Potential for digital heritage

I recently published a blog post on the Archival Platform on the democratising potential of new digital technologies. This was in part a response to the recent workshop on the draft National Policy on the Digitisation of Heritage Resources. The draft policy focuses on institutional issues relating to the digitisation of heritage resources. While these are important, I feel the policy is severely lacking on community engagement and needs clear indication on how these new digital heritage resources will have relevance for the vast majority who were previously excluded from museums and memory institutions, and perhaps for whom these institutions and their collections hold little significance.


The racialised collection policies of the past and exclusionary access to memory institutions for much of the population as well as (many argue) unsatisfactory postapartheid efforts to address these imbalances, mean that digital heritage resources in the present should be significant to and engage the vast majority of the population. Therefore, it is not enough to simply digitise past collections without addressing the issue of  transformation and whether or not these digital resources will have relevance to South Africans at large, regardless of improved access.

I feel that in order for digital heritage objects to have greater significance in South Africa, we should try and democratise the modes of production as much as possible. We should utilise ubiquitous mobile technologies and let those for whom these resources should be important, play a part in developing them. The policy is now being finalised for submission to the Minister and Cabinet, following amendments based on input and comments that the policy team has received on the draft version.

South Coast Writers Trail

We recently went on a research trip down the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, for a writers trail we are helping KZN Literary Tourism produce.  Writers associated with the region include Ellen Kuzwayo, Es’kia Mpahlele, Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post and Michael Green.  We ended up at this beautiful church, set amongst the sugar cane fields, which forms part of the network of Trappist outstations written about in Green’s For the Sake of Silence.

maris stella
maris stella

South African Indian English

Professor Rajend Mesthrie of UCT’s Department of English Languages and Literature recently launched a1700-word Dictionary of South African Indian English, published by UCT Press this year, which marks the 150th anniversary of the first ship bringing Indian labourers to then-Natal.

Mesthrie wrote the book as he feels that our current dictionaries of English in South Africa, excellent though they are, merely skim the surface of the riches that lie behind dialect, regional and ethnic usage in the country. As English spreads globally it’s bound to diversify. Sociolinguists like Mesthrie sees language as played out in living, changing communities, rather than something fixed and stored in dusty Oxford dictionaries and crusty Cambridge grammars. It is up to properly trained linguists to support and give credence to ordinary language used by ordinary people.

Mesthrie offers a few examples. There are religious terms like ‘Diwāli’, ‘Eid’,and ‘Kāvady’; culinary terms like ‘biryāni’ (so spelled), ‘bunny chow’, ‘rōti’ (not ‘rooti’) and ‘dhanya’. There are also neologisms (or new coinages) like ‘healthy’ meaning ‘fat’, and ‘future’ meaning ‘one’s future husband or wife’ (possibly an archaism from Victorian times). And of course, lots of slang: ‘lake’, adapted from the Afrikaans lekker, ‘pōzi’ for ‘house’ adapted from the Great War usage, meaning ‘going back into position’.

source: UCT paper

Map Inanda

Map Inanda is the first project of its kind in KwaZulu-Natal to integrate sophisticated GIS (Geographic Information Systems) with the development of unique heritage resources and the promotion of heritage sites. The initial website is based on work that McNulty Consulting has been doing in Inanda with the eThekwini Municipality, KZN Literary Tourism and the Ulwazi Programme.  We have brought together content that has already been developed and is freely available online.

It is envisioned that the next phase will be to engage with various communities in the area to determine which people, sites and stories they deem to have cultural, historical or social significance to Inanda. Digital heritage resources (in the form of video, images and text) could then be developed around themes identified by the communities in various areas of Inanda. These would be added to the website with the exact geographic co-ordinates.

Why Map Inanda?

The Map Inanda Project has the potential to create numerous benefits for the communities in which it operates.

  1. Key to the project will be the development of digital skills for members of a chosen team. They will be taught how to use GIS tools to record accurate co-ordinates when content is collected, how to edit images, sound recordings and video clips as well as how to submit this content onto the Map Inanda website. These are increasingly important skills that will better equip team members for the job market.
  2. The project will collect and collate content from a variety of sources and aims as much as possible to create and present a clearer and more representative picture of history, religion and dynamic culture in contemporary Inanda.  We believe that the heritage and history of an area should be generated by the people who live there. In the spirit of democratising heritage, we propose a ‘cellular suggestion box’, an SMS component of the website that will facilitate wider and intergenerational community participation and allow people from Inanda to submit ideas and suggestions for Map Inanda, using  cellphones, which the vast majority have at their disposal.
  3. Map Inanda has immense potential to generate and boost tourism in the area. Inanda has a rich cultural, religious and social history, including sites like the Phoenix Settlement, Inanda Seminary,  Shembe holy places, Ebuhleni and Ekuphakameni, the Ohlange Institute, and John Dube’s house. Audio and visual representations of the history and culture of the area on the Map Inanda website would stimulate tourists’ pre-visit curiosity while precise geographic coordinates, linked to significant sites, would facilitate visits to these areas of interest.

Check it out at www.mapinanda.org

Community mapping of cultural and heritage sites
Community mapping of cultural and heritage sites