IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
Part I
An Attempt to Merge Local and Technological
Paradigms in the Digital Representation of Indigenous
Knowledge
Gereon Koch Kapuire
Edwin Blake
Polytechnic of Namibia
Private Bag 13388, Windhoek,
Namibia
+264-61-2072334
gkapuire@polytechnic.edu.na
University of Cape Town
Private Bag 7701, Rondebosch, Cape Town,
South Africa
+27-21-6503661
edwin@cs.uct.ac.za
ABSTRACT
Current technology trends and developments have hardly been
informed by African indigenous and rural knowledge systems.
Thus either substantial modifications are necessary in adapting
technology to the requirements of indigenous knowledge systems
or those systems are inadequately represented through
technologies. This paper explores different options of organising
video recorded indigenous knowledge in the pursuit of
maintaining local communication patterns and practices. The
evolutionary design of our indigenous knowledge management
system is informed by a series of interactions and prototype
evaluations with a pilot community in Eastern Namibia.
Keywords
Indigenous knowledge management system, rural, traditional,
video
1.
INTRODUCTION
Information and Communications Technology (ICT)
applications developed in urban settings do not account for the
challenges of African rural environments [5]. Oyugi, Dunckley &
Smith [7] noted that people’s concepts of knowledge and forms of
information communication depend on their locality and so it is
essential that they be able to shape their use of ICT without
stepping outside of their culture and identity. However if
technology was designed in the absence of an input from the local
culture, its appropriation often fails [9]. Gruijters and Blake [4]
affirm that the focus must be to satisfy the user’s needs and map
their actual experience into system architecture to be used for a
development of a system. Thus for the design of an Indigenous
Knowledge Management system we need to understand the role
and structure of Indigenous Knowledge in the local context.
Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is local knowledge and an
important aspect of life to the rural areas which is unique to a
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission from the authors of this work and the Conference Chair of
IKTC2011.
Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference. 2011. Windhoek, Namibia,
2 - 4 November 2011.
Copyright 2011 IKTC2011 and authors.
ISBN 978-99945-72-37-3
given culture, society or regional community. Indigenous
knowledge is often considered less valuable than modern science
in the context of development. Currently, the indigenous
knowledge is only accessible through the holders of the
knowledge as it is not written down, nor is it recorded in any
electronic form. As elderly people and knowledgeable senior
community members die, so does their knowledge, because
indigenous knowledge is shared within the communities through
oral and performed practices only. The knowledge, wisdom and
experience, can add greatly beneficial development methods to
the local communities. The indigenous forms of communication
are important to local level decision making processes and for the
preservation and spread of indigenous knowledge. However
through migration to urban areas the chain of knowledge transfer
has been disturbed with the risk of total loss of this indigenous
knowledge. In Namibia, different from other countries, ruralurban migration is characterised by a strong maintenance of rural
links. Namibian migrants keep on investing in their traditional
rural areas while considering towns and cities to be their
temporary domicile only [6]. However regularly returning
community members struggle as they do not have the necessary
skills or indigenous knowledge for survival or to perform certain
actions that this knowledge requires or advises. At this point of
time there is no technological supported platform where
community members and migrants can continue to share locally
relevant knowledge.
2.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Since 2008 a long-term collaborative research project which
aims to design and develop an indigenous knowledge
management system with a selected local community has
embarked in, as a proof of concept. The target users of the system
are the community members, mostly the elders, who upload and
organise videos and audios for the younger users in town to view
and learn from. Over the years we have been continuously
exploring alternative design methods and concepts with the
community in an attempt to map local communication patterns
into an appropriate ICT indigenous knowledge architecture [10].
2.1 Pilot Community’s Set-Up
The pilot community engaged in the project is located in
Eastern Namibia, in the Omaheke region, reachable via gravel and
sand road. The village consists of 18 homesteads with a total of
200 rural dwellers ranging mostly of the Herero ethnic group from
toddlers to the elderly. Some of the community members mostly
the youth that are involved in the pilot migrate in and out of the
72
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
village to the urban areas for work or school going purposes;
therefore they are not stationed at the village on a regular basis
and are at times not involved in the project because of the above
mentioned reason.
