From Preserving to Performing Culture in the Digital Era

We offer a vision of digitising culture as supporting cultural processes in the digital era, with a particular focus on participatory design approaches. In doing so, we draw on our own experiences of designing a cross-cultural digital community noticeboard with a very remote Australian Aboriginal community. We review several existing local and international perspectives on digitising culture that consider culture as artefacts, knowledge, language, and values, noting a common emphasis on creating cultural repositories and digital representations. We then advocate for a complementary viewpoint that shifts the focus from cultural repositories to cultural performances, informed by postcolonial computing theory. Finally, we highlight a series of open design, methodological, and ethical questions that will guide ongoing participatory design work to ensure that every community can create digital tools to embed in their cultural performance in the everyday, in and on their own terms.