Digital Humanities of the North: Open Access to Research Data for Multiple User Groups

Abstract

By means of the Digital Humanities of the North (DHN) website, this chapter shows how free access to social and cultural anthropology research is provided not only to scientific communities, but also to interested public and Indigenous communities of Siberia and other parts of the Circumpolar North. The DHN site is primarily targeted at local community use as endangered Indigenous knowledge and languages are best preserved and sustained if their everyday use is encouraged. At the same time, DHN also contributes to the overall preservation of cultural diversity in global perspective. The increasingly important role that use of new technology and social media plays now, and will play in the future, to involve the Indigenous youth is explored as they make use of documented but at-risk Indigenous knowledge of experienced elder community members. A particular focus of this chapter is on the new Environmental Knowledge of the North website, with the aim to bring together both Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science with mainstream disciplinary social and cultural research combined with methods and data of the natural sciences. Another goal of the chapter is to connect museum collections virtually with fieldwork documentaries of corresponding knowledge and techniques of craftsmen, craftswomen, and artists from Indigenous communities.

11.1 Introduction

One of the objectives and tasks of the Foundation for Siberian Cultures (FSC) [Kulturstiftung Sibirien] (https://dh-north.org/themen/kulturstiftung-sibirien/) and its affiliated publishing house (https://dh-north.org/verlag/) is to provide free access to social and cultural anthropology research. This service is provided via the Digital Humanities of the North (DHN) website (https://dh-north.org/). DHN is aimed not only at scientific communities, but also interested public and Indigenous communities of Siberia and of other parts of the Circumpolar North.

In addition to published research, DHN provides access to primary research data on which published findings are based, notably video and audio recordings of activities and interviews, along with corresponding transcriptions and translations, that document Indigenous knowledge and practices. Often, it is more comfortable for researchers to keep their own primary research data in their own private archive. However, this practice is not ideal because conclusions, interpretations, and theory-building cannot easily be double-checked, replicated, or questioned by others. Linking primary research data with resulting digital publications and presenting them in combination via the internet appeals also to interested user groups beyond the scientific community. For example, availability of research data allows it to be reused by others or returned to their communities of origin where the data may play an important role in sustaining local cultural heritage, especially for Indigenous communities.

On the DHN site, provision of recorded and free, easily accessible Indigenous data that are used and published in studies is targeted in particular for Indigenous communities’ use. There, these materials find wide resonance as local learning tools (Fig. 11.1). By planning and pairing these data and publications together, long-lasting research collaborations with Indigenous communities have developed over the years. These relations are based more on mutual trust and less on short-term formal or business-like agreements (see Allemann & Dudeck, 2019). This methodological approach is in line and further promotes up-to-date concepts of co-production between ‘outside’ researchers and Indigenous communities (Kasten, 2021a; Krupnik, 2021; Krupnik & Bogoslovskaja, 2021), which has become the foundation for most social and cultural anthropology research in the North for the last two decades.

Fig. 11.1

Use of the FSC’s digital learning tools during a school class in Lesnaya, Kamchatka, Russia in 2012. (Photo credit: E. Kasten)

11.2 History and Contents of Digital Humanities of the North (DHN)

Content on the DHN site is open access and always has been even with the FSC’s previous web domains (http://www.siberian-studies.org/ and http://www.kulturstiftung-sibirien.de) that were set up in 2004 and 2010, respectively. With the establishment of the FSC in 2010, content on the site was expanded to include audiovisual media. The problem soon arose of how to best organize and present the rapidly growing digital collections in a user-friendly way that could be shared easily with others to facilitate productive scientific exchanges, as well as return collected data to the communities of their origin. Early on, the 2010 site well-served the FSC’s needs until technical limitations became increasingly apparent regarding attractive layout and when rapidly growing smartphone use, especially in Indigenous communities, set restrictions for its intended application because of its outdated HTML structure. Therefore, a workshop was held in 2018 at the FSC in Fürstenberg/Havel, Germany that brought together social and cultural anthropologists with strong interest and experience in data management to discuss and outline adequate responses and future strategies (Kasten, 2021b).

Consequently, the new DHN site was created and went live in 2019. The site offers sought-after new opportunities to make rich digital collections available to multiple user groups in a well-integrated and attractive way. Like its forerunner, the kulturstiftung-sibirien site, DHN is multilingual in German, English, and Russian, whereas most other databases and web portals are in English or, at best, bilingual in German and English only, excluding their use by Indigenous communities of other-language-speaking countries. Plans are underway to add French to the DHN’s multilingual site and coverage of Canadian Arctic content will soon more prominently materialize. French is an official language of Canada and some Indigenous members in Canada speak various types of French. Thus, adding this language to the DHN site complies with the FSC’s principal objective of targeting Indigenous groups as current and future users of the site.

