Conclusions and Future Speculations

This edited book explored the role of digital technologies and current literature in the contemporary galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] sector to recognise the invisibilities imposed on vernacular knowledge in formal institutional record-keeping and cataloguing processes. The investigation was framed around urgent global needs to revisit access and dissemination based on Anglo/Euro-centric models and make them more inclusive of alternative knowledges in a period of unprecedented climate crises as well as the enduring social justice challenges of marginal communities (Mehra & Gray, 2020). The case studies in the collection highlighted the possibilities of tremendous opportunities through the employment of the ‘digital’ in the recovery of these data absences while redefining ‘data’ as spanning the intangible experiences of people narrated through stories to the tangible artefacts exhibited in museums. Authors explored the role of information systems design and associated digital tools and their potential to provide visualisation of data for record-keeping purposes representing an alternate viewpoint. This atypical mode of interpreting, representing, and accessing data contributed to the conceptual decolonising of the Western academy’s methodologies of archiving practices. The method traversed various social justice focused initiatives such as Mukurtu and Indigenous Archives Collective that prioritise Indigenous data governance and data sovereignty as a means of connecting different worldviews (Evans et al., 2020, p. 8). Experiential, visual, and other sensory ways of expressing data curation concepts presented some examples of bridging variable worldviews (i.e. the Indigenous and non-Indigenous) through bespoke designed spaces (e.g. cultural centres). Research methodologies employed, such as ‘yarning’, provided firsthand, immediate, and personal preferences for the future of one Aboriginal community’s thoughts on their reconnection with Country. This novel approach of recognising vernacular knowledge working in parallel to the established (and entrenched) status quo raised questions about mechanisms of storing knowledge. In summary, Western systems of structuring knowledge have prevailed in their preservation of tangible materials; in effect, this is a preoccupation of such civilisations. Non-Western cultures and in the context of this book, Australasian communities have historically transferred intergenerational knowledge orally and in other temporal forms.