Digital Humanities of the North: Open Access to Research Data for Multiple User Groups

By means of the Digital Humanities of the North (DHN) website, this chapter shows how free access to social and cultural anthropology research is provided not only to scientific communities, but also to interested public and Indigenous communities of Siberia and other parts of the Circumpolar North. The DHN site is primarily targeted at local community use as endangered Indigenous knowledge and languages are best preserved and sustained if their everyday use is encouraged. At the same time, DHN also contributes to the overall preservation of cultural diversity in global perspective. The increasingly important role that use of new technology and social media plays now, and will play in the future, to involve the Indigenous youth is explored as they make use of documented but at-risk Indigenous knowledge of experienced elder community members. A particular focus of this chapter is on the new Environmental Knowledge of the North website, with the aim to bring together both Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science with mainstream disciplinary social and cultural research combined with methods and data of the natural sciences. Another goal of the chapter is to connect museum collections virtually with fieldwork documentaries of corresponding knowledge and techniques of craftsmen, craftswomen, and artists from Indigenous communities.