The digital collections of the FSC are manifold, belonging to diverse formats such as photo, video, audio, and text collections. Among the latter are digital editions from the FSC’s publishing house; other books, journal articles, and book chapters; and scanned rare books from the FSC’s physical library. To meet the challenge of bringing together information from different formats in a well-integrated way, dossiers are created on certain themes. In addition, pathways are created to improve discoverability of content surrounding regional or thematic interests of various user groups, such as Indigenous community members, scientists, and the wider public. One possible access route, for instance, is by way of ethnographies if site users are interested to learn more about a certain ethnic group. On the main page for a selected ethnic group, general and illustrated information is provided, while more specific themes are addressed in the subsequent text. Text highlights are then linked to subpages, most often dossiers, where diverse materials on certain themes are compiled in a well-structured way, allowing and encouraging users to navigate freely across themes in their own explorative and creative ways. Indeed, another access mode is by way of themes. Here, a selected theme is first generally outlined with links embedded in the text to subthemes that are then more comprehensively and thoroughly presented in the form of dossiers. In addition, the DHN site provides from its main menu information on the FSC and its recent activities, including direct access for download of digital editions from the FSC’s publishing house. However, as the new DHN site was created only a few years ago in 2019, not all categories are fully complete yet and still under in-progress status.

11.3 Linking Digital Collections of the FSC for Multiple and Notably Indigenous Community Uses

The FSC’s published research (i.e., monographs, collective volumes, and essays; research data of more than 200 hours of audio-visual documentation of Indigenous knowledge; and new editions of historical ethnographic sources such as travelogues and early ethnographies in the public domain) is easily linked to each other in electronic form on the DHN site. Combinations of selected modules from the aforementioned varied formats can be arranged by users themselves about interests and research questions.

For the digital collections of the FSC, much audio and video data are from my own fieldwork recordings with the Itelmen, Even, and Koryak peoples on the Kamchatka Peninsula from the 1990s through the mid-2010s (Kasten, 2021b). At that time, true co-production of knowledge evolved and could flourish with Indigenous communities, whereas in recent years the impacts of political Russian propaganda towards the West and impediments for non-Russian researchers are increasingly felt, along with already earlier trends of Indigenous and local culture commodification (Kasten, 2004). Together, these phenomena gradually impaired the basis for open discourses on Indigenous knowledge and dissemination of printed learning tools from my original recordings. After being urged by local communities, the Koryak co-editor of some textbooks published by the FSC, Galina Khariutkina, forwarded in 2016 a request by the FSC to the Kamchatka Ministry of Education championing for wider use of these learning tools in the regular local school curricula. Unfortunately, no response was received. Since then, the FSC’s focus is on processing the collections of recorded existing materials in electronic form with the principle aim of making them available for community use to sustain endangered Indigenous languages and knowledge and, in this way, contribute to the preservation of cultural diversity in global perspective.

In addition, more collections have been and will be solicited by other colleagues for digital publication and presentation via DHN, including the edited volumes by Raisa Bel’dy et al. (2012) and Tat’iana Bulgakova (2016) on the Nanai people, Brigitte Pakendorf and Nataliia Aralova (2019) on the Negidal people, Alexandra Lavrillier and Dejan Matic (2013) on the Even people, Cecilia Odé (2016a, b) on the Yukaghir people, and, currently in preparation, Zsófia Schön and Stephan Dudeck on the Khanty people, Roza Laptander on the Nenets people, and Michael Riessler on both the Komi and Sámi peoples. Most recently in 2021 and on behalf of the FSC, Viacheslav Shadrin recorded Indigenous knowledge on sustainable relations with nature in times of climate change among the Chukchi, Yukaghir, and Even peoples living in Sakha (Yakutia) in their respective Indigenous languages (Fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

Map with documented languages presented on or in preparation for the Digital Humanities of the North website. (Map credit: Kulturstiftung Sibirien)

Most of my own annotated recordings on Itelmen, Even, and Koryak language and culture are hosted at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) (https://www.elararchive.org) at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften [Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences] for long-term storage. All the full-resolution video recordings will also be stored at the Ethnological Museum [Ethnologisches Museum] (https://www.smb.museum/museen-einrichtungen/ethnologisches-museum/home/) in Berlin, together with my already deposited video recordings from the 1980s made with the First Nations of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. For ELAR and DHN, the film quality is compressed for faster download. While ELAR is addressed more to the scientific community and scholars of linguistic studies, DHN is targeted at local community use. Endangered Indigenous knowledge and languages is best preserved and sustained if their everyday use is encouraged by faster and easier access to content which is what DHN is designed to do.

