Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones Within the Digital Museum more

Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum by Ramesh Srinivasan, Katherine M. Becvar, Robin Boast, and Jim Enote May 15, 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor Katherine M. Becvar, graduate student Graduate School of Education & Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles 300 Young Drive North Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520 USA <srinivasan@ucla.edu> <katherine.becvar@gmail.com> Robin Boast, Senior Curator for World Archaeology Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology University of Cambridge Downing Street Cambridge UK CB2 3DZ <rbb10@cam.ac.ak> Jim Enote, Director A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center P.O. Box 1009 Zuni, NM 87327 USA <enote@igc.org> Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within transnational and cross-cultural contexts. He has studied how the cultural and social practices of a community or organization can impact the design of a new media system, particularly with respect to how a system represents, categorizes, and disseminates the information it stores. His research has spanned such bounds as e-governance, public health, development informatics, digital preservation, across Asian, African, Australasian, and North American field environments. His research has received international acclaim and has appeared in top academic and international journals. For more detail, please consult his web page: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/srinivasan/index.html . He holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University, M.S from MIT's Media Laboratory, and a B.S from Stanford University. Katherine M. Becvar, MA, is a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles completing a Masters degree in Library and Information Science. Her research interests focus on cultural knowledge and the diverse ways it gets attached to artifacts and crafts in spaces of display and consumption, especially museums, as well as how indigenous groups are increasingly creating their own cultural representations in institutional settings. Her thesis, Knowledge as a marketing Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 1 strategy: Ethnic crafts in the retail environment, earned her a Master's degree in Latin American Studies from UC San Diego. She also holds a B.S. in costume and textile design from UC Davis and currently works as a freelance designer of couture costumes. Dr. Robin Boast, Deputy Director and Curator for World Archaeology, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Dr. Boast has been a leader in open-access museum systems for 30 years, and is an historian and sociologist of science specializing on museums and classification of knowledge. His publications include: Boast, R., M. Bravo and R. Srinivasan (2007) Return to Babel: Emergent diversity, digital resources, and local knowledge. The Information Society. 23(5):395-403. Boast, R. (2002) Mortimer Wheeler’s science of order. Antiquity 76 (291): 165-170. Boast, R. (2002) Computing Futures: A Vision of the Past. In B. Cunliffe, W. Davies and C. Renfrew (eds.), Archaeology: the widening debate. London, British Academy, pp. 567-592. Jim Enote – Zuni farmer and interrupted artist – has explored to a large degree such varied subjects as, cultural pattern languages, Zuni architecture as fluxus art, Japanese art after 1945 and from 1999 to 2004 indigenous community-based mapping. Born in Zuni, New Mexico, Jim considers his career an odyssey of hitch-hiking, watermelon picking and writing. Jim is also known for his painting and photography and has shown his work domestically and internationally. Besides currently serving as Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, he is a Senior Advisor for Mountain Cultures at the Mountain Institute. He is now camped out at his work-inprogress home in Zuni. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 2 Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum Abstract: As museums begin to revisit their definition of 'expert' in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider its documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting traditions and perspectives in such a way that the tension between the perspectives is preserved? This paper expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge Universtity and the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center of Zuni, NM to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. Based on our findings, narratives and of objects in use have emerged as key omissions in traditional museum documentation, which offer us several possibilities to expand on our concept of digital objects, which will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects both to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. Keywords: museum documentation, museum objects, multiple ontologies, narratives, local knowledge Introduction: Since they were first designated 'cabinets of curiosity' (Impey and MacGregor 1985; Pomian 1990), museums have adopted the task of presenting archetypical objects. Those objects were selected because of their representativeness of a larger body of knowledge, whether it be historical, biological, cultural, or some combination thereof. Objects have been displayed to stimulate curiosity, display cultural knowledge, and demonstrate the political strength and reach of the society Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 3 behind the institution (Bennett 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1992). The performance -- collection, research and display -- within the museum, up to the mid-20th century, has also been compared to laboratory practice where scientists and scholars continuously discuss, study and re-order the world in miniature (Bennett 2005). These presentations of objects as markers of collective knowledge, we argue, has been predicated on their treatment and representation as scientific specimens. Though these objects continue to be maintained as scientific specimens, museums are increasingly aware of the necessity to show how objects are embedded in different social practices and different social and political programs. In this paper, we build on theoretical and applied scholarship from such diverse fields as museum studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, and sociology, to argue that today a paradoxical relationship exists between the theories of museum objects as 'specimens' versus 'embedded'. We explain that the 'object as specimen' paradigm considers the museum object as a representation of a larger body of knowledge, while the 'object as embedded' paradigm presents the object as acting within a larger, dynamic cultural and discursive system. Since the 'object as specimen' is an embedded social practice, we argue that it remains important, though not sufficient. This paper's contributions accompany discussions that have re-thought the very notion of objective, scientifically-derived knowledge (Star and Greisemer 1989, Law and Mol 2003, Law and Singleton 2003). The ideas of diverse systems of knowledge revealed within science and technology studies (STS) opens up the possibility for a new set of museum practices that makes diverse frameworks and uses of objects more visible. If "facts have been localized," as Law and Mol assert (2003, 1), then scholars and practitioners of museums must consider the effects which that realization has on how we use and present objects in museums. Law and Mol explain that objects are carriers -- agents -- of different types of knowledge, emergent from a local knowledge context. However, as the object is made to travel to distant museums and asked to 'speak' about their places of origin, it becomes a Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 4 public spectacle, interpreted by diverse publics, each maintaining their own cultural imaginations (Appadurai 1996). Multiple ontologies have been described as proposed modes of intervention. This means that giving authority to different ways of knowing can be a way to overcome the limited museum paradigm. This paper explores possible interactions between locally grounded knowledge systems, the means by which objects travel and access new meanings, and what 'multiple ontologies' (Boast, Bravo, and Srinivasan 2007; Srinivasan 2006; Srinivasan and Huang 2005; Turnbull 2005) look like in the practices of museum documentation. Bruno Latour has claimed that facts and objects, particularly when treated as such by scientific principles of rationality, operate as 'immutable mobiles' (1987), in the sense of fixed and stable knowledge. Immutable mobiles are defined as objects of knowledge subject to the shackles of fixed classifications and categories, and therefore placed at an irremovable distance from how the object was originally culturally produced, and from the