via social media
- 9. Need for: sustainability - Easy to get funding for a single project. - Harder to find long-term funding and staffing, especially for projects no one institution can “claim” - Tension between “ownership” of prestige projects and need to develop an unglamorous common infrastructure
- 10. Need for: interoperability Europeana, DPLA, and HathiTrust use OAI-PMH to share metadata between institutions in different areas and at different levels. Image: www.europeana.eu/en/item/447/GEO0019210
- 11. Need for: multilingual linked data Can use structured linked data (WikiData?) to allow exploration and cataloging across languages Image: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q483159
- 12. Need for: distributed storage and backups Need for distributed backup copies and an infrastructure resilient against hackers, political change, and physical disasters: - cf. hackers attacking Vatican digital library - cf. security, archivists, and digital collections article - cf. fires in post-Soviet physical archives Could connect with Middle East Librarians’ endangered libraries committee or British Library’s endangered archives programme.
- 13. Need for: decolonizing Central Asian DH Ideas from indigenous projects in North America: - Stewardship vs. ownership - Local data sovereignty - Cultural platforms (Mukurtu CMS) - Traditional knowledge labels At right, Berkeley’s Breath of Life reconnects community members with archives about them
- 14. Questions for you: What would decolonized archives in Central Asia look like? What would a regionally-accessible research culture look like? What would disaster resilience for digital projects look like? How to develop this ‘unglamorous infrastructure’? How can we build more effective collaboration?
- 15. Rebekah Ramsay, historian: rebekah.ramsay@berkeley.edu Celia Emmelhainz, librarian / archivist: emmelhainzc@si.edu Thank you! We’d love to continue the conversation:
Editor's Notes
- [Scattered notes for presentation] Glad to be here and thanks to SRS for organizing and for all they do! Our presentation is a good one to end on, because we are not presenting about specific project, instead our goal is to raise some broader questions for reflection as we end today’s session. I’m Rebekah Ramsay, a historian at UCA, and I’m here with my colleague Celia Emmelhainz from UC Berkeley to talk about building out a cooperative digital humanities for Central Asia… We define digital humanities loosely as using digital technologies to uncover new insights in the humanities, but our conversation overlaps with broader discussions of digital archiving and data sharing across fields as well. In this presentation, we will think through some of the challenges and opportunities for integrating digital humanities infrastructure across Central Asia. Dr. Kassymbekova: “To study CAn history you have to go outside of Central Asia, you have to find funding, etc.” -- how might DH help us break out of these constraints, and how do we avoid replicating these infrastructural inequalities in new projects and archives?
- This talk is based on a networking conversation on “Digital Humanities for Cultural Heritage” that Celia and I hosted at CESS’ online conference last fall. Today, we want to continue this conversation, by sharing perspectives we’ve heard from these regional specialists as well as challenges and opportunities that we ourselves see. We will leave you with questions to take this conversation further as librarians and researchers connected to this region. You can follow along with or save a copy of these slides by typing bit.ly/carf-dh into your browser -- we’ll throw a link in the chat!
- Our roundtable conversation was a facilitated 2-hour discussion between 10 Central Asia specialists, located in Europe, Asia, & USA. Some of the issues that surfaced in our conversation included links disappearing, place names changing, difficulties with online search, the need for backups, and the need to attend to privacy and political concerns (last quote, mentioned by Dr. Sarybaeva for the AUCA project too).
- One of the major ideas that multiple participants brought up was the need to ensure that our archives, digital humanities projects, and catalogs are truly accessible to residents in every town and village in Central Asia. That means thinking beyond the static library catalog or digitized PDF, and ensuring that DH projects can be viewed on mobile phones in the village, annotated by residents with local insight, or shared on local social media. In fact, as you can see, the value of social media was a recurring theme that could be developed more methodically and intentionally for this context.
- Takeaways: Interest in DH widespread (40 people) People want: More networking/collaborations To connect to regional communities and universities To develop more robust theory and ethics for these types of projects -- Di Wang, PhD student at Ohio State University
- Broken down by type -- idiosyncratic list -- included AUCA link from today! Transition -- in spite of these great projects, what could be developed further, and what is still lacking/challenging? Celia speaking from her background as a research librarian connected with CA but with extensive experience in libraries, archives and research design beyond CA
- Many of us experience challenges in collaborating, whether in different roles at one institution, between nearby institutions in one city or country, across borders or oceans, and across the global inequalities we all experience. (Rebekah and I recognize our ‘passport privilege’ in being born in the USA, which gives us more access to Central Asia than many of our Central Asian colleagues experience in working with US and European institutions). We also have seen challenges in getting funding from governments and NGOs, and in finding sustainable sources of staff and people to maintain and develop digital archives.
