History, Memory and Music: The Repatriation of Digital Audio to Yolngu Communities or Memory as Metadata
Date
2004
Authors
Toner, Peter
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Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures
Abstract
Metadata, as is well known, is data about data. It is certainly possible to develop a much
more elaborate definition, and others are in a much better position to do so than I am.
For my purposes, I would like to strip back the definition of metadata to its essential
core, and that is data about data.
In particular, though, I have two kinds of data in mind. The reference data are digitized
audio recordings made in northeast Arnhem Land between the mid-1920s and the early
1980s—but they could in practice be any kind of digitized cultural heritage. The metadata
which refer to these recordings are people’s memories—memories about the singers,
about the ethnomusicologists or anthropologists who produced them, about the
recording sessions, or about the musical past more generally. In my research I have
always been interested in memory, and its contrasts with history, but to think of memory
as metadata is an important way of linking the concerns of Yolngu traditional owners
with those of archivists, and to foreground the prospects and challenges of repatriation
in a digital age.
I should acknowledge from the outset that thinking of memory as metadata has been
partially inspired by the “Software Tools for Indigenous Knowledge Management”
developed by Jane Hunter and her colleagues at DSTC. If memory was always a key
interest in this research, it was the idea of metadata annotations of the kind developed by
DSTC being attached to digital objects that has clarified the link between memory and
the digital domain—although the issues for Yolngu custodians have yet to be worked out
(http://www.archimuse.com/mw2003/papers/hunter/hunter.html)
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Citation
Toner, Peter G. “History, Memory and Music: The Repatriation of Digital Audio to Yolngu Communities, or, Memory as Metadata”. Researchers, Communities, institutions, Sound Recordings, eds. Linda Barwick, Allan Marett, Jane Simpson and Amanda Harris. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2003.
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Conference paper
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Researchers, Communities, Institutions and Sound Recordings
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Open Access
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