Detailed surveys have been carried out to determine how additional attention can be drawn to use of open access resources provided by the FSC for its primary target groups. Among these surveys is one carried out by Stephan Dudeck (2021) for the FSC as part of its recent project on sustainable relations with nature (Fig. 11.3). Dudeck explores the increasingly important role that the use of new technology and social media plays now, and will play in the future, to involve the Indigenous youth in sustaining the Indigenous knowledge of experienced community members—most often elders—that is at risk of fading into oblivion. By motivating the younger generation this knowledge can be preserved.

Fig. 11.3

Video seminar in Kazym, Western Siberia with, from left to right, Stephan Dudeck, Tat’iana Liubavina, and Anastasiia Brusnitsina, 2021. (Photo credit: E. Fedotova and S. Dudeck)

11.4 Environmental Knowledge of the North (EKN)

In 2021, the FSC launched an additional website: Environmental Knowledge of the North (EKN) (https://ek-north.org/en). This site integrates social media algorithms to encourage interactive discourses with and among Indigenous users in the North, providing additional pathways to the common pool of online publications and research data similarly as the DHN site. The structure of EKN is slightly different from DHN and more closely tuned to participatory Indigenous community users. The main access structure to seek information (e.g., themes, regions, peoples, dossiers, etc.) remains the same. However, to stimulate vivid interactive exchanges, an alternating new ‘video of the week’ on a certain theme is posted on the first page. Community members can respond with their own video posts, often spontaneously taken with their smartphones, which appears under videoblogs. By providing their own content, users become co-producers of the EKN site. For Indigenous community users and foreign researchers, this user-added content provides informative data for further comparatives analyses.

Under themes, another issue is more strongly emphasized on EKN: natural science research. This category brings together Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science (see Lavrillier & Gabyshev, 2017) with social and cultural research and the natural sciences. For both Indigenous partners and natural scientists, it is useful to learn about their different methodological approaches and each other’s complementing observations and results. This focus contributes to bridging gaps between differing methods and outcomes, often recognized in the past but about which both sides now have become increasingly interested in learning. Thus, short films are posted made by natural scientists of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung [Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research] (AWI) (https://www.awi.de/) in Bremerhaven, in collaboration with film universities in Berlin and Potsdam, that show the output of their teams working in the Arctic. The videos inform in an understandable and visually appealing way complex content in the natural sciences, in this case regarding climate change, that dramatically effects and is of great interest for Indigenous peoples in their corresponding regions.

At the FSC, it is important that all video posts contain both Russian and English subtitles for the promotion of dialogue between and among Indigenous communities in Russia and the entire North on important themes and concerns that most of them have in common. Unfortunately, the phase when these new social media tools were about to be tested and fully implemented for users in Siberia coincided with the escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and subsequent restrictions and shutdowns of some social media platforms in Russia that the FSC intended to use. However, these initiatives will be taken up again as soon as possible. Then, the FSC plans to establish a network of local administrators to enact and oversee additional participatory community-based, self-determined social media activity.

11.5 Prospects to Further Expanding Digital Humanities of the North (DHN)

DHN has rapidly developed since its implementation in 2019 in ways that were not anticipated at the beginning. Therefore, increasing complexity urged the FSC to split the site step-by-step into more specific sub-websites that remain linked to each other for cohesiveness.

The initial focus on the documentation of Indigenous languages under the program Languages and Cultures of the Russian Far East has recently been, and will continue to be, expanded to become Languages of the North; it will be presented and accessed through a separate forthcoming website. As before, this website will provide even more comprehensive information for linguistic research, allowing a more wide-ranging exchange of relevant cultural and language issues among Indigenous communities of the North.

In the future, other themes will be emphasized. One of these themes was already initiated in 2021 with the project Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Sustainable Relations with Nature in Times of Climate Change funded by the Eastern Partnership and Russia program of the Auswärtiges Amt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany] (2022). For that project, environmental knowledge was recorded in co-production with local partners in Western Siberia, Sakha (Yakutia), and Kamchatka. The short films are shown with Russian and English subtitles on the EKN website. In the future, the information on Indigenous environmental knowledge and corresponding practices will be further enhanced through interactive tools (e.g., with posts by users from local communities).

