What does a cultural heritage program targeting practitioners in Nairobi have in common with a community archival project in West Philadelphia? ADH’s digitisation advisor, researcher, cultural producer, and community archaeologist, Malkia Okech explains how co-learning supports preservation, builds capacity, and solidifies transnational communities of digital heritage practice.
Digital work has the potential to be revolutionary work- we can use digitisation as a means to open dialogue and as an invitation to collectively challenge, reframe, and represent our history as Africans and Afro-descended people. This is why “bridging the digital divide” is more than just closing the gap to internet access or educating communities about digital resources. It is also about expanding the digital world- places or communities may seem accessible with the click of a button, but in reality, the growth of social media and complex online infrastructures, and algorithms, has created unforeseen challenges. One of these challenges is in cultural heritage, specifically that of black people around the world: access, authenticity, and ownership. Because digital technology is not neutral, the ownership of digital infrastructures remains blurry and there is potential for harmful power dynamics to multiply.
A Transnational African Digital Heritage Framework (TADHF) is a proposal to strengthen networks across borders in an effort to preserve our cultural heritage collectively and sustainably. It is an ask to share heritage and preservation-related skills and information across Africa and the diaspora. It is a way of building community, trust, joy, and solidarity between ourselves, to honour our history, memory, and culture the way we (in our different populations) see fit.
Furthermore, TADHF asks us to consider how we as practitioners communicate within ourselves, organisations, and projects, and how we share resources and solidarity around the common goal of autonomy and equity in ourselves, our infrastructure, and our data. Infrastructure, as in the physical and technical containers of our cultural information [the data] that other (western) institutions deem cultural assets – or objects of capital. We have the opportunity to design practices and places of storing our information our way.
Communities of practice have three characteristics: a shared domain of interest, competence, and commitment that distinguishes them from others, collective learning through joint activities, discussions, problem-solving opportunities, information sharing, and relationship building and a shared repertoire of resources and ideas that they take back to their practice.
Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (June 2015)
To understand what a framework of this kind would look like or an exercise of its principles, let’s discuss two projects from two institutions: African Digital Heritage’s ‘Skills For Culture’ initiative, which focused on developing a curriculum for digital preservation and the archive and ‘Eslanda Robeson Reading Room’ at Paul Robeson House & Museum in West Philadelphia.
Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the revolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.
Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture” (1970)
African Digital Heritage (ADH) + Skills For Culture
At ADH one of our goals is to cement the place of African culture in an era of rapidly changing technologies and endless possibilities of the future. We’ve worked towards this by developing a unique set of training programs that explore the growth and development of systems, strategies, and audiences in the cultural heritage sector as they relate to emerging technologies and those who have access to them. These trainings explore skill building in the realm of digitisation and dissemination of cultural resources from the community to institutional level.
Aptly named, the Skills For Culture program that was launched in 2019, was specially curated for present and future cultural heritage practitioners. It seeks to increase the visibility, ownership, accessibility, inclusivity, and transmission of cultural heritage, by strengthening the status of cultural heritage and translating it for the next generations, through contemporary practice, participation, and technology.
The first phase of the program, which took place in the same year it was launched, facilitated research, training, and workshops in Nairobi and Kisumu for practitioners and emerging professionals. These interactions considered prominent gaps in the industry i.e., documentation, curation, archiving, and audience engagement. The second phase that took part in 2022, prioritised the development of a toolkit in response to findings and feedback from Phase I. The toolkit presented solutions to the aforementioned gaps, incorporated feedback from the pilot workshops, built heritage project capacity, and made the training information easily available locally and remotely.
For Phase III, African Digital Heritage developed a mentorship program for practitioners in Kenya; a recommendation from both Phases I and II. We are also exploring avenues for strengthening our digital heritage training materials for a larger remote audience. We hope this will enhance the skill range of practitioners and support more people with more skills, rather than enforcing a hierarchical system that relies on an expert at the top. To this end, we are developing a curriculum that reflects the complete life cycle of digital heritage projects, accounts for different stakeholders, and intersects at multiple levels.
So what does this mean and how does this information translate on the ground? A case study on how data from a Kenyan project informed a project across the world, might clarify things more.
Paul Robeson House & Museum Archive Project
The Paul Robeson House & Museum (PRHM) located in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was the last residence of Paul Leroy Robeson, an internationally renowned individual talented in many areas including athletics, singing, acting, and law.
He was also an activist who embraced Socialism and dedicated himself to the recognition of different revolutionary moments across the globe. In fact, he befriended Jomo Kenyatta in 1934, while he was acting in London and Kenyatta was studying Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
The PRHM is dedicated to documenting and preserving the legacy of Paul Robeson and his contributions to the community. It is also the home base of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance – the organisation that restored the home, an effort led by local librarian Frances P. Austen in the 1980s. The location has become both a site for learning and a gathering place for artists and activists.
The museum has an estimated 500-800 items in its collection, which includes a range of collectibles, original furniture, records, and paraphernalia. While some of this relates to Robeson directly, most of the material is attributed to the story of the house and how it became the community centre it is today. The museum’s catalogue and digitisation efforts were focused on one major room in the building, a makeshift storage space that would be renovated to become the Eslanda Robeson Reading and Resource Room. Old file cabinets and boxes around the room contained mostly paper records such as newspapers, clippings, pamphlets, letters, books, and more. The room also contained some AV material and an assortment of paintings that the house exhibited and auctioned in the past, but for this initial phase, the focus was on paper records.
In 2022, information from African Digital Heritage’s toolkits and projects, as well as research towards the curriculum were applied to the PRHM archive project. Each step of the process was accompanied by a public program where people in the neighbourhood could work with me to create the infrastructure of the catalogue and digitise materials. It was a communal, educational, and iterative process all in one.
By the end of the year, we had only managed to go through a small amount of the records; three out of the 20 identified boxes. Despite that, the PRHM archive and Eslanda Robeson Reading and Resource Room were launched as a space for study, cultural heritage programs, and community history projects. The beginnings of the digital archive currently lives on ‘Omeka’, a web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, and archival collections. We intend to continue outfitting the room, and developing the archive alongside relevant programming and training for practitioners and community members.
Not only did the work and resources of African Digital Heritage inform the planning and execution of the PRHM archive, but this co-learning experience showed how cultural heritage can transcend geographical restrictions and what could come from a transatlantic community of practice.
Personally, it taught me what cultural heritage can look like in its best-case scenario, and what is required to actualise this: experiments and attempts; trial and error, frequent evaluation, and didactic (educational) engagement.
As stewards of cultural heritage, our needs and desires should align with those of the communities we serve and the heritage we aim to preserve – we have to be comfortable stating that it is not always us who have the solutions, and we cannot keep them to ourselves.
