Cultural-Digital Intersections: Village Incubators, Emergent Databases, Indigenous Networks in Central Asia, and the South Asian Web

Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the Department of Design/Media Arts in the School of the Arts and Architecture

Primary contact

Ramesh Srinivasan
Assistant Professor
Information Studies (courtesy: Design| Media Arts)
(310) 206 - 8320
srinivasan@ucla.edu

Project description

I will show a series of ongoing research projects that explicitly explore connections between cultural discourses and new media systems. These include:

Emerging Databases, Emerging Diversity (ED2): In collaboration with Cambridge University (UK) Museum of Anthropology, this project (NSF-funded) is a study of the ability of museums to re-introduce digital objects to the communities from which they originated. How can communities provide a metadata that allows museum objects to be presented within a deeper cultural context and narrative? Moreover, how does this allow public institutions of information to negotiate deeper relationships with communities and allow knowledge to be presented through information systems that recognize multiple ontologies, perspectives and cultural conceptions? This project is to be conducted in partnership with the Zuni, Nunavut, and other peoples.

- South Asian Diasporic Media: How can a digital media system circulate important narratives across generations, castes, classes, religions, and regions within the South Asian diasporic community of Los Angeles? What impact would it have on the social networks of a fragmented immigrant community? And how does this system enable cultural identity and identification to be revealed in the context of different generations of immigrants?

- Village Incubators: An ongoing project focused on two oral, pre-literate rural villages in Southern India (Andhra Pradesh). The goal of this research is the study of the impact visual media can have as a first externalized symbolic system on the development-related discussions of a village community.

- Digital Networks of Indigenous Knowledge: This research will investigate how indigenous and cultural knowledge in Central Asia can be diffused into the university setting and impact pedagogy, cultural communication, and infrastructures within several universities sponsored by the Aga Khan Foundation. The work will involve engaging custodians of knowledge and history to begin to engage in media-based documentation of their knowledge through such forms as video. Research shall focus on the impact of such a system on pedagogical and developmental activities within the region.

Project supported by the National Science Foundation (Emergent Databases project), the UC Humanities Research Institute (South Asian Web), the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications -CalIT2 (Village Incubators), and The Christensen Fund (Indigenous Networks in Central Asia)