The elders and some of the youth have no secondary
qualification and have been residing in the village since
childhood. Some of the younger members attended school and left
school early due to financial constraints. English proficiency is
generally limited and therefore most communication takes place
in their mother tongue, Herero. The design team includes
voluntarily participating elders and youth from the community.
The researchers and developers consist of students and staff from
Namibia, South Africa, Germany, and Denmark. The first author
of this paper originates from the pilot village and serves as the
main interface between the external researchers and the
community members to facilitate sessions and simultaneous
translations.
In terms of ICT infrastructure and exposure there is a huge
digital divide between urban and rural dwellers in Namibia. In the
rural areas there is limited Internet connection and the usage of
mobile phones is also limited because in some rural areas there is
no satellite coverage, whereas in the urban areas there is access to
Internet and mobile phone connections.
2.2 Video Capturing
The community elders possess valuable indigenous skills and
knowledge, but most of it is not documented or physically
preserved. We have initially captured a variety of local practices
and stories in the form of video recordings. The videos were taken
over a year over a number of field trips by the researchers and the
community members [1].
The community members were equipped with flip cameras
and sophisticated phones to record what they found worthwhile
documenting. The videos were uploaded to the researcher’s laptop
and played back to the community members at selected occasions
and following field trips. The videos are initially saved with a
time stamp and high-level descriptive name which is meaningful
only to the researchers.
2.3 Community Interactions
Being conscious of the differences in structuring, organising
and transferring of indigenous knowledge an attempt is being
made to model the knowledge architecture and features based on
the actual communication practises of the community. For
example, the elders determine how, when and with whom to share
specific knowledge. Although the youngsters are hardly actively
inquiring about the knowledge but are patiently absorbing as they
listen. Thus a major distinction of the “narrator” role and the
“listener” role in our system design has been distinguished.
In order to derive ideas on how to organize and represent the
videos in a way which is meaningful and understood by the
community members numerous community meetings, contextual
interviews, prototype design and evaluation sessions were held
[10]. In the initial meetings with the community members,
discussions arose whereby the elders wanted to share their
indigenous knowledge with others just like they would do in the
natural way. Elders commented that a lot of the youth have gone
to the urban area and when returning to the rural area they tend to
struggle. Knowing that the community is well engaged in the
project it was explored how knowledge amongst themselves was
shared. Prototypes were developed and evaluated to test for
suitability within the existing context, for further acceptance and
feedback. Selected features of the prototypes were designed to
Part I
map the way community members actually transfer knowledge.
The workshops and prototype testing was done in the rural area
with the community.
Due to their level of technological understanding, the
community members didn’t have specific ideas initially about
how they could organize videos so that it is retrievable from the
developed prototypes. On the other hand the developers from
overseas never experienced the life of being in the rural areas and
getting to see how the rural people perform different tasks. Thus
developer community interactions are guided by principles of
action research with a high emphasis on mutual learning [3].
3.
VIDEO REPRESENTATIONS
A number of representations of videos were explored which
would be intuitive and usable to the community members. In
order to take sensitive design decisions a number of evaluation
sessions were run with low and high fidelity prototypes. Also
tagging, metadata and associative organisations have been
investigated with the community members. Below the different
options and conclusions made in regard to their suitability are
described.
3.1 ITunes Organisation
As a most simplistic way to display a list of videos, ITunes
were used. ITunes is an application that can represent video lists
as thumbnails. In ITunes videos were displayed one after the
other, whereby the users would select videos either by scrolling to
the left or to the right. If a user wants to view a specific video, the
user double clicks on the thumbnail. The process of sequential
search seemed intuitive to the community members and they
could not suggest any other way of organising the videos. From a
developer’s perspective major problems of retrieval could be
anticipated as the number of videos would increase also in terms
of selecting videos based on thumbnails only.
