| Abstrakt: |
ABSTRACT:Mukurtu is a "free, mobile, and open-source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage" developed by Waramungu people in Central Australia and Kimberly Christen, a scholar who conducted long-term fieldwork in this Aboriginal community (Mukurtu 2023). Users can archive images, videos, and texts, and most importantly, the platform requires community consultation and collaboration. Mukurtu responds to requests for tools to use in language revitalization projects that were not designed by and for linguists. The platform has fields for words, example sentences, parts of speech, and other typical lexicographic categories, but also the ability to link, relate, and establish relationships to non-linguistic materials, collectively called Dictionary. From the beginning, the Dictionary's capacities have exceeded the scope of the genre as it is usually depicted: a neutral, reference work designed to convey referential regularities within or across languages.In this paper, we explore how Indigenous communities are putting the Mukurtu Dictionary tools to use and how this points to local epistemologies as well as language ideologies concerning what dictionaries are and do. Using ethnographic and media examples taken from our experiences working with Indigenous community members, four themes offer insights into how the platform diverges from traditional dictionaries: 1) access, stewardship, and expertise; 2) relationality; 3) multimodality, multiplicity, and flexibility; and 4) pedagogy and publics. We conclude with shared challenges in using the Dictionary, and a discussion of what the analysis brings to understandings of Indigenous knowledge production, stewardship, and transmission, as well as the sociopolitical possibilities of community-controlled dictionary projects. |
