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Digital collecting and anthropologies of the archive in Vanuatu.

A digital collecting prototype was created in collaboration with the Collecting Social Photography Project (Sweden, Denmark and Finland) and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. The funds supported a visit from Sweden of two curators, lead investigators of the Collecting Social Photography Project. Through a day-long workshop to work on the prototype, Masters students in Digital Anthropology and Digital Humanities discussed the issues around collecting social media from cross-cultural and comparative perspectives.Ìý

Two prototypes have been created, the first,Ìýis a web-based collecting platform that will send crowd-collected images directly to the Collecting Social Photography project. The platform was available inÌýBislama (the national language of Vanuatu),Ìýto compare social media collections across Vanuatu, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.Ìý

The second prototype was developed in collaboration with UCL's Extreme Citizen Science Project (ExCites) and worked with ArcGIS, to produceÌýa place-based mobile collecting portal. Both platforms were being testedÌýremotely with people in Vanuatu, with a follow-up fieldwork visit to Vanuatu planned for March 2020.Ìý

Several findingsÌýemerged from the project. There are several challenges regarding the long-term collection and archiving of social photography, and the disconnect between users, cultural institutions and technological infrastructures. This raised important discussions about the ownership of data and the long-term preservation of digital culture. The project comparedÌýthe knowledge architectures of social media with those of conventional museum catalogues. The case study builtÌýon the "decolonizing the database" movement and raisedÌýimportant questions about the fields that organise knowledge and the long-termÌýimpact of changing these on structures of data governance, ownership and digital preservation.Ìý

In the long term, the project would support the work of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre with a prototyping process that will allow them to collect across a wide geographic area and harness local expertise to create new forms of communication with the national museum in the capital city, Port Vila.Ìý

The collaboration has extended the geographic reach of the Collecting Social Photography project by bringing in an important dialogue with the Global South.Ìý

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