3.2 Thumbnail Sorting
To explore a more sophisticated way of categorising videos a
thumbnail sorting session with the community was run [10].
Videos captured previously by the community, as well as
unfamiliar videos from another research site were represented by
means of cards with printed thumbnails. There were 60 cards
based on different stories. The aim of the sorting was for the
community members to place the cards on a board according to
their association. Discussions arose as to why videos with similar
images like goats were being placed together. The elders of the
community would say that they belonged together. Related videos
for example of plants should be grouped together so that when
searching for videos about plants then they are all grouped
together and the same would apply when searching for videos
about milking. The participants had difficulty trying to figure out
what the cards were and how the thumbnails related to the videos
(which were taken weeks ago) even though significant scenes
were chosen as thumbnails. Also all videos not taken in the village
were discarded by the participants. The method yielded some
design ideas like as to which videos are linked together yet no
significant breakthrough in terms of overall knowledge
architecture.
73
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
Part I
4.1 Prototype 1
The prototype was developed remotely by students from
Germany based on our written specification only. An application
was developed which was then tested within and by the
community. The prototype was developed based on concepts
familiar to the programmers. This was the first attempt in
representing the local videos within an application.
Figure 1: Thumbnail sorting (Kapuire et. al. 2010)
3.3 Metadata
During a community meeting it was agreed that it is important
to note who recorded the video and where they are staying, as this
would give the video credibility. It is also important who is on the
video and who is the main speaker. Considering adding the name
of the plant under discussion in a specific video is problematic
due the phenomena of multiple context dependent terms given to
the same object. For example, when a plant is small it has a name
but when it grows it gets a different name, also depending on
whether it is used for healing or eating (Bidwell et al. 2010).
Moreover the same plants can be at different places. If a video is
associated with a name of the plant or the place of origin,
searching would be difficult to allocate the right video. As the
retrieving of the right video would depend on how it was
categorised during the organizing of the videos, it is anticipated
that a number of challenges in the absence of a common category
system would make it difficult to retrieve the right video.
While knowing that metadata is data that contains information
about other data, it has shown that multimedia annotation is hard
and requires effort from the users. During a prototype evaluation,
the community members had to enter metadata (see Figure 2). The
process was hard for them as they were not familiar to the
process. Based on the usability of the developed prototypes, it will
show the difficulties of using metadata as a concept to organise
videos.
4.
PROTOTYPES
A series of prototypes were developed with the aim of
evaluating design ideas of organising the videos for appropriate
retrieval by the community members.
Figure 2: Video upload mode (Kapuire et. al. 2010)
4.1.1
Features
The system was based on a classical meta-data organisation
with a number of specific fields to facilitate retrieval. The
interface was text-based (see Figure 2) where when a video got
uploaded, meta-data had to be entered manually. All users had a
static profile which identified them to be a “narrator” (able to
upload video) or a “listener” (able to retrieve videos). The
“narrator” would determine which kind of listeners the video is
targeted at. While the listener could enter search terms as well as
“information need” which together with the profile would retrieve
the appropriate videos. As some rural dwellers can understand
“English” the interface language was in English while the metadata entered was in Otjiherero.
4.1.2
Usability Evaluation
During a field trip to the village, the prototype was tested in
order to evaluate its suitability, the functionality and usability of
the prototype. At first the prototype was explained. Secondly, the
user started to interact with the system by login on. When logged
on, the system was explained again thoroughly. The users started
to interact with the prototype with continuous explanations as
needed. Users were asked to complete 2 tasks.
Task 1: The narrator logs onto the system and enters keywords
on the search criteria to playback a video. Than uploads a video
clip recorded from a flip camera, which is on the local machine.
Respective metadata is than entered and saved. The user plays
back the uploaded video.
74
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
Task 2: The listener logs onto the system and enters keywords
on the search criteria to playback a video. The user views all the
video he/she can see.
