Additionally, while the company’s original intent was to help indigenous communities tell their stories, Cultural Codex evolved over the past year to have a broader purpose of preserving any cultural projects. Its primary focus is still to encourage the sharing of indigenous culture, but there are now articles on remembering retro computers and Denis Diderot. This expansion to essentially any cultural content muddles the website, turning it into a Wikipedia-like platform with only a search bar and tags to help you sort through the data dump.
As artist Susan Hiller’s work “Lost and Found” demonstrates, languages are swiftly disappearing, but archival material on them is available; living speakers are also invaluable and rich resources. Cultural Codex would do well to home in on indigenous cultures alone. It has the potential to become a leading platform for voices that are often overlooked or ignored, where crowd-sourced information can make sharing and learning about them an interactive, engaging experience.
Couldn’t agree more with that second paragraph! If the company is serious about this, they really should put in the effort to make sure that the space remains more indigenous than not, because otherwise we white people just wash over everything because we can.
(Perhaps a separate site for other cultural things, like the computers and Diderot, but maintaining an indigenous space should be a priority.)
rq says
Couldn’t agree more with that second paragraph! If the company is serious about this, they really should put in the effort to make sure that the space remains more indigenous than not, because otherwise we white people just wash over everything because we can.
(Perhaps a separate site for other cultural things, like the computers and Diderot, but maintaining an indigenous space should be a priority.)
rq says
Wrong post.