process of its creation as an immutable mobile. In contrast, a consideration of multiple ontologies accepts the tensions that lie between different interpretations and understandings of an object. We believe that within these tensions, the incommensurability between perspectives are actually great potential sources of knowledge. By focusing our attention on difference (Kuhn 1970), this incommensurability offers us the chance to acquire new knowledge, to be exposed to paradigms that are not our own, and allow these paradigms not to be subsumed by the fixed standards and static classifications of the immutable mobile, as all mobiles are mutable outside of their programs of stabilization. Indeed, we believe that for museums to truly serve as "contact zones," spaces of post-colonial encounters between heterogeneous publics (Pratt 1992; Clifford 1997), they must foster this incommensurability, rather than ignore it by stripping objects of their radically diverse interpretative frameworks. The contact zone can be realized, we believe, when diverse expert communities are empowered to articulate and Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 5 state their claims to an object, and thereby create a type of agonism (Arendt 1958; Mouffe 1999; Connolly 2005) that would allow unprecedented types of dialogs and information to be uncovered and performed. This is particularly the case as the information within museum catalogs is more accessible than ever before due to digitization. As objects become accessible outside of the museum, it becomes important to focus on how these objects are represented, retrieved, and ascribed within a particular knowledge system. Moreover, we assert that individuals within a given community attach different descriptions to shared phenomena, and they need to continue to describe the world differently. As each of us is a member of different communities, we each describe and classify our world using different concepts at different times and for different purposes, and these different descriptions -- these contrasting and fluid ontologies (Boast 1997; Boast 2000; Srinivasan and Huang 2005) -- remain important. Not only are they useful, but they are the ontological keys that unlock the doors to diverse, rich and incommensurable knowledge communities to which the objects travel, or return, and within which they participate. They are not merely alternative translatable ways of expressing the same piece of knowledge, but more accurately are diverse 'ways of knowing' about the world that are necessary to organize, find and use information. Hence, embracing these multiplicities is fundamental to experiencing, creating and performing accounts of knowledges (Turnbull 2000, Turnbull 2005). This paper builds on the above intellectual argument by studying how might a museum, whose responsibility has evolved to serve as an expert and arbiter in matters of culture, reconsider its treatment of its objects? How can the museum present different and possibly conflicting traditions and perspectives in such a way that the tension between the perspectives is preserved? These questions are answered in the context of a digital museum initiative via Cambridge University's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (MAA). We consider the MAA to be characteristic of Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 6 the tensions other museums encounter around object representation and are particularly interested in re-visiting these tensions in the context of the growing global movement to make digital objects available via museum information systems to global publics (Marty, Rayward, and Twidale 2003). We also recognize that the MAA is unusual in its willingness to revisit these tensions and commit to new programs of encounter. This paper presents data and analyses from a multiple-year study supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and conducted in collaboration with the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center of Zuni (AAMHC, New Mexico, USA), and the MAA. This project, led by the Zuni center (AAMHC) with the approval of the Zuni Tribal Council, is focused on the needs and interests of the local cultural group from which the objects originated (Marshall 2002), and is careful to respect local concerns about what knowledge should be shared with the museum around the digital objects (images) that are being re-circulated at Zuni. We believe that the success of projects like this depends not only upon rethinking the notion of 'expert knowledge,' but also upon rethinking ideas about the qualifications that create researchers and voices of authority. In that regard, it builds on a significant body of research exploring the power of considering community in informatics, media, and grassroots cultural initiatives (Kavanaugh and Patterson 2001, Hampton 2004, Pigg and Crank 2004, Liff 2005, Srinivasan 2006). In particular, we validate the hypothesis that significant gaps exist between the ways in which the Zuni interpret their historic objects and the MAA's catalogbased representations of the same objects. This realization uncovers two key topics around which museums can re-consider object representation: • Narrative meanings: Narratives and stories are the cultural threads that clearly connect the objects shared with collective cultural meaning at Zuni. While stories were shared by the Zuni in their engagement with the objects, they are notably absent from the catalog entries. Therefore, in this Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 7 regard, the object has been removed from the context in which it culturally circulated, and in which similar objects continue to circulate, and their phenomenological meanings at Zuni. • Meanings based on use and practice: Uses, both historical and contemporary, are largely absent from the descriptions of these objects in the museum. The MAA catalog presents data of the object within a taxonomy that is categorical and descriptions that support the management of the object rather than about how the object currently engages or might have engaged the lived experience at Zuni. Focusing on use and practice, both past and present, therefore connects the object to community practices, less symbolically than narratives/stories, but still in a very relevant manner. Our data reveals a significant gap between the categorical systems of representation featured within the MAA documentation and the connections the objects have to local knowledge contexts in their sites of origin. In particular, data and analyses of how use-based and narratological knowledges meaningful to the Zuni can be shared via the MAA catalog systems shall be presented. We argue that these experiences must also be shared and presented alongside the categorical and scientific languages and descriptions that the museum currently features within the catalog. Section 1, the intellectual argument, discusses how knowledge is attached to objects in museum contexts, arguing that within the trope of Western museums, objects are considered meaningful when explained by a certain class of experts who communicate those meanings via interpretive labels and narrative paths, that substitute for the missing cultural context that could not travel with the cultural fragment. However, there are flaws to this approach, as we will demonstrate. We then discuss an alternative framing of the way that knowledge is attached to objects within the museum, shifting the metaphor from objects as vessels of objective knowledge towards objects with 'biographies' and 'social lives' of their own. Finally, we briefly discuss the notion of 'digital objects,' Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 8 and what possibilities digital objects have to communicate with local knowledge practices, yet maintain the considerations and articulations of embedded cultural voices. Section 2 presents the methodology and data collected relating to a set of selected Zuni objects, representative of the larger Kechiba:wa excavations of the 1920s. The data we present shows the contrasting nature of the MAA catalog entries relative to the oral descriptions gathered from the Zuni participants, especially around issues of narratives, objects-in-use, as well as several other issues. We propose that the comparisons between these two sets of descriptions point to possibilities for improving museum display and representation, particularly within digital museums, and incorporating organizational schema based around 'multiple ontologies', rather than solely a traditional meta-categorical schema. Section 3 concludes by reflecting on these findings and discussing possibilities for museum representations at Cambridge that will allow the data gathered in our study to be woven into museum documentation, representation and display, thereby enabling new forms of 'contact zones' to emerge. Theories of Object Representation The relationship between words and things