The Ethics of Virtual Cultural Representation

The Ethics of Virtual Cultural Representation
Szabo, Victoria, Duke University, ves4@duke.edu
Spatial/temporal platforms for visualizing humanities data offer scholars new ways of representing the people, places, and material objects they study within a larger cultural context. These environments can be used to illuminate the lives of individual people, groups and objects over time, present archival materials in geographical or topological context, model theories of structural change over time, and annotate lived experience of the physical world in realtime. While digital maps, virtual worlds, and location-based mobile applications differ in how they represent information, each has attributes that both lend them authority and power, and potentially provoke ethical challenges. This project attempts to articulate some of those features in order to develop guidelines for ethical rich media map and virtual world construction in the humanities.

As digital humanities scholars we sometimes adopt tools created for purposes different from our own. It is our responsibility to understand the rhetorical effects of the communications strategies we adopt for our teaching and research. In the case of spatial/temporal platforms like Google Earth, the built-in assumptions about content-presentation rely on consistently abstracted information. Because humanities “data” is often heterogeneous, ambiguous, incomplete, qualitative and partial, it does not always fit well with a “vector” platform that demands specificity. The temptation to assign a point, a line, a path, a region, or a date can be powerful when assembling an archive. At the same time, the “bitmap” aspects of a rich media environment, both the panoptic stitched imagery of satellite views and street views, and the user-generated annotations, naturalize and potentially humanize they system’s affect, lending it further power as a tool for spatial-temporal representation.

To combat these totalizing tendencies, we can understand our assemblages as database driven, hypermediated historical narratives, whose organizing principles of space and time offer a thru-line for our content. Doing so requires that we show the seams, make the construction produces visible in the final product, and allow the user to deconstruct, or drill-down in our creations. The separation of presentation and data that is a mainstay for coders is difficult to maintain in this context, but is a useful guide when thinking about display possibilities. The goal is to reveal the ways in which a map or virtual-world based presentation is a coherent, but not exclusive, narrative built up out of and illustrated by the materials at hand. Ideally the presentation layer can be added onto and changed based on new information, additional data, or other perspectives.

This approach to spatial/temporal project creation has implications for how we construct, share, and annotate digital map and virtual world based project, which will be elaborated here through three examples. Each project includes both quantitative and qualitative “data” sources, georeferenced content, and a focus on a specific historical or cultural group. While none of these projects are specifically ethnographic or documentary in focus, each raises ethical challenges for the digital media author representing a populated environment. Example Projects:

1. Multimedia Mapping: Muhuru Bay, Kenya, was undertaken by a team of faculty, postdocs, students, and community leaders. This complex project involved the ISIS Program, Duke Global Health researchers, DukeEngage, a summer enrichment program for undergraduates, and the WISER Foundation, an NGO. Some of the issues that arose here were around the use of demographic and survey data reflecting the local population, testimonials by local children on their lived experience as female students in the community, the exposure of selected aspects of the local infrastructure, including a latrine quality survey as part of a publicly accessible rich media map. This project also involved the creation of what were literally the first contemporary maps of the region showing location and sub- location boundaries of the various provinces and villages in Muhuru Bay, and well as a research study on local children’s perspectives on mapping as part of study of the social geographies of AIDS and HIV.

2. “The Walltown Neighborhood History Project,” is a community mapping project, involved seventh and eighth grade students in a summer camp-based experience which involved overlaying historical census data information and fire insurance maps onto a contemporary Google map of their community. This project was intended to promote technology literacy among the students, to provide a chance for local community members to learn more about their neighborhood’s history and contribute their own content, and for Duke researchers to leverage an archive of historical “Digital Durham” materials in a highly accessible, public fashion. Challenges here include the public presentation of historical data in a public, georeferenced context, the presentation of historically racialized demographic language to be read in the non-scholarly context of a Google map, the production of a local and collective identity for the Walltown residents via expressive and quantitative (GIS) data, and the potential exposure of individuals on the public web, even granting their informed consent.

3. The “Virtual Haiti Project,” is part of a Humanities Lab focused on Haiti and supported by Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Students in a class called “Representing Haiti” are asking the question of what it means to create a “Haiti Island” in Second Life, and what it is and is not appropriate to model there. We need to understand how a geo-referenced constructed environment exceeds the bounds of our intentionality, which in this case is to create a Kreyòl language learning space and virtual front end to a library of Haiti-related, downloadable resources alongside a set of coordinated maps related to visualizing the Haitian diaspora. Perhaps more fruitful than direct mirror-world strategies in-world be non-representational strategies such as psychogeographies, associative place-based meditations, and imaginative transformations or reconstructions. Yet why not also a Port-au-Prince StreetView?