- This image is from: https://adebiportal.kz/, a wonderful digital library based in Kazakhstan. Digital archives in Central Asia face challenges in protecting publishers’ and authors’ rights and preventing piracy or plagiarism, and yet when we lock down digital images behind passwords or view-only on a computer screen, it can limit the ability of people to access and rework cultural heritage in useful ways. For instance, how can someone write notes on a text, or re-use the text, or share it with their friends on social media? Can they use an iPad offline to access the file, or only online? What if they’re trying to show a historic image or story to their grandmother in the auyl? We face these issues in the USA also, where we digitize materials, but that doesn’t make them available to indigenous communities or poor white communities in our villages, or to local researchers who don’t work for a library or university.
- Another thing that our digital projects need is sustainability. It is relatively easy to get funding for a single digital archive, or staff and student support to put materials online. But it’s harder to find a source of long-term funding to really develop these projects, especially if they are between institutions and no one university can “claim” the credit for them. We see a tension between ownership of digital projects that can inspire pride in a community or country, and the need to develop and maintain an unglamorous and common digital infrastructure (something that the Maintainers conference has covered: https://themaintainers.org/about/).
- Similarly, we need digital records that are interoperable. HathiTrust is a combined catalog of many older books from U.S. research universities, where they share their catalog and digital scans rather than making duplicate copies in each place. Europeana provides one search portal with links to images and texts in multiple countries in Europe, and DPLA has a similar structure to combine library, archival, and museum records from across the United States. Perhaps we could towards Eurasia, a collection of records from heritage institutions across Central Asia? This common infrastructure could build on and support customized portals for searching within an institution or within a single country. If we use a common metadata standard, it is also possible that records about digital objects held at major universities and museums globally could be pulled back into the Eurasia portal. This would let students and scholars in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan more easily find and reconnect pieces of their history that are now held abroad. As Botakoz Kassymbekova said earlier in this conference, “To study Central Asian history you need to be outside of Central Asia.” This is not right. Perhaps we need to repatriate resources digitally, and reconnect Central Asian residents with access to their cultural heritage held abroad?
- Similarly, we need to be able to link records across many languages, including English, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other regional languages. Organizations like Wikidata allow us to work with structured linked data that identifies one thing (in this image, the Syr Darya river) in many languages. Similarly, the Europeana search portal uses XML to provide data in multiple languages: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/data-multilinguality.
- We need to do all of this, of course, with an eye to distributing both storage and backups of our digital heritage and data collections. The links in this slide take you to examples of some of the risks to heritage collections in libraries, archives, and museums. Risks can include fires, floods, lack of electricity compromising delicate collections, hacking, theft, or political uprisings. The Middle East Librarians Association and the British Library both have programs that support endangered libraries and archives. We could use their wisdom to develop more resilient heritage collections in Central Asia (see Celia’s presentation on these issues in the USA, here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q08s9gg).
- Finally, we can adapt insights from indigenous activism in the US to the postcolonial situation of Central Asia. Here in the US, Native American/Indian communities had much of their cultural heritage taken away to museums and libraries in major US cities and in Europe, much as early ethnographers often extracted knowledge, physical objects, and images of Central Asia to museums in Moscow and St Petersburg. But there are ways of repatriating this knowledge, either digitally or in terms of returning some physical objects. We can also look at creating culturally sensitive platforms (see link to Mukurtu CMS) that respect how Central Asian heritage was originally shared– not necessarily making everything available online to foreigners who might extract knowledge for a profit… but keeping some craft and community secrets within their original community. The image above is from the Breath of Life program at UC Berkeley, which reconnects indigenous community members with archives about their community. We could arrange a similar program to send Central Asian researchers to Russian, European, and US institutions with holdings about Central Asia, helping to bring this knowledge back home.
- That is a lot of information and ideas in just a few minutes! We end this discussion with some questions for you, above. [read them out]
- We would be glad to hear from you, and continue this conversation. Please contact us at [these emails].