in museum interpretation Objects in the museum have been argued to be vessels of knowledge (Taborsky 1990) -- one can think of them as being instructive of distant lives or histories even though the objects have been removed from their original environment and refer to their original contexts via instructive labels, juxtaposition, and the mediation of experts (Ingold 2007). But the supposed objectivity of the knowledge presented by experts is becoming increasingly subject to scrutiny, as questions of representation and identity, especially those of underrepresented peoples and former subjects of Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 9 colonialism, are being raised. Increasingly, the authoritative voice of museum exhibitions and catalogs is being contested by those they seek to represent (Karp and Levine 1991; Simpson 2001; Clifford 1997), and some are questioning whether ethnographic museums are still an appropriate means for representing culture, particularly given their focus on 'tradition' and 'past' (Dahl and Stade 2000). Over the past 15 years, anthropology and archaeology museums have made extensive efforts to incorporate other voices and conflicting interpretations into their exhibitions (Ames 1992, Karp, Kreamer and Levine 1992, Simpson 2001, Herle 2000). Work has been done to integrate source communities (often indigenous) around whose objects the exhibitions are based (Phillips, 2005; see also the Pitt Rivers Museum Research (http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/museumresearch.html), Haida Spirits of the Sea (http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Haida/index.html) and the MAA (museum.archanth.cam.ac.uk)). Despite this welcome recognition of other voices, and the importance of their encounters, we argue that approaches so far have largely maintained the contrast between 'self' and 'other' -- what Smith (1998) calls "the Politics of Pluralism-in-the-large." The exhibitions serve as temporary spectacles, and while they are admirable for their inclusion of and direction from diverse communities, we think that they fail to fundamentally influence the catalogbased representation of the permanent collection of objects. We argue that independent of exhibition, historical objects and their representations can function as powerful vehicles of knowledge sharing when infused with multiple ontological voices. Appadurai (1986) has argued that western common sense, based on key scientific and philosophical traditions, considers objects as "inert and mute," and it is only by the agency of humans that objects have knowable meanings. The perceived opposition between words and things implies that only through the action of verbal expression can the meaning of objects circulate and be understood as part of human thought and agency (Appadurai 1986, Ingold 2007). The principle is that things by Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 10 themselves are inherently enigmatic; only when words are applied to things can we understand the significance of those things (Pearce 1992). Therefore, interpretation is a mandatory part of museum practice to understand what the objects are there to teach a museum-goer (Reibel 1997). What is often less than transparent are the contingencies of the process behind interpreting museum objects. Clifford, for example, has stated that "the making of meaning in museum classification and display is mystified as adequate representation" (1988, emphasis in original). Curators and invited authors make decisions and write copy, and education staff make recommendations based on curriculum standards, but the orderliness of presentation and smoothness of display in exhibitions disguises the uncertain and messy work of knowledge-making that happens behind the scenes. Just as scientific facts are presented as unequivocal and incontestable, exhibitions are rarely presented so that their processes of creation are themselves transparent. Macdonald explains that: the assumptions, rationales, compromises, and accidents that lead to a finished exhibition are generally hidden from public view: they are tidied away along with the cleaning equipment, the early drafts of text and the artifacts for which no place could be found (1998a, 2). Additionally, museum objects are 'rescued' from oblivion and mundane everyday life through a process of extraction and documentation (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1992). Since museums are one place where scientifically-derived facts are presented for public view, the contingencies of the production of facts materially impact how we understand the significance of what is presented to us in museums. The other uses for objects, past and present, are at times absent, hidden away, partially expressed in displays, or relegated to supplementary documentation. The primacy of text over things in museums is often traced in scholarship to a particular historical moment -- during the middle of the nineteenth century, when museum interpretive strategies began Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 11 to privilege words over things, at the same time that museums shifted their purpose from curiosity and wonder to education and edification (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1992, 31-32). What this necessitated was the development of a class of professional experts, idioms of public explanation, and specialized didactic public spaces that could provide museum-goers with the interpretations needed to make 'sense' of the objects. Therefore, in tandem with the development of the discipline of anthropology, and of most major ethnographic museum collections, the role of the museum expert became firmly entrenched within the matrix of cultural repositories. This transition of museums from "cabinet of curiosities" to "public displays of ordered knowledge" prompted the development of an entire class of museum professionals whose job it is to know what they are talking about, in effect to be 'experts' (Ames 1999). Over the past 30 years, people who work in museums have also been moving through another transformation-- replacing the 'expert' with the 'professional' -- professionals in display, collections management, marketing, education, etc. (Ross 2004, Ames 1999). This transformation from "public displays of ordered knowledge" to "cultural repositories with an educational mission" has had the unexpected consequence of further removing the objects from their contexts of use (Ames 1999). The first transformation was the removal of the objects from their contexts of original use to use as specimens or exemplars, key to the educational process. We argue that this movement toward professionalization in museums has had the unintentional effect of transforming objects from 'specimens' used by curators to generate and establish hegemonic knowledge, to mere 'illustrations' used by collections managers and education specialists to teach museum visitors about the world, thus further demoting their cultural significance (Ingold 2007: 3-4). A further dynamic accompanying the 'public' and 'educational' role of museums has involved responding to demands for attention to multiculturalism. As issues of cultural diversity warrant Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 12 increasing awareness and action in society at large, museums are responding with programs to facilitate community involvement and participation. However, this process is by no means straightforward, as museum professionals take on the new duty of navigating the often-tricky path through community politics (Simpson 2001). It is also notable because it encourages the museum to return to an approach of relying on 'expert knowledge', be it from a curator or tribal leader. Clifford reminds us that: Neither community 'experience' nor curatorial 'authority' has an automatic right to the contextualization of collections or to the narration of contact histories. The solution is inevitably contingent and political: a matter of mobilized power, of negotiation, of representation constrained by specific audiences. (1997, 209). It is important to bear in mind that it is not only the voices of the marginalized, nor only the voice of the appointed institutional expert, that have a place in matters of cultural heritage. Rather we argue that there are multiple communities that can be considered relevant stakeholders with valid perspectives to bring to the discussion. This paper is in part a call to return expertise to the museum, but expertise with a small "e". Not a return to the single connoisseurial voice, nor a continuation of the museum professional as the sole gatekeeper of Pluralism-in-the-large (Smith 1998), but an opening up of the object to the multiple knowledgeable uses, for multiple communities, and the equitable expression of those performances. The data we present in section 2 highlights the differences between these knowledges, and argues for the