In the previous instalment of this interview, DH Specialist and 2023 Dan David Prize Winner Chao Tayiana Maina discussed how Digital Heritage is no longer a ‘luxury’ in the 21st century, the importance of ‘practice of care’ every DH practitioner must be mindful of and challenges facing this young industry today. The following presents the rest of the interview.
Chandini: What inspired you to digital heritage? How were you acquainted with this concept and what motivated you to introduce it in Kenya?
Chao: Well, frankly, I never knew that digital heritage was a field until I finished my undergraduate program. I did not know there was such a field because it was not even a possibility in my mind. I worked with history and I worked as a computer scientist, but all of these aspects of my life were separate from each other. When I finished my bachelor’s, I had a conversation with someone and they said, well, can you check if there is something along both those lines? That was when I discovered that DH was still developing in the West and that there were postgraduate programs that spoke to it. When I began pursuing DH as a postgraduate program, I realised I had been doing digital heritage for a long time without knowing that I was practising it. So what that course did was give me a language for the work I was doing. It gave me tools and frameworks on which to situate the practice I was creating and that I had created for myself. When I started working in DH, I worked as a content creator. I went to archives, wrote about those and then created a platform where these archives could be accessible or where I could tell their stories. The impact it had was phenomenal. I would get thousands of views from all over the world, mostly from Kenya. It demonstrated that there was a hunger for information; there was a deep, deep need in our society among my generation on online platforms to have information about their history. And witnessing that made me see, okay, this needs to happen. Moreover, spending time in the UK and seeing ways in which museums there were already thinking about digitisation, digital exhibitions, and digital engagement helped in thinking about the potential for this in Kenya. That was how I came back home, realising that nobody was going to employ me to do DH because the industry was extremely young. So I had to start my own. And it’s interesting when you’re building not just an organisation or a practice, but you also have to build an industry. So you have to build an ecosystem as you’re building the organisation. And that has been my experience. I’m still working it out. I’m still finding my way through, but I would say there’s much more awareness now than there was six, or seven years ago.
Chandini: As a pioneer of digital heritage in Africa, what were the initial obstacles you faced when introducing DH, in Kenya, and then as you progressed to Tanzania, Guinea, and Uganda? Or did you receive a lot of support from the community around you?
Chao: It is a mixture of both. The main obstacle was that it was still so new. I had to do a lot of justification. When we speak about justification, it’s one thing to work in an industry where people see the need for it but to start something that people don’t necessarily think of as a priority is tricky. I was seeing DH with a different level of urgency. Also, it was not that people didn’t think it was important, it’s that people thought it was a luxury. If you’re working in a space where institutions barely have enough to pay their staff, speaking about having a website, digitising their collections, and engaging with audiences, seems like a luxury they can’t even afford to do resource-wise, right? So a lack of financial resources means a lack of technical infrastructure, of relevant skills to do this work, and that affects an ecosystem in many ways. So resources are a big challenge. It still is, but more so years ago than it is today. Second, public awareness on the matter. I think I found it much easier to convince public audiences who are consuming content and engaging with it than convincing institutions. Because institutions have a very set way of working. They’ve been operating, let’s say, for fifty years in the same way, so the impetus to change is much less than an individual at home who is accessing a website, right?
And so there’s also an apprehension of change. Also, many people at that time saw digital technology as their replacements for their work, and working within digitisation meant threatening job security. So the perception that digital was a threat and not a companion that could accompany existing operations, is something we’ve worked very hard to change with real success amongst institutions. Also, the apprehension that only a certain kind of person can work in digital technologies. If working with more seasoned, experienced museum staff who do not have digital skills, they shy away from this conversation because they feel like it makes them seem irrelevant or inexperienced. In essence, digital heritage is much more than technicality or taking a photograph. It is about decision-making, curation, and the sustainability of this material. It’s about the governance structures that enable this material to exist for a long time. Eventually, everyone essentially is a part of the digital heritage conversation, but there’s a tendency for people to feel rightfully alienated by new technologies and that was a big, big problem as well.
Chandini: MBC and ADH are currently working with digital visualisation and oral history projects. As a parting question, what are some other tools that you are looking to work on within the next four or five years or so?
Chao: I’m very interested in databases and data infrastructure now. So how information is structured. For example, when we talk about museum objects, how are they described in the database? How do these databases look? Databases are now forming the pillar of how we consume historical content. Moreover, changing the structure of a database, or a catalogue can radically change how you interpret an item, and how you engage with it. So if I go online, and I see this is a Kenyan shield from 1913, it was collected by so and so, versus going in and seeing the science of how the shield was made, what treat was made, when it was used, who made it.
At the core of how we structure data is something that I want to continue looking into. More broadly, I wouldn’t say practically, but I’ve been thinking about the intersection between artificial intelligence and cultural heritage as well. How are we seeing artificial intelligence working within the world that we have today as it is? Do we have any agency to change that? Are we seeing, what opportunities are we seeing, but also what dangers are we seeing?
So I’m very interested in that as well. But I think at a personal level, I’m going to be a bit old school and just say that I’m interested in documentaries and filmmaking as a medium of digital heritage also.
In the next few years, we’re going to see a lot of explorations of history through films. I’m interested in that because I think as a historian and a DH practitioner, a lot of the material that people would rely on to create these films comes from what we are doing now. And so I’m interested, for example, if someone makes a film on the Mau Mau, would MBC’s work have contributed to how the story is told in any way? That’s a really interesting point of intervention.
Chandini: I’m sure it will. Thank you for your time, Chao!
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Chandini Jaswal, who authored this guest contribution, is a second-year postgraduate history student at Panjab University, India. She secured the gold medal in her undergraduate history degree. Jaswal is a core team member at Karwaan Heritage, India and a communication member at The Museum of British Colonialism, UK-Kenya. Jaswal has published 15 research papers and 27 articles focusing on subcontinental history, particularly pre-modern India. She is also engaged in documenting oral histories of the 1947 Partition. Her research papers have been recognised at various conferences and workshops, including the New York Conference on Asian Studies and the Indian Association for South Asian Studies among others. Twitter handle: jaswalC05.
The Digital Orientalist 