Another important goal of the project is to stimulate exchanges between the humanities and natural sciences dealing with pressing issues in the North (e.g., the effects of climate change) whose consequences are already experienced dramatically in northern Siberia. Therefore, beyond findings of social sciences research, an environmental assessment was undertaken by ethnobotanists and climatologists (Černjagina & Kiričenko, 2021) of the Tikhookeanskiy institut geografii Dal’nevostochnogo otdeleniya Rossiyskoy akademii nauk [Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences] with whom the FSC maintains long-lasting partnerships ever since the first joint resource assessment project in 1995 that was funded by the European Union’s International Association for the Promotion of Cooperation with Scientists from the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Kasten & Dul’chenko, 1996). Bringing together social and natural sciences on relevant issues in the North has been a continuing concern for the FSC as myself and other FSC associates participate each year since 2015 in the Franco-German workshop series Gateway to the Arctic put on by the AWI in Germany and, in France, the Cultures, Environnements, Arctique, Répresentations, Climat Cultures [Environments, Arctic, Representations, Climate] research centre (https://www.cearc.fr/) at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Consequently, colleagues from the AWI contributed a chapter to the project proceedings (Treffeisen & Grosfeld, 2021). More authors brought the environmental challenges also into its broader perspective about Russian state environmental politics (Tynkkynen, 2021), and Russian editions of the volume were published and made freely available online. Thus, on the EKN website, social and natural science research results can be linked to the recorded environmental knowledge by Indigenous community members where it can be openly accessed.

Currently, this methodological approach is further expanded to the Western Arctic as well, partly motivated by the fact that former co-productions with our Russian partners have been halted for political reasons, hopefully only temporary. Therefore, within Germany, the FSC is partner in the recent new Circumpolar Research Co-Creation initiative at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung [Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research] in Leipzig and the Institut für fortgeschrittene Nachhaltigkeitsstudien [Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies] in Potsdam. Currently, the forthcoming project is in its initial phase and has been further elaborated during a workshop in July 2022 at the FSC, incorporating Indigenous knowledge from Indigenous communities living across the Circumpolar North.

A primary issue to be elaborated with partners from Indigenous communities is future forms of co-production, in particular about Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016) and being alert about data privacy laws in Russia that can declare any publication of recorded personal data without FPIC as illegal and an administrative offence (O personal’nykh dannykh, 2006). Especially regulated are personal data (i.e., any data that allow the identification of an individual, including information on ethnicity, religion, or worldview). Data such as this must be anonymized—impossible for photo and video data. Common practice by Russian state authorities is to arbitrarily apply a certain law or not,¹ opening the door to put pressure on or block any (foreign) journalists or ethnographers, while at the same time allowing state-controlled institutions to proceed with their work if those researchers follow Russian political guidelines. Therefore, formalized regulations must be viewed with caution as they can be (ab)used by political stakeholders over the vested interests of those affected.

Regarding future thematic contents, a particular emphasis will be on material culture such as handicrafts and tools. This emphasis connects to another program and earlier research focus with which the FSC has already engaged in the past: to connect museum collections virtually with fieldwork documentaries of corresponding knowledge and techniques of craftsmen, craftswomen, and artists from Indigenous communities. In 2000, I commissioned a full set of an Even festive garment made by Maja Lomovtseva in Esso, Kamchatka for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (museum identity numbers: I A 5634 a–b and I A 5635 a–f). During this time, I was invited by Even craftswomen to document their work by video recording so that their knowledge and expertise could be preserved and used later by following generations as these women felt that earlier ways of how this knowledge was passed down to children and grandchildren within the communities was no longer fully effective. In the meantime, these informative recordings of the craftswomen’s work were transcribed and translated from the Even language. Eventually, these films were made available with optional Russian and English subtitles on the DHN site. For the local community, the videos serve as useful learning tools because detailed information is conveyed as well in spoken Even language that can be studied also in a corresponding textbook (Kasten & Avak, 2018).

Virtual presentation offers wide-ranging comparative possibilities. For example, while looking for incised drawings in walrus tusk in the collections of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, I came across an older but similar Even garment from 1887 (museum identity number: I A 2247). The scant documentation that was common at the time stated only that it was acquired somewhere in Siberia northwest of Kamchatka, presumably in Sakha (Yakutia). During my next visit to Yakutsk, I organized a seminar at the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North (http://igi.ysn.ru/) where an Even craftswoman, Alyona Nikolaevna Khabarovskaia (2019), commented on the garment in detail with help of its image from the museum object projected on a full screen (Fig. 11.4). As soon as this annotated film was put online, Maia Lomovtseva from Kamchatka sent a series of Whatsapp messages to me further discussing this image, tracing similarities of her own work to her ancestry. Discourses such as these are exciting and of great value for local craftswomen and artists, the same as they enhance the documentation of a given object for the museum and its visitors considerably.