importance in considering the diverse knowledges, uses, and expertise, not just for each stakeholder, but for others as well. Biographies of Objects Extending the ideas of objects having social lives involves considering their biographies and their associated narratives. Recognizing that objects have biographies not only allows us to recognize the Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 13 agency of objects, but allows for the recognition of the contingencies of the many possible meanings and significances of objects (Kopytoff 1986). We assert that these contingencies and narratives should be documented and presented to museum visitors, in the same way that museum professionals catalog an object's means of creation, materials or location of origin. This represents a shift from knowledge as a static and monolithic entity, to a viewpoint that knowledge is emergent, mutable, and processual (Turnbull 2000). As argued, the outcome 'public' museum practice is that they present objects either in relation to their origin or as specimens. The voices that are allowed to speak do so either about their origin, their role as specimens, or from one or two stabilized biographical narratives, but the object remains detached from its ongoing biography and continuing relevance to its community of origin. We assert that the apparent neutrality of the underlying documentation as it allows only certain voices to speak is actually ideological, privileging fixed categories and voices that are often removed from the context of cultural production. By presenting objects as entities that move through "different regimes of value in space and time" (Appadurai 1986, 4), museums can portray objects as complex, socially-understood things. A viewpoint that is gaining increasing acceptance in museology is that of exhibition-as-process. Exhibitions in cultural heritage museums are increasingly becoming sites of contestation, as a particular exhibit bears the "burden" of representing an entire region or group (Karp and Levine 1991, 6). What this means is that exhibitions are increasingly being presented as ongoing programs, rather than products. An example is the exhibit Torres Strait Islanders: the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge in 1998. One of the most notable elements of the exhibition, documented extensively by its coordinator Anita Herle (2000), was the process of Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 14 collaboration that the MAA went through during the creation of the exhibition. In fact, a foundational idea of the exhibition is that "objects in museum collections have life-histories and agency which connect people and events over space and time" (Herle 2000, 254). It could be said that this exhibition took 100 years to develop. There has been a close relationship, on and off, between anthropologists at the MAA and the Torres Strait Islands since Alfred C. Haddon and his team first visited in 1898-1899, and this relationship continues today. The exhibition, curated collaboratively between representatives of the Torres Strait Islands and the Museum, was not so much an exhibition about the Torres Strait Islands, but was about the reflexive impact on both the Museum and the Torres Straits Islanders of these 100 years of associations through the objects which were part of those associations. Curtis describes a similar idea in his description of the biography of objects approach which "highlights the ways in which objects were exchanged and collected, and how their meanings are contingent on context, will change over time, and may be contradictory" (Curtis 2006, 122). Indeed, considering the multiplied biographies around objects in museum practice may reconcile the gaps between the view that 'objective knowledge' is in fact a localized phenomenon (Latour 1986) and the transnational influence of the movement of objects which adds other layers of interpretation that can hold great meaning in museum representation (Appadurai 1996). Clifford states that: The fact that an altar or a tribal mask can mean quite different things in different locations makes inescapable the recognition and display of multiple contexts for works of art or culture (1997, 210). Yet our interest is to describe an added layer of complexity, beyond just the straightforward idea that the same things mean something different in different places. While the ramifications of these multiple contexts for developing innovative strategies of museum display are clear and have been in Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 15 development for the better part of two decades (Clifford 1997, Phillips 2005, Herle 2000), what has yet to be developed is a clear strategy for handling the multiple ways of knowing about objects, and documenting and presenting these in such a way that diverse museum audiences and stakeholders can understand and appreciate what is being presented. Not only are objects understood differently in different places, but we must take care not to use the same categories to think about and understand what those differences are in different places (Geismar 2004). As our findings reveal, it is not a question of merely collecting more information using existing categories and frameworks, but rather a deep inquiry into the information that people use to engage with objects, and a realization that key contextualizing information is often absent in the stable descriptions museums use. Turnbull (2000) describes his idea of "knowledge spaces" in his discussion of how knowledge moves and is assembled between different cultures and periods, asserting that it is the social order which permits the framing of science as universal and describing how they establish equivalences despite incompatibilities. This paper promotes the importance of digital museums to serve as knowledge spaces, dedicated to the process of assemblage and negotiation of knowledges to take place. However, the difficulty of this in the context of museums is clear-- museum visitors like to think of facts as objective, and may become unsettled or confused when the authoritative voice of the museum gives way to multiple points of view (Macdonald 1998b). Quite simply, people are not accustomed to questioning the 'factness' of facts, despite what social studies of science have revealed about the frequent lack of consensus in the creation of facts. One of the primary reasons for this is the general acceptance of most museum visitors that, in a museum, a single authoritative voice is what is on offer (Merriman 1989). The museum, and its displays, are not seen as media of discussion, discourse or debate. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 16 This provides us with an interesting challenge, and we suggest that one possible approach to the presentation of incommensurable ways of knowing is to allow the objects to escape the museum by creating mutable mobiles (Law and Singleton 2003). First, it is necessary to make the object mobile, but also to make it mutable -- changeable, modifiable, subvertable. To these ends, "digital objects" offer an invaluable opportunity in that they are very mobile and mutable through recontextualization, re-use and reproducibility. This is the charge of our work at hand, where we consider the unique possibilities held by digital objects to reconcile multiplicity of different contexts and interpretations with the locality of how they were culturally produced. Therefore, in this section we argue for the importance of extending the exhibition-as-process idea to the practice of museum documentation, so that the adaptations in meaning that objects go through in differing contexts and at different times are made visible and attached to the object as part of its legacy documentation. Beyond this simple attachment we are calling for a deep association of the many different and diverse accounts which surround objects to become the primary point of documentation. Documentation within museums has become a highly standardized classificatory description of the specimen-ness of objects (See Canadian Heritage Information Network 2002, "Standards." Available at: http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Standards/index.html). Rather than documenting objects as specimens only, and then allowing only a few extra voices to be associated with the object at the point of display and exhibition, we feel that these diverse accounts should be the primary goal of documentation. It is at this deep and relatively permanent level, we find the identity of the museum object, not solely at the level of the exhibition which is transitory. No matter how much museums allow multivocality to express itself at the level of the exhibition, it is at the level of the catalog that the enduring identity of the objects exists, and it is at this level that multivocality must be incorporated. The emergence of digital libraries and museums only Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 