Laura K Gibson | King's College London (original) (raw)

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Papers by Laura K Gibson

King's College London, 2019

Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021, 2021

This paper documents the collaborative design project: “Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures: Understandi... more This paper documents the collaborative design project: “Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures: Understanding Zulu History and Language with Zulu-Speaking Communities and Their Belongings.” With eight Zulu experts, and the company Museum in a Box [32], we collaborated to create an oral history documentation project that focuses on the belongings at the Iziko South African Museum (SAM). Using the Museum in a Box tool, we created a movable, audio-based exhibit that compiled stories and images of objects from the SAM, for use back in the community in KwaZulu-Natal. This paper documents our shared process and considers the development of this exhibit and documentation project as a kind of participatory anarchive or counter archive [20, 41]. We connect practices and theories in participatory design with those in museum studies and archival studies; and show the productive tensions that exist in an experimental, community-engaged oral history documentation project.

The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2012

This paper draws on current themes of digitisation and access in two specific museum contexts—the... more This paper draws on current themes of digitisation and access in two specific museum contexts—the Reciprocal Research Network in Vancouver, Canada and the Luthuli Museum in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As museums and cultural heritage projects engage with new digital environments, issues around access for wider communities are raised. We ask what the possibilities of open access permitted by the digital world are, and how can ideas about open access through technology be complicated by existing power structures and geographical limitations in marginalised communities. This paper draws attention to the fact that when online access is implemented, other associated issues are raised. Open access databases and catalogues do not in themselves provide inherent access to knowledge since access to them is mediated by social, economic and historical circumstances. We frame this discussion specifically within issues of the digital divide and technological infrastructure, ownership issues in an open access environment, and the subsequent challenges concerning multiple interpretations.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2016

Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy, 2020

With a specific focus on a material culture collection previously classified as Natal Nguni and Z... more With a specific focus on a material culture collection previously classified as Natal Nguni and Zulu at the Iziko South African Museum, this research article explores how digital spaces offer opportunities for changing the ways museums document and manage objects collected during colonial periods. This article draws attention to the highly constructed nature of museum documentation systems and the ways normalised colonial knowledge production practices are often replicated in digital versions of museums. Drawing on data I collected during workshops and interviews conducted 2016-2019 with descendent communities who self-identify as Zulu, I consider how their proposed, alternative categories, classifications, and information structures might take advantage of digital possibilities to change how museums construct knowledge about the people and cultures their objects are employed to represent. In conjunction with more rigorous repatriation and hiring policies, rethinking museum documentation systems is, as this article argues, an important step towards decolonising institutions.

Drawing on arguments that classifications are constructed and unnatural, yet both invisible and p... more Drawing on arguments that classifications are constructed and unnatural, yet both invisible and powerful, this paper considers how increasingly standardised online catalogues and digitised databases allow museums to reach larger, more diverse audiences than ever while simultaneously silencing the voices and viewpoints these devices exclude. By exposing the constructed nature of schema using examples of digital museum objects, we begin thinking of online catalogues as boundary objects capable of incorporating hybridity and individuality that challenge universalising narratives without necessarily descending into a chimera of systems that meet only the needs of a localised few. We also consider the possibilities for hybrid records and schema, which include a multiplicity of voices and allow museum records to become contact zones in their own right.

FULL TEXT AT: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245 The democratisat... more FULL TEXT AT: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245

The democratisation of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. It has included innovative ways to manage interpretation, express heritage values, and create experiences through the ‘decoding’ of heritage. This decoding of heritage becomes democratised, more polyvocal than didactic exhibitions, and less dependent on experts. However, the decision of what ‘heritage’ is and what is commissioned for digitisation (the encoding) is not necessarily a part of this democratisation. This paper will consider how digitisation reinforces the Authorised Heritage Discourse through the lens of Stephen Lukes’ three (increasingly subtle) dimensions of power: conflict resolution, control of expression and shaping of preferences. All three dimensions have an impact on how public values are represented in heritage contexts, but the introduction of digitisation requires more resources, expertise and training within established professional discourse. Social media may have a positive impact on the first two dimensions, but can reinforce hegemony. Alternatives are subject to epistemic populism. The role of digitisation and social media in the democratisation of heritage needs to be better understood. Questions regarding the nature and process of digital interaction, in terms of whose heritage is accessible, affect the very issues of democratisation digitisation appears to promote.
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245

These papers were given at a joint International Council of Museums (ICOM) Committee for Collecti... more These papers were given at a joint International Council of Museums (ICOM) Committee for Collecting (COMCOL) and Committee for Museums and Collections of Archaeology and History (ICMAH) conference in November 2012. Hosted by the Iziko Museums of South Africa in Cape Town, museum workers from across Europe and Africa convened to address the theme “Utopias and Dystopias: Museums and the Idea of Historical Progress and Multiple-trajectories”.

This paper draws on current themes of digitisation and access in two specific museum contexts—th... more This paper draws on current themes of digitisation and access in two specific museum contexts—the Reciprocal Research Network in Vancouver, Canada and the Luthuli Museum in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As museums and cultural heritage projects engage with new digital environments, issues around access for wider communities are raised. We ask what the possibilities of open access permitted by the digital world are, and how can ideas about open access through technology be complicated by existing power structures and geographical limitations in marginalised communities. This paper draws attention to the fact that when online access is implemented, other associated issues are raised. Open access databases and catalogues do not in themselves provide inherent access to knowledge since access to them is mediated by social, economic and historical circumstances. We frame this discussion specifically within issues of the digital divide and technological infrastructure, ownership issues in an open access environment, and the subsequent challenges concerning multiple interpretations.

Thesis Chapters by Laura K Gibson

Doctoral Thesis, 2019

This PhD thesis investigates the relationship between decolonisation and digitisation in South Af... more This PhD thesis investigates the relationship between decolonisation and digitisation in South African museums. Focusing specifically on the Iziko South African Museum and the material culture collection previously classified as Natal Nguni and Zulu, this thesis interrogates how knowledge about Zulu culture was systematically constructed by the museum through its cataloguing, classifying and collecting practices, and so imbued with colonial and apartheid ideologies. Accepting that decolonisation demands changes at the museum’s permanent knowledge-production level, I consider how reconnecting descendent communities with their material culture facilitates alternative, multivocal narratives and whether digital tools can really play a role in this process as a step towards decolonising cultural heritage and ethnographic knowledge.

Through a combination of archival research, interviews with practitioners, and workshops with communities self-identifying as Zulu today, I address the following questions:

1. Did South African museums document ethnographic material culture in a way that constructs a specific narrative about Indigenous cultures? If so, what is this narrative and how is it constructed to the exclusion of others?

2. Is it possible to (re)construct alternative knowledge about Indigenous cultures by differently documenting this material culture? If so, how?

3. How could technology play a meaningful role in this process of decolonising knowledge production in South African museums?

The research findings expose discrepancies that reveal the folly of making digitally available existing museum records that are deeply embedded with unequal, yet normalised, systems; doing so risks uncritically perpetuating and reinforcing them. As well as proposing that serious decolonisation demands more nuanced decisions about the actual material and information that is digitised and made available, this thesis advocates further consideration of the digital landscape in South Africa. Based on fieldwork research, my argument is that digital tools have great potential for making information more easily available and participatory; however, digital divisions persist as a legacy of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa and so potentially disadvantage the same communities. Recognising and addressing this situation is a fundamental second step towards decolonising museum collections whereby descendant communities can access, engage and reconnect with their material culture.