We describe a seven-year longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with an indigenous community in Kenya. We detail the process of conducting research with an oral community: the deliberate practice of understanding and collecting stories; working with inter-generational community to envision and design technologies that support their ways of storytelling and story preservation; and to influence the design of other technologies. We chronicle how we contended with translating oral stories with rich metaphors to new mediums, and the dimensions of trust we have established and continue to reinforce. We offer our griot-style methodology, informed by working with the community and retrofitting existing HCI approaches: as an example model of what has worked, and the dimensions of challenges at each stage of the research work. The griot-style methodology has prompted a reflection on how we approach research, and present opportunities for other HCI research and practice of handling community stories.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642682
There are many approaches to design frameworks that guide designers through co-designing with Indigenous communities. Designers that want to be respectful to the Indigenous communities look towards these equitable design approaches to ensure they are not perpetuating histories of harm. However, some of these approaches are prescriptive to a generalized “Indigenous community." Through these guidelines designers often develop a practice through their own interpretations of what is equitable for this learned idea of a generalized Indigenous community. This can be limiting, as what are respectful practices to an Indigenous community can be vastly different. This paper engages with these generalized guidelines of co-design to present and discuss a method of developing customized practice to collaborate with specific Indigenous communities. We showcase the framework with our experience of developing a design practice for the Office of Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation’s work with the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) community.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642931
Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) faces numerous threats that can lead to its destruction. While the emergence of short video platforms provides opportunities for fostering innovation and communication among ICH practitioners and viewers, it is still understudied how different stakeholders present, explain, and manage ICH via short videos. To address this, we conduct a mixed-method study of ICH-related videos on Douyin, a popular short video platform in China with an extensive user base and wealth of ICH content. By adopting the Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) framework, we propose a taxonomy of frames that construct the landscape of ICH short videos and then investigate the interactions among different groups regarding power, identity, and knowledge. Additionally, we analyze viewer responses to different frames and groups based on audience metrics (e.g., # of likes and comments) and comments. Our research reveals that government-affiliated and indigenous groups dominate the promotion and presentation of ICH on Douyin. Contrary to previous literature, viewer responses show a preference for videos from external ICH groups and ordinary individuals, suggesting a tendency to counter authority and exclusivity associated with ICH. Moreover, it highlights a lack of sustainable debates and negotiations among different groups involved in ICH discourse. Situated within CHS, we provide design implications for ICH safeguarding and sustainability through short videos and online media.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642138
We report on community-centered, collaborative research that weaves together HCI, natural language processing, linguistic, and design insights to develop spoken language technologies for unwritten languages. Across three visits to a Banjara farming community in India, we use participatory, technical, and creative methods to engage community members, collect spoken language photo annotations, and develop an information retrieval (IR) system. Drawing on orality theory, we interrogate assumptions and biases of current speech interfaces and create a simple application that leverages our IR system to match fluidly spoken queries with recorded annotations and surface corresponding photos. In-situ evaluations show how our novel approach returns reliable results and inspired the co-creation of media retrieval use-cases that are more appropriate in oral contexts. The very low (< 4h) spoken data requirements makes our approach adaptable to other contexts where languages are unwritten or have no digital language resources available.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642026