0.21 Negotiating the cultural turn as universities adopt a corporate  (Page 3/5)

The problem was that, as we were designing the site from 2007 to the present, capitalism came to the brink of collapse. We enjoyed support initially from the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Images (SCETI), but this quickly changed as administrators at Penn became much more cautious about the planning and management of digital resources. Essentially, we fell into the “one-off” junk pile. This was not entirely fair, since Gibagadinamaagoom has always been intended as a model that could be replicated by other tribes for cultural revitalization projects. Although not spoken, the problem was almost certainly rooted at least partly in culture. The economic downturn caused the Penn Museum to lay off most of the researchers and to shift its agenda for digitization more towards classical archaeology. The Penn library adopted a similarly conservative approach focused on digitizing Medieval manuscripts and slide collections from the Art History department, which consists primarily of classical art and architecture. Although programmers and curators expressed interest in Gibagadinamaagoom , Penn’s commitment to a corporate model, coupled with the recession and a jobless recovery, presented a barrier we could not scale. We were able to create a new site, however, which I direct and which is supported by the School of Arts and Sciences, entitled Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities (DPIC). This site, designed as a companion piece to Gibagadinamaagoom , enables undergraduates to play a meaningful role in ongoing research projects that build bridges to Native communities—an interesting example of how culturally based projects must make concessions, not altogether undesirable, to the corporate model favored at Penn, which strongly emphasizes undergraduate research projects.

It is interesting to note here that, despite the lack of “institutional” support for Gibagadinamaagoom, the support of digital humanities scholars and the National Endowment for the Humanities never wavered. We received a Digital Start-Up grant, through Itasca Community College, and assembled an advisory board that includes Jerome McGann, David Germano, Steven Ramsay, and Andrew Jewell. Andrew Stauffer, Bethany Nowviskie, and Dana Wheeles at the University of Virginia helped structure the project so that it will eventually be included in NINES. Thus, in the early phases of the project design, the support of digital humanities scholars provided a kind of intellectual sustainability that enabled us to conceive an archive as deeply rooted in the Native American tradition as, say, the Walt Whitman Archive is in the canonical tradition of print culture.

A crucial turning point for the project came when I was asked to serve as Director of Native American Projects and to direct two large grants at the American Philosophical Society (APS). The APS houses one of the finest collections of Native American materials in the country, a collection originated by Thomas Jefferson, which includes the papers of distinguished anthropologists ranging from Franz Boas to Frank Speck to Anthony F.C. Wallace. In 2007, the APS received a grant from the Getty Foundation, which funded a survey of the more than 110,000 images of Native Americans in the APS’s holdings. In 2008, the APS received funding from the Mellon Foundation, which supports the digitization of more than one thousand hours of audio material related to endangered American Indian languages—songs, linguistic materials, and stories collected over the last one hundred years: a digital collection that could make a real difference in the effort to preserve highly endangered languages. The grant, however, currently digitizes the material solely for preservation purposes. We are thus in the process of building a partnership to write another large grant with the goal of making this collection more accessible. The partnership with the American Philosophical Society holds enormous promise not just for our project but for many other tribes.