"Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities"

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About the Author

Bibhushana Poudyal is currently a doctoral student and Assistant Instructor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research areas are Critical Digital Humanities, Critical Digital Archiving, and Digital Humanities in Transnational Contexts. Presently, her inquiries are directed toward Theories and Praxes of Situating/Situatedness and Decolonizing-Depatriarchalizing of Epistemes, Epistemologies, Ontologies, Digitalism, and Digital Archives.

Contents

Introduction

Methodological overview of critical digital archiving project

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

What is (or why) archiving and digital archiving?

Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts

Conclusion

References

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

In this section, I will provide one particular incident to introduce and contextualize myself and my project, though this was not the only incident that triggered my critical decolonial digital archiving project. It happened in my first semester in my PhD program and during my second month living in the United States. I was waiting for the campus shuttle to get back to my apartment. Just then, a guy came up to me and started talking. After some casual exchanges, he asked,

"Where are you from?"
"Nepal," I said.
"Where is that?" He asked.

I felt like he had to know Nepal without any further references. Then, I remembered that there are countries I don't know either. Because “no one” talks about them. [The question here is also who is/are “no one?”].

And I said, "It's in South Asia."
"You mean Philippines?" He asked.
"Isn't that a different country? Maybe you wanna Google Nepal," I told him.

At this point, I just wanted to be done with this conversation.

"Yeah, you are right. I will," he said.

I smiled and turned my head to the street, continuing to wait for the bus. And right then, something even more dreadful occurred to me. I remembered what Google might say about Nepal aside from providing some tourist guide kind of thing. Earthquake? Flood? Chhaupadi system? Discrimination against women? Some local "exotic" rituals? And so on.

Well, all of these statements are true. Who is denying that? But is that all that's true about Nepal? What about other multiple narratives that are easily overshadowed by the dominant and much disseminated algorithmic exotic or damaging narratives? I feared that this person from the bus stop might Google Nepal and start feeling sorry for me the way I never felt. I might feel sorry for myself in many ways, but not in the way Google would prepare a ‘stranger’ to feel sorry for me.

I hastily turned towards the stranger and said, "Actually, I don't recommend you googling. Google doesn’t tell you much about the places you don't know and wanna know more about."

I knew he wouldn't Google anyways. Perhaps, he did not even remember my country’s name anymore. But from then on, I knew that I would never again say to a stranger, "Why don't you google Nepal?"

I always knew there was something ‘wrong’ with Google. But the representation of Nepali "culture" in digital spaces started becoming a major concern for me after I moved to the United States. It felt like post/decolonialism and its debates started making much more sense to me after my move. People would already conclude things about me based on my skin color and the way I speak English in an “un-English” way. Why would or what makes someone conclude things about me in an absolute manner before even waiting to know me? What does it mean or why should it even mean something to be a Nepali woman, for instance? These questions are so pertinent to me after coming to the United States. Why should it mean absolutely something to be someone from some place? I also remember some people being surprised when they learned this is my first time out of my country. They comment, “It does not look like this is your first time. You are so global.” I still do not know what that means. Why is it hard to conceive that being global (whatever that means) is also a Nepali way, among many other ways?

These questions and experiences and, equally important, the lack of significant number of digital archives about Nepal built by Nepali either on a personal, institutional, or semi-institutional level prompted me to undertake this particular project. The first digital archives that I encountered while researching about already available digital archives about Nepal were built by westerners and archived in western institutional online locations. For instance, Digital Archaeology Foundation (n. d.), 2015 Nepal Earthquake (n. d.), The Thak Archive (Macfarlane & Harrison, n. d.), and Birds of Nepal (Inskipp & Inskipp, n. d.). In these digital archives, the knowledge that is produced and disseminated about Nepal has a very simplistic dimension: exotic and/or damage-based. However unintentional and well-intentioned they are, these digital archives about Nepal are no different than what Edward Said (1978) aptly remarked vis-à-vis Description de l'Égypte, the “great collective appropriation of one country by another” (p. 84). These digital archival epistemological-ontological performances cannot be separated from Said’s interpretation of Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it,” which in short means “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3). Nepal is produced in these Western institutional spaces and that Nepal is disseminated across media.

Overwhelmed by these experiences, I decided to study theories and praxes of digital archives and to build a critical digital archive about Nepal to problematize simplistic portrayals of Nepal, to demonstrate the situatedness of these epistemic performances, and to make it evident that every structure of meaning is already full of gaps and fissures. My desire to create this archive is stirred by my interest in understanding these questions as intimately as possible: Who produces knowledge and what kinds of knowledge are produced the most, specifically about Non-Western worlds? And what kinds of knowledge are disseminated far and wide? These questions cannot be understood or answered through disciplinary hubris or constraints. They need folks from different non/academic locations and disciplines to come together, raise questions, problematize normative narratives about digitalism which is accessible only to powerful institutional locations, complicate simplistic representative portrayals about Others, and work together to transform the face of digital rhetoric and composition through/toward ethical epistemological performance. This kind of demand and desire for interdisciplinary methodologies in research and study is particularly essential to understand the shifting epistemological-ontological-axiological ecologies of knowledge production and dissemination.

To give a hint of that shift in as few words as possible, I quote Jentery Sayers’ reading of Amy Earhart’s works. Earhart teaches Africana Studies at Texas A&M University and works with digital humanities. This quote provides a glimpse of what is involved in that shift toward digital archiving. Regarding Earhart’s enquiries and studies sprouting from the conversations with both of her academic practices (Africana Studies and Digital Humanities), Sayers (2016) writes,

[S]he convincingly shows how the vexed relations between race, representation, and digital technologies must be addressed through multiple layers of project development, from support (e.g., grants), digitization (e.g., encoding manuscripts), and metadata (e.g., Dublin Core descriptions) to expression (e.g., visualizing data), narrative (e.g., in online scholarly exhibits), discovery (e.g., through search engines), and storage (e.g., sustaining the shelf life of web-based resources). (para. 22)

I bring this quote to draw attention to the complexity that archiving constitutes once it reaches from the physical domain to digital. With that movement, archiving becomes the space that manifests intricate interrelationships among financial capital; the interest/purpose/demand of that institution that has the power to decide whether or not to offer those grants; metadata styles (what/how to describe archived artefacts); another level of digital/technological technicalities once composition and data storage move in digital space; (lack of) ‘sufficient’ digital ‘literacies’ needed to fulfill the purpose of digital archiving; and the issues of production-distribution-accessibility-usability.

Regarding this shifting epistemological-ontological-axiological ecologies of knowledge production and dissemination, David Berry (2012) writes in "Understanding Digital Humanities," “it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology” and this shift in “mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme” (p. 1). And this context must be understood differently, not as an opposite of physical-analogue space but as a space that is shaped by and shaping the physical space. And the way the "cultural artifacts" are translated, represented, archived also highlights the necessity, especially for the researchers, to theorize “the digital ‘folding’ of memory and archives, whereby one is able to approach culture in a radically new way” (Berry, 2012, p. 2). I am naming that new way critical digital archiving. But before discussing that, I briefly offer different ideologies and histories behind theories and practices of archiving and digital archiving in the following section. Because, like Ellen Cushman (2013) recognizes, there is a necessity for scholars “to understand the troubled and troubling roots of archives if they're to understand the instrumental, historical, and cultural significance of the pieces therein” (p. 116). Decolonial digital archival scholars must understand the institutional history behind archives and museums to understand this present institutional investment on cataloguing and archiving the culture, history, people, and countries of Other worlds.