17 accentuates the possibility for museums to facilitate the sharing of diverse accounts via databases and digital catalogs. Digital Objects A third consideration surrounds the question of "digital objects" and their relationship to museum practice. It may seem that by transforming the object into a digital representation one simply creates an objectified immutable mobile. However, we hypothesize and validate that a distinguishing aspect of digital objects is that they can carry a multitude of complex references to the original physical object, while being decoupled from its dominant institutional account. Their circulation asks diverse audiences to reflect on their origins, while also presenting opportunities to combine, appropriate, reedit, and more. Walter Benjamin (1935) was one of the first scholars to speculate on the impact of technological reproduction on the uniqueness of a work of art, and his theories have specific implications for our project. He states that what is lacking in even a perfect reproduction is an object's materiality, its unique existence in space and time, and the history to which it was subject during its existence. However, Benjamin also notes that "technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself" (Benjamin 1935, 222). Unlike the photographs or illustrations which Benjamin analyzed, the electronic substrate of digital objects render them far more mobile and mutable. Since digital objects are mobile, modifiable and extensional, digital collections can be developed in ways that are impossible for physical objects. But beyond the simple implications that digital objects are extensional, deeper discussion reveals the possibilities digital collections have to stimulate grassroots community participation and enable previously marginalized communities to actively lead and take ownership of cultural heritage projects on their own behalf. As institutions like tribal museums and ethnically-oriented cultural centers grow in numbers and popularity, the relevance of looking at objects through multiple frames Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 18 of understanding only increases. New and emerging technologies have a vital role to play in portraying the biographies of objects within museums. The use of digital technology in the arena of cultural heritage has grown rapidly over the past 30 years, and projects like the MAA/AAMHC project discussed within this paper are exploring ways that technology can be used to do a better job of documenting and extending cultural heritage (Srinivasan and Huang 2005; Srinivasan 2006). The digital object maintains an independence because of its ability to travel and aggregate and connect different interpretations (Brown and Duguid 1995). We feel that this mutability of the digital object -- not just the mutability of its representation, but of its agency -- has remained largely unrecognized. Since, as we have argued above, the immutability of an object is an effect of its objectification, we propose that it takes only a change of practice to transform the digital immutable mobile into a mutable mobile (Law and Singleton 2003). We are aware that this concept is not without problems, nor can the digital object have the same agency as the corporeal object; however as the following discussion and our data will show, the concept of digital objects is highly useful for thinking about the ways that technology can be integrated into cultural heritage repositories. We now present a detailed discussion of our study to validate our digital, mobile, and the mutablility of museum objects. Methodology and Data Presentation Methodology We have argued that traditional museum catalogs have presented objects in a limited manner, omitting the multiplicity of accounts and contexts that can be shared. However, as technology systems are increasingly adapted for use in representing cultural materials, an undue emphasis is being placed on information standardization in order to facilitate access and interoperability of Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 19 information systems. Unfortunately, this approach to standardization comes at a high cost to the diverse local meanings of objects (Boast, Bravo, and Srinivasan 2007). Therefore, as part of the ongoing project "Emergent Databases: Emergent Diversity (ED2)" led by the MAA/AAHMC, this paper explores ways that museums can develop access systems that are able to accommodate and develop multiple ways of engaging with and understanding an object. It should be noted that the data presented here are a portion of the ongoing project's findings. A primary goal in this project is to explore both similarities and differences between how local communities associate knowledge with objects in comparison to standardized museum systems. The stories, comments, and descriptions about objects we gathered from the Zuni participants in our study will be compared here with the catalog entries about those same objects, forming the foundation for our analysis and the recommendations for further research presented below. Specifically, the objects we used to gather descriptions were originally excavated from the Kechiba:wa site at Zuni, NM, during the early 1920s, as part of the larger Hendricks-Hodges Expedition directed jointly by the National Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution (Isaac 2007). At the time of the excavation, the majority of the uncovered artifacts went to Washington, D.C., but because of the participation at the time of Cambridge's curator Louis C. Clarke, some of the artifacts crossed the Atlantic and became part of the collection at the MAA at University of Cambridge (Ebin and Swallow 1984). Using data collected during ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979, Hammersley and Atkinson 1983), this paper compares the accounts around objects collected from Zuni participants and the existing museum catalog used by the MAA. A key component of this project has been its collaborative intent. Every aspect of the research design and implementation has been done with the Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 20 leadership of our Zuni colleagues at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center (AAMHC), in order to ensure that the research process is relevant to local priorities, participation, agendas, and goals. Collaborative, participatory methodologies are gaining increasing acceptance in across several social science disciplines (Marshall 2002; Bishop, Bazzell, Mehra, and Smith 2001; Robinson 1995). The proliferation of participatory methodologies in social science research reflects a fundamental de-centering of the research paradigm (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Moreover, this project is situated within a growing body of indigenous new media research that is based on local needs and agendas (Christen 2006, Hughes and Dallwitz 2007, Christie 2000, Salazar 2003). The preliminary set of objects to be circulated was selected by Zuni colleagues during a trip to Cambridge and vetted by a well-regarded Zuni religious and cultural expert. This study also did not involve objects with solely religious associations in our data-gathering, because knowledge of a religious nature is sensitive in Zuni and is held by a few individuals on behalf of the community, making it an inappropriate topic for public inquiry and discussion (Isaac 2005, Jim Enote and Octavious Seoutewa, pers comm). Over one hundred Zuni participants in our study have been interviewed by the team of Zuni researchers, in a variety of locations -- at the AAMHC, public places, and in participant's homes. These participants were sampled from the larger population around the demographics of gender, age, and occupation, decided upon by AAMHC staff to be the most relevant social categories within the community. The participants were randomly divided into two groups, each of which were interviewed during August 2007 - October 2007. Each participant was asked the same series of open-ended questions about a set of randomly-selected images of Zuni objects from the Kechiba:wa collections housed at the MAA. The images of objects for each interview were chosen from the preliminary set of twenty-one objects that were initially chosen during the consultation visit our Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 21 Zuni colleagues took to Cambridge. The questions asked during the interviews were written in order to elicit descriptions and uses of objects, as well as any other meaningful knowledge that the community member may associate with that object. Also, because of our hypotheses about the importance of stories and uses to understanding objects, our interviews included specific questions about uses and narratives relating to the objects. Very little information was provided by the researchers during the interview if participants were unable to immediately identify what