2014 event (Culture and Metadata)

Date: Thursday 8th May
Time: 6pm
Location: FORM Gallery, 357 Murray Street, Perth
RSVP: canningstockroute@form.net.au by Friday, 2nd May

Mira (Martu Wangka): to bring something hidden into the light.

Mira: Canning Stock Route Project Archive represents the culmination of FORM’s award-winning Canning Stock Route Project. The archive is being developed by FORM and the Centre for Digital Archaeology at UC Berkeley (CoDA), and is based on CoDA’s Mukurtu CMS, a free web open source platform for managing and sharing digital cultural heritage, built especially for Indigenous communities, libraries, and archives.

Once intangible cultural materials become data, a number of ethical issues emerge. Working in partnership with the Arts Law Centre of Australia through its Artists in the Black program and Herbert Smith Freehills, FORM has developed an extensive best practice framework of agreements to protect the Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property (ICIP) and copyright of Aboriginal participants.

The process of developing Mira has involved retrospectively adding metadata to over 40,000 items of unique cultural content, and this process has raised a number of ongoing research questions that FORM continues to engage with as we develop new projects in this area. These include:

– What ethical issues emerge once intangible cultural materials become data? How, and in what ways, does embedding these cultural materials with metadata add value?
– What is the relationship between Indigenous cultural production, ICIP, data, and metadata? What responsibilities do humanities and arts organisations have to archive Indigenous cultural production in the most secure way possible, both for the present and for future generations?
– More broadly, what knowledge-sharing is possible between those working in the arts and those working purely with data surrounding questions of data and value?

Join us at FORM Gallery, 357 Murray Street, Perth, on Thursday 8th May, 6pm-7pm, for a presentation by Mollie Hewitt and Travis Kelleher on the process of building Mira, followed by an open discussion of the issues mentioned above.

Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP at canningstockroute@form.net.au by Friday, 2nd May.

FORM: http://www.form.net.au
Mira: http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com/
CoDA: http://www.codifi.info/