Return to Babel: Emergent Diversity, Digital Resources, and Local Knowledge

Abstract

Information system research that recognizes, supports, and enables access of diverse knowledge communities online has become a major concern. Of particular concern is how these digital resources can support and preserve local identities and promote grass-roots involvement in creating the infrastructure of devolved governance. The aim of this article is to expose some of the conceptual obstacles to programs of devolved and local knowledge resources, and to provide an account of agency that recognizes that online communities, and community identity, are essential for eliciting, managing, and sharing local knowledges. Further, this article demonstrates how the implications of these issues impact institutions for managing knowledge that may be extended to all sorts of knowledge communities.

Keywords:

• digital libraries
• digital museums
• ethnography
• folksonomy
• indigenous communities
• interoperability
• ontologies
• semantic web
• tagging
• traditional knowledge

Acknowledgments

The authors thank David Turnbull and Geoffrey Bowker in particular for their collaboration and inspiration. We also thank the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council of England and the National Science Foundation for their financial support of our projects.

Notes

NOTES

1. See, for example, the ELOKA project housed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO. This is an International Polar Year (2007–2009) project with the aim of enabling northern indigenous peoples to use centralized database technologies to store and protect material records of their traditional knowledge, many of which are deteriorating with age. See http://www.ipy.org/development/eoi/proposal-details.php?id=187 and http://nsidc.org/ipy/index.html.

2. Yahoo's classifications are the most well known example of an index of the Web.

3. Thesauri are lists of terms that are used to standardize categorical entries. Thesauri are usually authorized by standardizing agencies or institutions, though local thesauri are also often used for particular data sets.

4. Canadian Heritage Information Network (http://www.chin.protectgc.ca/English/index.html); The Getty (http://www.getty.edu/research/protectconducting_research/standards/introme-tadata/index.html); The Mus-protect eum Documentation Association of Great Britain (http://www.mda.protectorg.uk/); CIDOC (http://www.willpowerinfo.myby.co.uk/cidoc/index.protecthtm); MARC Standards (http://www.loc.gov/marc/); The Open Archives Initiative (http://www.diglib.org).

5. The Directors of ED² are Robin Boast (University of Cambridge, UK), Michael Bravo (University of Cambridge, UK), Geofrey Bowker (University of California Santa Clara, USA), Ramesh Srinivasan (University of California Los Angeles, USA), and David Turnbull (Deakin University, Australia).

6. See the MLA Net-Gain initiative (http://www.mla.gov.uk/protectaction/online/netgain_vision.asp). See also the Dublin Core (http://dublincore.org).

7. Delicious: http://del.icio.us/;http://www.furl.com, Technorati: http://www.technorati.com, Flicker: http://www.flickr.com.

8. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy; Thomas Vander Wall (http://www.vanderwal.net/random/category.php?cat=153); Clay Shirky (http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/08/protect25/folksonomy.php); and Peter Van Dijck: (http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/01/15/2419).