they were looking at, but often, towards the end of the interview, and especially when the participant had trouble identifying an object, the interviewer would tell the participant what the object was, as well as its name in the Zuni language. While the exact number of interviews about each specific object varied, at least five interviews took place for each of the twenty-one objects in our sample. Data Presentation As alluded to earlier, the gathered data spans two major topics, focused on the important role played by (1) stories and narratives and (2) discussions of objects-in-use for contextualizing publics', specialist communities' and museums' understanding of objects as they are described and represented. Initially, we intended to present a comparison between the descriptions presented by the MAA catalog and the descriptions offered by our Zuni participants. But as we developed an analysis of our data, it became clear that the kinds of information that our Zuni participants were sharing with us were confirming what we suspected about the omission on the part of the Cambridge catalog to present information which describes objects relative to their current and past usefulness, or information derived from narratives about or related to those objects. This is not to say that museums do not present stories or information about objects in use at all; however, as we argued in Section 1.2, this type of key contextualizing information is most often presented at the level of an object's exhibition in the museum's gallery, not at the level of the object's enduring description in the Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 22 museum's catalog nor via emergent digital museum systems. The entries from the MAA catalog for the objects we included in our study are typical of what is usually found in a museum's catalog with "name," "description," "material," and "notes" containing the most illustrative information about each object (in addition to metadata fields used for collections management, such as accession number, which are less useful for the purposes of describing and understanding an object). In fact, the MAA catalog conforms to the SPECTRUM (2007) standard for museum documentation. However, a simple comparison between the descriptive information in the Cambridge catalog and the data collected during our interviews shows that for the most part the Cambridge catalog entries are sparse, clinical, and use highly specialized language to describe everyday objects (see Figures 1 and 2 below). (FIGURE 1 HERE) Figure 1. Description of digging stick (MAA 1924.122), from MAA online catalog at [web address] (FIGURE 2 HERE) Figure 2. description of digging stick (MAA 1924.122), from an interview with a Zuni participant The information presented in Figure 1 about the object is an example of the knowledge systems and languages specific to museum professionals, whether that be archaeologists, anthropologists, curators, or historians. The nature of the knowledge provided by the Zuni participant quoted in Figure 2, about the exact same object, reinforces the need for new 'experts' to participate in the practice of museum documentation. As we will expand on below, our data also begins to illustrate Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 23 some of the foundations on which this documentation extended through digital objects can be built. Comparing the two different accounts the exact same object, a digging stick, we begin to see the disparity between the two descriptions, isolating two major issues, largely omitted at present, that the digital catalog system must consider: (1) everyday uses and practices, and (2) diverse narratives and stories. In Figure 3, we have attempted to further depict the broad variety of descriptions which we gathered from our participants, contrasted against the sorts of formalized information categories which are written by, and understood by, museum specialists. Specifically, Figure 3 shows the descriptions we gathered about four objects representative of the larger collection: a fragment of a basket (MAA Z42472), a digging stick (MAA 1924.122), a pottery bowl (MAA 1924.473), and a rock with a naturally-occurring lumpy shape (MAA 1924.101B). The size of the text corresponds to the number times that our participants used that term or concept to describe the object they were looking at, and the 'clouds' are clustered by general type of description, i.e. 'name', 'material', 'uses', etc. We have used a Venn diagram to represent that there are a few overlaps and similarities between how our Zuni participants described an object, and how the Cambridge catalog did the same (shown in the center). But significantly, the majority of descriptions given by our Zuni participants (left side), relating as they do to past and present uses of objects and to stories and narratives about objects, do not have a corresponding description in the Cambridge catalog (right side). (FIGURE 3 HERE) Figure 3. Comparison of Zuni comments (left) and MAA catalog records (right) for four sample objects, grouped according to metadata field or general category. The size of text corresponds to the frequency with which that term appears in our data. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 24 Data Analysis This section serves as an analysis and discussion of the general findings we began to discuss above, illustrated across a set of objects in Figure 3. Despite the fact that the two sets of 'expert communities' were describing the same objects, we have uncovered two significant differences between the types of information they deemed important to know about objects in order to make sense of them: (1) Stories and narratives about objects -- We found that stories were an important aspect of participant's descriptions of, discussions of, and engagement with objects. (2) Uses and Practices around Objects -- In almost every case, information about objects-in-use was absent from the Cambridge catalog, although it was a central feature of the descriptions of our participants. In addition to these two major findings, we also have two supplemental points that emerged from our discussions with the Zuni participants in our study, which are presented below. We found that our Zuni participants consider objects to be a powerful focus for teaching and learning. Additionally, and significantly, we found that while physical objects are important as physical things, our Zuni participants perceive a real potential for digital objects, especially for learning purposes. Stories and Narratives An important part of the data we gathered, which has no corollary in the Cambridge catalog, comes out of the stories shared by the Zuni when presented with the objects. Stories are considered important mnemonic devices, modes by which culture transmits and homeostatically maintains itself (Goody and Watt 1963, Ong 1982), and also critical to maintaining the bonds between communities Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 25 (Lord 1965). While not every single participant had stories or memories related to all the objects they were looking at, the fact that numerous participants were able and willing to share both personal stories and narratives about the objects indicates that there is much more that museums can do to collect and present narratives related to objects as a core part of catalog documentation. Our everyday experience of objects, around which we tell stories, is a key component of our understanding of the meaning of objects. Furthermore, it is precisely these sorts of stories which we argue are crucial to cultural revitalization, and for eliciting participation in the kinds of emergent cultural heritage systems which integrate and share multiple ontologies (Srinivasan, Boast, Furner, and Becvar forthcoming, Salazar 2003, Christen 2006). Furthermore, stories and narratives about objects can also be a way to discuss Zuni cultural objects which aligns with Zuni ideas about the appropriate circulation of cultural knowledge. By focusing on personal experiences with objects, people are able to talk about important aspects of their lives as Zunis in a way that avoids a conflict with more esoteric areas of knowledge. Isaac notes a similar approach to the discussion of cultural topics via personal experiences in her earlier analysis of the AAMHC, noting that the information that the staff chose to present, in other words the "public sphere of local knowledge," drew primarily from "personal, familial, or clan experiences" (Isaac 2005, 10-11). Excerpted below are some selections of the sorts of stories which participants shared with our researchers when presented with the images of the objects from Cambridge: "I have [in my mind] an image of people using a basket to clean wheat and the smell [of] the wicker plants it is made of." (viewing MAA Z42472) "my mother has a similar one [set of tweezers] that was used in the plaza ceremony with the