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Clarkson and Frost win grant to develop digital museums with tribal communities
(Apr 2008) Two SI researchers have won a $200,000 NSF grant to work with American Indian communities developing "digital tribal museums" while also bringing new educational opportunities in computer science and information to reservations.
"American Indian tribal communities are tired of being objects of curiosity in dominant society's museums," says Assistant Professor Gavin Clarkson, who was awarded the grant along with Associate Professor Robert Frost.
"And as tribal economies grow," Clarkson adds, "a number of tribes have decided to reclaim their artifacts and cultural heritage from external institutions to develop tribal museums."
"A key feature of our project," says Frost, "is that it uses community curation and community tagging, so that the tribe itself controls what is in the system and how it is presented."
In opting for community curation and metadata development, Frost and Clarkson are consciously breaking with traditional museum practice of using professional curators to select and label content.
"Native Americans have not been well served in museums," Frost says, "as non-Indians often end up ventriloquizing Indians, a situation often seen in traditional dioramas."
This desire by a group to control the ways in which its own cultural history is represented runs up against the formidable financial challenges of building physical museums.
A digital museum can be a more affordable first step for many tribes, but technology skills are required, and American Indians are sorely underrepresented in the computing and information fields, Clarkson points out.
Frost and Clarkson's project will address this underrepresentation by developing and deploying an educational program that provides culturally relevant classroom instruction in IT on-site, within tribal communities.
"For American Indians," Clarkson says, "developing 'bottom up' skills in computing can best be met by addressing current needs and interests by building virtual museums and learning the software needed to deploy them." Clarkson is himself a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
The researchers hope to encourage more American Indian students to pursue careers in the computing, information, and IT-driven cultural heritage professions.
Given that U-M offers free tuition to enrolled tribal members, this project charts a direct path for American Indians to matriculate into computer science and information programs on their way to those professions.
"This project will show how the raw materials of cultural heritage can be leveraged to empower local communities and define new ways of conceiving community foundations around a merging of computing knowledge with local memories, documents, and artifacts," Frost says.
SI Adjunct Lecturer Christopher Quintanna and several MSI students will also be engaged in the project.
A study by the Institute of Museum and Library Services reports that in 2006 about one-quarter of the 1.2 billion adult visits to museums in the U.S. were made online.
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