Fig. 11.4

Alyona Khabarovskaia comments on an Even old garment during a seminar in Yakutsk, Russia in 2019. (Video still credit: E. Kasten)

The same approach was applied again with regard to two other objects in the collections of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin that I noticed during the same investigation, specifically two Koryak festive garments—Kukhliankas—from 1900 (museum identity numbers: I A 2911 and 2913). During a workshop under the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (https://www.eldp.net/) on transcribing Koryak texts for ELAR, a Koryak craftswoman from Kamchatka, Lydiia Chechulina, stayed for a week at the FSC to comment extensively on these two objects with the help of a photo (Fig. 11.5). During this investigation, she became increasingly excited to see for the first time such an old item that supposedly originated from her home village. Additionally, she later discovered previously unknown materials and ornaments that made study of them not only informative for her but also cultural and social anthropological and museum research in the exploration of cultural dynamics at different times (Kasten, 2021c). Another similar object that I commissioned for an exhibition from a Koryak craftswoman, Tamara Khupkhi, from Tilichiki in 2002 and now in the collections of the FSC (Fig. 11.6), was paired with fully annotated video commentary. Such full comparative documentation is of mutual benefit and inspiration for Indigenous craftswomen, the Ethnological Museum, social and cultural anthropologists, and the wider public.

Fig. 11.5

Lydiia Chechulina comments on a Koryak festive garment from 1900 during a workshop at the FSC, 2020. (Video still credit: E. Kasten)

Fig. 11.6

Koryak fur coat made and worn by Tamara Khupkhi in Tilichiki, Kamchatka, Russia in 2002. (Photo credit: E. Kasten)

Because of these promising first results, the Ethnological Museum in collaboration with the FSC prepared a research project on the museum’s collection from the Nanai people in the Russian Far East. In 2021, the custodian of the depository Claudius Kamps and I began photographing the objects that would then be discussed in a field project in 2022 with craftsmen and craftswomen in the Amur Region. The project was frozen—the only one to be so—in April 2022 due to sanctions resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Part of the project is to create another FSC website, Museums of the North, where images of German museum collections are shown together with annotated video documentaries on the knowledge and techniques of present-day craftswomen, artists, and craftsmen from the corresponding Indigenous communities. Beyond the benefit of such useful contextual information and vivid presentation for museum visitors and scientists, these virtual exhibitions have great impact on the Indigenous communities from where these objects originate, especially by stimulating other creative artwork. Plus, online accessibility gives those local community members who do not have the chance to travel abroad to visit distant museums a chance to view and learn about the collections.

Together with the FSC’s partner institution, the Hokkaidō-ritsu Hoppō Minzoku Hakubutsukan [Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples] (https://hoppohm.org/) in Abashiri, Japan, plans are in place to translate the FSC’s websites into Japanese to reach additional audiences and integrate complementing collections and digital presentations from and about Japan. Another extension of DHN is a planned sub-website on life histories where videos held by the FSC can be linked and shown together with academic works by historians on issues or events. For example, if a person wants to learn more about the socioeconomic transitions in Siberia during kolkhoz, sovkhoz, or perestroika times, analyses and assessments by historians and other scholars—which may be biased through their given academic or political zeitgeist—can be contrasted here with original statements of Indigenous peoples in their recorded life histories, providing broader and more balanced perspectives showing how local peoples were directly affected by these changes as well as how differently changes were perceived.

11.6 Conclusion: Future Perspectives in Politically Uncertain Times

In April 2022, with the war in Ukraine in mind, the FSC launched its new program Escape and Displacement in Eastern Europe due to the War in Ukraine. As former connections with state-controlled institutions in Russia cannot be maintained for the time being, it is all the more important for the FSC to keep the ties with individual partners in Siberia. The FSC, in collaboration with its partners in Canada, the United States, and Europe, is considering the launch of an open publication platform for scholars working on Siberian topics in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, featuring contributions by authors separated by boundaries and newly erected barriers in international collaboration (Kasten et al., 2024). By maintaining these and other connections as much as possible, the FSC and Indigenous communities can be better prepared for the future when fruitful collaborations and partnerships with Russia may be resumed for mutual benefit as it was prior to 2022.