bear dance and another dancer who had a yucca plant on him, and the bear tries to get them, but it was my mother who had the tweezer and took the fruits. We also used to make our own Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 26 tweezers while staying at our Nutria farming village." (viewing MAA 24.119) "[This mortar reminds me of] grandfather making black paint. This same grandfather was also survived the smallpox epidemic in the early 1900s, and [he] was passed for being dead but came back to life after three days of being comatose, [which] proved how strong he was but [he] was forever scarred by the smallpox." (viewing MAA Z42477) The role of narrative here should not be seen as trivial or traditional -- as somehow counter to 'scientific' or classificatory data. Though this study focuses on a comparison between the museum catalog and the accounts of one expert source community, the Zuni, it can equally be extended to other specialist/expert communities that have developed knowledge practices around these same objects, such as archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, artists, ecologists, etc.. These other specialist communities also give meaning to these objects through narratives, often narratives of use, but of a different nature and purpose. These other specialist narratives also rarely make it into the museum's documentation and are also, often, relegated to the exhibition or display, without a permanent association with the object in the museum. Uses, both historical and modern Based on our data, we confirm our hypothesis that objects-in-use are a critical way in which objects of cultural heritage are ascribed with meaning by source communities, such as the Zuni. As we argued in section 1.2, people make sense of an object via how it is used, not merely its physical description and characteristics. They are interested in considering the object in the context of practice-- that is the rituals, activities, and lived experiences that support the object. Narratives, described above, fit within this point, but so do the uses connected with the object. For example, when people were talking about a ceramic bowl (1924.473), in response to the initial two questions "How would you describe this object?" and "Does this object make you think of any stories or Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 27 memories?", most respondents (4 out of 5) described the object in terms of its tangible uses, as a bowl for holding corn meal or water, rather than its physical description (listed in the Cambridge catalog as "fragmentary small Gila ware bowl"). In total, nearly two-thirds of the interviewees referred to the uses of objects when we asked the preliminary question about describing objects and stories related to the objects (99 out of 158 object interviews). Later on in the interviews, we did ask questions specifically oriented towards the uses of objects, but the fact that our participants discussed objects-in-use when asked the open-ended question "How would you describe this object?" reveals the central importance of use and usefulness in describing and understanding objects. For the catalog entries for our entire sample of 21 objects, the Cambridge catalog only briefly mentions a potential use for two of the objects, while the descriptions for the other objects are confined to physical characteristics and materials. Therefore, the existing categorical catalog data embeds the object within a taxonomy useful for museum professionals and archaeologists, but fails to deal with the important issue of objects-in-use. Additionally, the importance of objects-in-use was reinforced by the responses to the general question "Can museums describe these objects in ways that are more enriching to museum visitors?" 44 out of 54 respondents answered "yes" to this question, and 15 of those positive responses also included something about the fact that museums can do a better job of describing what objects were used for. This finding, echoed in other places within our data, supports our overall assertion about the de-centering of the 'expert' description of objects, and the dissatisfaction with the status quo of museum documentation amongst the Zuni. Similarly, the data also indicates that the Zuni are interested in how these objects compare to things that are in contemporary use, a type of description which is also absent from the current catalog. As Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 28 shown in Figure 3, our respondents made frequent references to modern impacts on the production and use of traditional objects such as the ones we were showing them, especially for human-made objects (baskets, pottery, etc.). Topics such as a loss of quality and knowledge in the production of objects, the fact that people no longer make or use these objects, and also the fact that people now purchase commercial products instead of making objects for their own use frequently emerged in discussions about the human-made objects we showed our interviewees. For example, when we showed our respondents an image of a ceramic ladle (1924.482), 6 out of 16 interviewees talked about how people no longer use ladles like "this one", and the same number also explained that objects like this are made in a different way today. The power of teaching and learning In addition to the two principle findings outlined above, we also found evidence underscoring the importance of objects for teaching and learning. It is clear that the Zuni see their traditional objects as important catalysts for new efforts toward teaching and learning within their community. At some point in nearly every interview that we did, interviewees expressed a link between the objects that they were looking at and learning more about Zuni culture and history, by expressing a desire to learn more, or stating that these objects are important because one can learn from them, or something similar regarding the relationship between cultural education and objects such as the ones we were showing them. This finding is consistent with the link between objects and learning which museums are built upon and have in turn reinforced for decades, as described in section 1.1. Because of the limited nature of the catalog entry, it is clear that merely providing access to catalog entries written for specialists does not mean that non-specialists can definitely learn from those entries. The absence of contextualization, and of comparisons to other objects, means that the 'scaffolding' which is so important to the process of learning cannot take place when systems merely extract metadata Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 29 from a museum's catalog and make it accessible (Pea 2004) to the public, specialist communities, and the museum. Interestingly, even when the Zuni did not know what an object was or what exactly it was used for, they often observed that it would be useful for teaching purposes. For example, one of the objects we showed the participants, a pair of long wooden tweezers used for picking the fruit of the prickly pear cactus (MAA 24.119), was initially misidentified by nearly all of the participants we interviewed since objects like this fell out of everyday use at Zuni some time ago. But notably, even though 80% of respondents (18 out of 22) were guessing about what this object was, 35% of respondents said that it would be useful for teaching purposes when asked about how this object could be useful today or in the future (8 out of 22). Clearly, we cannot overestimate the importance of objects as a conduit for teaching and learning specifically, and generally as a key rallying point for cultural revitalization. Digital and Physical Objects As hypothesized in section 1.3, digital objects offer a flexibility, mobility and extensionality which make them ideal for projects related to cultural revitalization and collaboration. Consistent with this hypothesis, many of the participants we interviewed saw a strong potential for digital objects, citing more abstract types of usefulness like education and cultural identity. Participants expressed a strong link between digital technology and education, with 41 out of 90 positive responses to the idea of these images being available online citing the potential usefulness of online images for the purposes of teaching and learning. Another value which our participants noted, which arguably is somewhat related to educational value, was cultural value, or a reference to Zuni identity (5 out of 54 respondents mentioned this type of value). However, the educational and cultural utility was not seen as limited to the Zuni themselves, but digital objects were also seen as a useful way to extend Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 30 the Zuni accounts back into the museum, for use by the museum's different groups of users. For example, one participant noted that "when it [a description] comes from a Zuni