Digitising Language Practices - Boundary Objects in the Movement of Knowledge

• In Event: Beyond Boundary Objects and Immutable Mobiles - New Ways of Thinking about the Movement of Knowledge I: Theoretical Perspectives of Knowledge

Abstract

This presentation details two digital infrastructures presenting Indigenous Australian language materials - the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages (containing digital versions of books created for bilingual education programs, available at http://livingarchive.cdu.edu.au/) and the Digital Language Shell (an online template for sharing Indigenous languages and culture, available at http://language-shell.cdu.edu.au/) - which I have worked with and helped to develop over a number of years. Reading these as boundary objects, I consider how these infrastructures support and facilitate the movement of knowledge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous creators and audiences. Part of this involves considering how the infrastructure networks of software, web design, language data, digital objects, books, curricula, etc., reconfigure existing knowledge artefacts into digital formats, which then take on new performativities in the online space. I will also consider how such re-presentation of language practices in the digital realm may shape and problematise certain issues, both enabling and restricting the movement of knowledge between very different knowledge traditions. Drawing on stories from users, I begin to consider and open up some of the means by which these infrastructures promote transitional language work, and might continue do so in more explicit and informed ways.

Author

• Cathy Bow, Charles Darwin University