Putting language alongside digital heritage collections.
A community approached us about their use of Mukurtu, an open-source platform to manage and share digital cultural hertage content.
They were already using Mukurtu to organize important community heritage items – maps, photos, interviews and more. They loved the Indigenous and community-centered approach of the platform. However, they wanted to integrate language more closely with their online collection.
Understanding the work
Mukurtu has a built-in ‘dictionary’ feature. Unfortunately, it was a later addition to the platform, with less user demand. Which meant its out-of-the-box presentation did not work for community needs. But Mukurtu is open-source and fully code-customizable, meaning the sky is the limit.
We first spent a few weeks understanding exactly what the community’s vision of the platform was. We shadowed Mukurtu users, observing their work and asking them about their dream outcome for the platform. Where would they like to see their language incorporate? What writing system did they prefer? Is there anything unique about their dialect that would want represented on the platform?
Visualize with Mock Ups
We took this feedback and attempted a few “mock” language entries on the site, linking them with related digital cultural items. We found that Mukurtu did not support multiple writing systems easily. And it was difficult to represent the robust definition of verbs in the given Mukurtu fields. What’s more, some of the basic features of dictionaries simply did not work.
Coordinating with Development Team
We then contacted the Mukurtu development team and presented the issues we found. We included extensive write ups of bugs found and desired features. The team confirmed that we were the first group to attempt to use the dictionary feature extensively. We worked together to find fixes or workarounds that would get the community a language site that worked for their users.
The Result
As the work continues to unfold, we coordinate communication and work between the community and the Mukurtu development team. As each phase progresses, we see more language alongside cultural heritage items, allowing speakers and learners to ground their language in context.
