Winds of Change: Seeking, Preserving, and Retelling Indigenous Knowledge Through Self-Organized Online Communities

Title of the Paper

Winds of Change: Seeking, Preserving, and Retelling Indigenous Knowledge Through Self-Organized Online Communities

Bibliographic Information

• Research Domain: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Development Research (HCI4D), focusing on the seeking, preservation, and dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge (IK).
• Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge, intangible cultural heritage, online communities, postcolonial computing, critical computing, HCI4D

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Problems or Challenges:

  1. Indigenous Knowledge (IK), primarily transmitted through oral traditions, lacks written records and faces the risk of rapid disappearance over time.
  2. While social media technologies provide opportunities for interaction among Indigenous community members, they also introduce complex challenges such as geographical distance, language proficiency, and the absence of key community members (e.g., elders).
  3. The application of technological tools must strike a balance between facilitating knowledge preservation and allowing cultural evolution, yet existing research rarely examines how communities themselves balance these needs.

• Significance of the Research: This study seeks to explore how technological tools can assist Indigenous communities in maintaining cultural evolution freedom while preserving community ownership of knowledge narratives.

• Motivation and Related Work:

  • Previous studies have examined the impact of social media on intangible cultural heritage (IKH), but few have focused on how African Indigenous communities use technology to preserve and disseminate IK while maintaining cultural autonomy.
  • Investigating designs that enable the coexistence of technology and culture to support long-term cultural preservation.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Approach: Through research on how offline and online community members seek, preserve, and engage with Indigenous Knowledge, the authors propose key design recommendations to improve technological support for IK preservation while maintaining the freedom of cultural evolution.

• Innovative Contributions:

  1. Combining offline and online modes to compare the differential impacts of technology on community roles and cultural practices.
  2. Summarizing Indigenous Knowledge preservation models based on self-organized online communities (e.g., Facebook pages and groups) to expand HCI4D's understanding of IK interaction.
  3. Proposing specific technological design guidelines to support community members in preserving and disseminating knowledge while respecting Indigenous cultures.

• Implementation Steps and Technologies Used:

  1. Conducting in-depth interviews with 13 members of the Kalenjin community during the first phase of the study.
  2. Observing content interactions and community-initiated discussions in 11 Facebook groups during the second phase of the study.
  3. Using grounded theory frameworks for data analysis and synthesis to ensure thematic saturation.

Research Findings

• Key Findings:

  1. Offline Observations: Traditionally, community elders serve as knowledge bearers, playing a central role in contextualizing and preserving relevant knowledge, which is passed down to younger generations through tribal ceremonies and other activities.
  2. Online Observations: Discussions in online communities are often led by younger members, whose pursuit of cultural identity is limited to publicly visible IK, while private knowledge is absent due to the lack of elder participation in online spaces.
  3. Community Divisions: Different groups exhibit varying perceptions of cultural evolution, with "language barriers" in online communities acting as a form of "filtering tool" to protect sensitive IK content, thereby restricting cultural participation for non-native speakers (e.g., urban youth).

• Advantages Over Existing Solutions:

  1. Language restrictions provide some protection for the dissemination of sensitive IK content, while identifying information gaps between cross-cultural or intergenerational groups offers opportunities for further exploration.
  2. Specific strategies were proposed to bridge the generational gap in knowledge transmission by combining offline elders and self-organized online communities.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  1. Significant differences exist between offline and online knowledge content; online interactions focus primarily on knowledge preservation, while offline interactions involve the transmission of more private knowledge (e.g., family rituals).
  2. The absence of elder participation in online spaces directly leads to imbalances in the content and methods of cultural interaction.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. The current study is primarily limited to the Kalenjin community; future research should expand to other African Indigenous communities to validate generalizability.
  2. The proposed technological design solutions involve ethical controversies; future studies should explore how to maintain cultural and community boundaries for sensitive information.
  3. Future research is encouraged to investigate hybrid methods that fully integrate offline communities into digital tools to address partial loss of cultural knowledge.

Conclusion

This study provides an in-depth exploration of the integration of Indigenous Knowledge preservation and technological support, proposing new methods to maintain cultural ownership and freedom of evolution in the context of social media. The research highlights the importance of considering existing social structures and ethical considerations within communities when developing technology.