Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Digital Humanities

Advisor

Aránzazu Borrachero Mendívil

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities

Keywords

Wampanoag, oral history, memory, traditional knowledge

Abstract

The Wampanoag Culture Keepers Society (WCKS) is a group of Wampanoag Elders with five core members representing three Wampanoag tribes. The Society was founded in early 2023 with a goal of documenting and providing access to traditional Wampanoag knowledge held by its members as a means of ensuring its sustained preservation and practice for generations to come. Rooted in community archival practice, The Wampanoag Culture Keepers Oral History Archive project is offered and functions in support of the Elders’ work. While recognizing the shortcomings of digital archival tools in relation to traditional knowledge sharing practices, this project seeks to render the audio recordings of the WCKS monthly gatherings more accessible to other members of the Wampanoag Nation through transcription, indexing and digital search capabilities. In addition, the Elders have elected to deposit the resulting transcripts in a selection of public and private archives to ensure their future availability. The project work is conducted with a “slow archives” approach that “opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale” (Christen and Anderson). Special attention was paid to the impact of digital interventions on traditional knowledge capture and transmission, creating conditions for open communication and collaborative shaping of the process, and recognizing the substantive knowledge that emerged from this practice. Both critical shortcomings and benefits of the digital tools in general and employed in this project for the preservation and safekeeping of culturally sensitive materials have been observed. This includes the Procrustean digital application of linguistic norms in the digital transcription process contrasted with the benefit of rendering archival materials accessible and therefore more impactful. Throughout Phase 1 of this project, in which the first three WCKS conversations are processed, it has been clear that value of this work does not rest solely on making available the transactional fact based knowledge that is shared within the recordings. Instead, this project has the expansive ability of also providing access to a portrait of the Culture Keepers’ shared generational understanding of Wampanoag and American culture and society, and each member's unique perspectives as influenced by all aspects of their identities, including gender, tribal and clan affiliations and status, education, and family culture.

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