As part of the indigenous public authoring / TEK (traditional environmental & cultural knowledge) project I am working on with anthropologist James Leach in Papua New Guinea we have created a simple 1 page poster of folding instructions for making up bookleteer/diffusion books in English and Tok Pisin. Thanks to Porer Nombo and Rembi Yemui of Reite village, Rai Coast, who helped with the description, translation and localised spelling.
Download it here (A4 670Kb)
Tag: indigenous public authoring
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the Periodical issues 11 and 12
After our holiday break in August the Periodical bounces back with issues 11 and 12. I am really proud to present two books made as part of a pilot project I took part in last year in Papua New Guinea:
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An Experiment in the Recording, Presentation and Circulation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge by Giles Lane and James Leach
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Reite and Sarangama: Bodies and Healing by Boston Porer, Pinbin Sisau, Kambuing Pulumaming, Gayap Makon & Maria Teteti
I was invited by anthropologist James Leach to work with villagers from Reite and Sarangama on PNG’s Rai Coast to test our Diffusion eBook format (using waterproof paper) to devise a simple method for recording and sharing local knowledge in the rainforest. One book is a collection of scanned notebooks made by the villagers, with additional English translations; the other is an overview of the experiment in both Tok Pisin (PNG’s pidgeon lingua franca) and English. Two other books of scanned notebooks by villagers are also available online and to download in the TEK Notebooks Collection
As the overview book explains, our project is to devise a cheap and easy to use toolkit that village people can use to record and share (where desired) not just their Traditional Ecological Knowledge, but their Cultural Knowledge too. A toolkit designed to accommodate the exigencies of the jungle and the rainforest and that, as far as possible, is technology agnostic. These books demonstrate how sheets of widely available waterproof paper can be made into simple booklets that can be written or drawn on as well as having pictures or photos stuck on and can then be scanned and shared online via a platform like bookleteer. Where the hand of a local person is often lost in the recording and transcribing of traditional knowledge, these books show an alternative strategy that can be used to assist people document and share knowledge in their own style and way – not requiring complex technologies on the ground that can fail or get broken because of environment conditions.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too. We need 28 more subscribers to surpass the ‘break even goal’ of 100 subscriptions – with free copies of artists bookworks created by Proboscis for every new annual subscriber from our back catalogue of projects.