person, they know exactly how much information can be presented without disclosing everything the public needs to know." The most significant responses to the question we asked about the usefulness of digital objects, and one which supports the enduring utility of the idea of digital objects, are the responses which acknowledge characteristics unique to images that the objects themselves to not share-- meaning that they are less fragile, that they take up less space, and that they last longer. Five out of 54 respondents said that digital objects were valuable because of their unique characteristics of being easily shared, stored, and lasting longer. We found these comments particularly interesting, since the participants who came up with this rationale in favor of the idea digital objects did so with very little prompting from the researchers. On the other hand, when asked about the usefulness of physical objects, a large number of participants also expressed a conviction that the physical objects are important, even if their digital counterparts are useful as well. In many respects, this finding speaks to the thorny nature of repatriation discussions, which can prove challenging to tribally-run institutions by diverting their resources away from community-oriented programs towards managing physical collections (Simpson 2001, Fuller 1992). The discussions we had with our participants about the importance of physical objects supports our assertion that the development of systems to accommodate digital objects can possibly serve as an interim step towards repatriation, but digital databases are not a suitable wholesale replacement for repatriating physical objects. Digital objects offer a flexibility and adaptability to local needs and conditions which physical collections, because of their very nature, cannot. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 31 Concluding Thoughts and Further Directions We started this paper by making three key intellectual arguments. First, museums increasingly resort to standardized and specialized narratives in their catalogs to characterize objects as illustrative of a meta scientific or cultural narrative. Secondly, we argued that the diverse interpretations, accounts and narratives about the object are not secondary to the object, but essential and necessary features of its biography, and it is the biography of the object, or rather its multiple biographies, that give it meaning and substance. These biographies represent the object's use and participation in the multiple social engagements that have formed its life history. Third, we argued that the ability of museums and collecting institutions to extend the object into other social settings, and their ability to collect these biographies is constrained by both the institution's necessarily limited expertise and by its resources. Only by extending the objects into diverse knowledge settings can these limitations even be partially resolved, and the objects go on to have active social lives. To this end, we argued that digital objects can offer a means for extending these objects into diverse knowledge settings, not simply as representations, not simply as illustrations, but as actors with social lives. How do we go about making these digital objects accessible, extensible and usable? We have shown that the usual metadata approach is insufficient as it primarily applies to only one mode of use, that of management of the collection within an institutional paradigm, and that it omits the possibility of sharing diverse narratives and knowledges. The work at Zuni has shown that narratives and stories are the cultural threads that clearly connect the objects shared with collective cultural meanings. These stories and accounts are missing not only from the museum catalog, but from the very standardized structures that are imposed onto the museum catalog. As a result, the object has been removed not only from the contexts in which it culturally circulated, and in which similar objects continue to circulate, but from all knowledge contexts in which it has, or could have, an active role. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 32 The results from the Zuni study, presented here, demonstrate that digital objects can have viable lives as active agents within a knowledgeable community. It has also shown that these accounts and narratives can deeply enrich the objects' active understanding for those communities and others. Further, while the digital object can have an active use in promoting understanding and meaningful dialog, standardized documentation, held by museums, does not usually offer any such role. We would go so far as to say that standardized museum documentation, while being effective in managing museum collections, is oftentimes antithetical to access and use outside of collections management. Though we do argue that these points are fundamental, we do not argue that they are sufficient. The digital catalog presents new possibilities and challenges for museum professionals as they make their objects accessible to global publics. In particular, questions of retrieval, representation and classification will re-emerge, if digital museum spaces are allowed to create possibilities for museums to perform as 'contact zones', as meeting places for diverse expert communities who have much to add and share around these objects. Though we do feel that the potential solutions to museums as contact zones, on-line and off, are multiple, we do hope to be able to extend our work with the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni to develop an on-line system that will correspond to the collaborative practices that we have explored in this paper. We hope to develop a system that has direct access to the digital resources of the Zuni collections at the MAA in Cambridge, while allowing the AAMHC, and the Zuni community, to add and organize comments, resources, associations, and accounts locally. These resources will be under the control of the AAMHC, and only certain resources will be shared back with the MAA in Cambridge. The MAA will not be able to change or modify these resources without the permission of the AAMHC, but they will be associated directly with the objects in the collection at the level of the documentation Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 33 system having the same status as museum descriptions and accounts. It is further hoped that the MAA will be able to extend this system to other specialist communities -- such as archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, historians, etc. -- to create rich and diverse documentary accounts around the objects. The Zuni have helped us understand that digital objects present possibilities to support the passing on of knowledge in manners that were previously not possible, especially because museum catalogs remain static and standardized. Community members see educational value around digital objects -many noted that online images are powerful nodes for learning. The Zuni asserted that while physical objects have more power in reinforcing emotional and cultural response and identity construction, digital objects engage greater participation, learning, and accessibility. The Zuni expressed that as these digital objects are also valuable because they do not generate the same major political, social, and economic quandaries often faced in physical repatriation efforts (Simpson 2001, Peers and Brown 2003). One aspect of physical repatriation, though effective and justifiable in many instances, is to move the object to another site of use without confronting the problems of extension and other knowledgeable use. We are not arguing against physical repatriation, nor are we arguing for virtual repatriation, necessarily. We feel that both strategies are a matter for negotiation between the holding institution and the claimant community. What we are arguing for is that regardless where the object resides, there is a necessity for considering how objects are used in multiple locations and how the diversity of knowledgeable accounts are allowed to be associated with that object. What we are calling for is a debate within collecting institutions about how their object collections are used and how these uses can be enabled and supported. This, we argue, will require a fundamental re-evaluation of how museums record, manage and account for their collected objects. Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum,. 2008 34 REFERENCES: Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal tours and glass boxes: The anthropology of museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ----- 1999. How to decorate a house: The re-negotiation of cultural representations at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology. Museum Anthropology 22(3): 41-51. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. 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