Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms: Recommendations on Fostering Digitally Enabled Equitable Participation in Heritage Production

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Fostering digitally enabled equitable participation in heritage production is a major component of democratizing heritage creation. Whilst substantial progress has been made in ensuring that digital data and infrastructure complies with the principles of FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) and LOUD (linked open usable data), less progress is discernible where basic technological knowledge and accessibility are limited. The challenge is heightened when dealing with low-resourced environments, as is common in the Global South, and the associated logistical challenges including varying technical competencies, computer and internet speeds, and cultural understandings and language barriers. This paper presents the outcomes of the NEH/AHRC “Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms: A Model to Empower Education Initiatives Across the Global South” project (https://www.metsemegologolo.org.za/wordpress/digital-storytelling/). “Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms” focused on how to best empower secondary school and university educators in the Global South to explore cultural heritage about precolonial African urbanism through digital storytelling with spatial and nonspatial data. We will discuss especially the project’s recommendations about how marginalized voices and perspectives can be integrated into the digital storytelling process through self-directed, generative storytelling curations in museum and classroom settings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38913.0