PULLMAN, Wash. — Kimberly Christen, assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, has been awarded a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a prototype open-source software package to reconnect indigenous communities with cultural heritage materials housed in museums, archives and libraries.

The $49,606 grant supports the development of “Mukurtu: An Indigenous Archive and Publishing Tool,” a digital, standards-based, adaptable archiving tool that emphasizes cultural protocols and provides a means for indigenous knowledge to inform public and private collections.

MUKURTU PROJECT
The Developer II position will act as the primary developer on an open source, NEH grant-funded, Humanities-based digital archive project. The project seeks to create a robust digital archiving and content management tool for the specific needs of Indigenous communities globally (this is phase three of an existing project). The Developer II position will develop in object-oriented PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and XML, and assist in deployment of an open source software package for both online and standalone (offline) computers. The Developer II position will work closely with the project manager and the lead software development manager on the primary application and implementation of additional media features, templates, customizable administration pages, xml export functions, robust installer package, and integration of image, video, and audio media into the system.

Applicant would have knowledge of and experience working with:

* PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML, PHP and Flash/Actionscript
* Eclipse IDE (or similar shared workspace)
* Media-recording using Flash/Actionscript

Applicant must also have:

* Experience as a developer on multiple innovative multimedia projects
* Ability to collaborate well with others and to meet deadlines
* Ability to manage projects successfully with minimal supervision
* Enthusiasm for the humanities and academia in general
* A desire to work in a self-regulated manner with clients who are collaborators more than executive producers
* A desire to work with ideas and concepts that move way beyond branding, causal pleasure, communication graphics, and marketing strategies

Seven-month project time line beginning early May 2010 with possibility of additional work. $40/hour, 15 hours/week.

Contact:

Send CV and cover letter to:

Dr. Kimberly Christen: kim.christen (at) gmail.com

Specify MUKURTU PROJECT in subject line

Deadline: April 30, 2010 (or until filled)

CMA members and subscribers should be getting the paper copy in the mail very soon. AAA members can begin downloading articles at AnthroSource. Below is the table of contents.

Museum Anthropology
Volume 33. Issue 1. March 2010

EDITORIAL

A FUTURE FOR MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY?
Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
Stephen E. Nash

LEADING VOICES
THE MUSEUM AS METHOD
Nicholas Thomas

RETURN TO THE QUAI BRANLY
Sally Price

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge
Stephanie Moser

“WHITE PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING!” Worrying about Authenticity, Museum Audiences, and Working in Native American–Focused Museums
Larry J. Zimmerman

ARTICLES

MODELING CULTURES: 19th Century Indian Clay Figures
Charlotte H.F. Smith
Michelle Stevenson

STEWARDING A LIVING COLLECTION: The National Park Service and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection
Paulette G. Curtis

FROM THIRD PERSON TO FIRST: A Call for Reciprocity Among Non-Native and Native Museums
Karl A. Hoerig

REVIEW ESSAY

Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice. By Barbara T. Hoffman, ed. and International Law, Museums, and the Return of Cultural Objects. By Ana Filipa Vrdoljak
Alexander A. Bauer

BOOK REVIEWS

Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War. By Lawrence Rothfield, ed.
Ann Hitchcock

Negotiation Basics for Cultural Resource Managers. By Nicholas Dorochoff
Rhonda S. Fair

Bones of the Ancestors: The Ambum Stone: From the New Guinea Highlands to the Antiquities Market to Australia. By Brian Egloff
Kathleen Barlow

Creative Spirits: Bark Paintings in the Washkuk Hills of North New Guinea. By Ross Bowden
Alex Golub

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. By Ilona Katzew
Laura A. Lewis

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. By Eric Ames
Henrika Kuklick

Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. By Stephen W. Silliman, ed.
Claudine Payne

Telling Children about the Past: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. By Nena Galanidou and Liv Helga Dommasnes, eds.
Jessica Belcoure

Contemporary Art and Anthropology. By Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds.
Morgan Perkins

Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens. By Mark D. Stansbury-O’Donnell
Tim McNiven

DIGITAL EXHIBITION AND MEDIA REVIEW

FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL: Tsimshian Prehistory. A Virtual Exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2001
George P. Nicholas

Check out all the deets here.

Thornton Media, Inc. creates custom hi-tech tools to help save endangered indigenous languages. We are Native-owned and have worked with over 100 American Indian tribes and Canadian First Nations since 1995. TMI is the only language tool company in the world devoted to Native languages.

I love it when popular technology is used in alternative ways. So take  Nintendo DSi and make it a language teaching tool for endangered languages, get an iPhone app for that…now, how these are used and how successful they are need to be measured too, I’d love to see some longitudinal studies on this (DEL grant anyone??), but for now, it’s great that this is going on…it’s a different take on the hacker mentality I’d say and one that could prove very beneficial.

“What they really need to do is self-exploit,” he said. If they want to make money from their culture, he said, “they should find a way to commodify it and bring that to the market.”

“Self-exploit”…that’s the name of the game in the 21 century I suppose…

The Mukurtu project seeks to create prototype of an open source, standards-based, archiving and publishing tool adaptable to the local cultural protocols and complex intellectual property rights systems of Indigenous communities. As the third phase of an on-going project, this software differentiates itself by providing Indigenous communities with a customizable, turnkey solution to their archive and web-publishing needs. Indigenous communities have been under-served by Web 2.0 technologies focusing on archival sharing, social networking, and user-generated production. Similarly, Indigenous voices have been marginalized in the collection of metadata pertaining to their cultural heritage. Mukurtu addresses these twin erasures by bringing together Web 2.0 technologies, collecting institutions and Indigenous communities through a flexible archival platform. Mukurtu will facilitate knowledge sharing between Indigenous communities and collecting institutions.

What this means is that over the next 15 months we will be “in development” and testing within Indigenous communities and generally getting a workable Mukurtu prototype put together. It’s been a long road of grant writing and work on the subsequent versions of Mukurtu (both the stand alone version in Tennant Creek and the online version here in WA with the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal) this next step will put us on the road to finally having an open source TOOL!!! so excited!

Also, if you are interested you can download the full proposal below. I certainly benefited from reading successful proposals and I hope this helps anyone looking to apply. Also, just FYI, this was our THIRD application to NEH, so, yes, persistence does pay off!! and getting the readers comments is always helpful too!

NEH2009_proposal

The U.S. Interior Department issued final rules this week on an issue of concern to Native Americans, anthropologists and many campus museums: the repatriation of the remains of Native Americans that have been held by museums.