During prototype testing, there was a lot of hesitation from the
community members. They struggled to relate videos to single
words and entered keywords into the metadata fields on
suggestions only. When playing the video again, they didn’t
understand why they needed to enter keywords to search for a
video of their choice. It took more than five minutes in order for
the users to type in the search keyword for the choice of video.
The entire concept of metadata was not well understood.
Besides only a few community members have sufficient
English, reading and writing skills to operate the interface.
Entering metadata in their own language did not ease the use as
spelling in Otjiherero is not necessarily standardized.
More general usage like login, uploading of videos, starting an
application was also new to the community members operating a
computer for the first time in their life.
It was concluded that the usage of meta-data for videos as
well as profiles for users would only be useful for internal data
organization but not at the interface level and not with manual
entry by the users.
4.2 Prototype 2
A major paradigm change was decided on by ensuring that no
text would be used for the next prototype. Design ideas based on
the outcome of the first prototype evaluation were used and a new
attempt to map real-life communication structures was developed.
This time the students from Germany went to the village to test
the prototype with the usability tester. The approach was to
develop a user interface entirely based on images and audio
output. Audio input was not pursed because of the complexity of
speech recognition which is beyond the scope of this project.
4.2.1
Part I
should be listening to the story. If the narrator feels like sharing
the story the narrator would call a group of people to come listen
to the story. If the narrator feels that only a specific person is to
listen to the story the specified person is called.
The system login was implemented with a speech output
telling the user in Otjiherero to select their photo (all community
members photos appeared on the login screen) (see Figure 3). The
owner of an uploaded video could enter metadata via selection of
images and thumbnails such as who took the video, who is the
main narrator on it and what event does it depict. In the video
sharing mode the owner of the video could drag video clips into
the baskets of the fellow community members (see Figure 4).
Once one of them logs on he/she would find the video in their
baskets for viewing. If the video was locked by its owner the
video could not be further shared.
4.2.2
Usability evaluation
The prototype was once more evaluated in the village by a
number of dwellers in a group setting. The users were given the
tasks to explore, upload a video, share it and then another person
logs on to view a shared video.
This time no hesitations were observed and the users enjoyed
the usage of the prototype. Login on was intuitive yet the
uploading of the video still presented the users with challenges.
Although the sharing concept in principle was understood the
usage of the mouse and the touchpad was problematic.
In general it was observed that much more ease of usage than
with the first prototype was experienced yet still a lot of
explanations had to be provided. Also too much clicking and
dragging as an interaction technique was problematic. While the
speech output was well received it should have been louder and
repeatable. Much more research would still be required in the
appropriate speech interaction and choice of voice.
Features
The system was implemented as a video sharing platform
based on the real-life scenario: The narrator determines who
Figure 3: Login screen [5]
75
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
Part I
Figure 4: Video sharing mode [5]
4.3 Prototype 3
With the third prototype an entirely new field was entered,
namely 3D visualisation and re-contextualisation of videos. The
motive of the prototype was to embed the videos into the
visualisation of the environment where it relates to the different
places where elders share their knowledge with others. The
prototype was developed by students from Denmark.
generic models of people; secondly, beyond graphically modelling
the village scenarios were created at the locations at which videos
are embedded, whereby the scenarios are animated models of
people associated with an audio narrative; thirdly, no paths
between scenarios were described, but rather modelled some of
the paths that farmed animals follow through the village to
provide some of the patterns that villagers use to navigate their
setting.
High graphical resemblance was used for the 3D Visual
representation of village consisting of trees, bushes, few manmade objects, houses, fences, water-pump, fire places, and car
tracks (see Figure 5). The relative positioning was based on the
author’s memory to support ease of recognition. Scenarios were
modelled based on video content and gestures were to indicate
specific actions, like a story being told. Users navigate around the
village to the different scenarios by using drag-able mouse
interaction.
Each scenario represented the trigger for an uploaded video
(see Figure 6) which the user could activate and view in a 2D
plane.
4.3.2
Figure 5: The visualization including all the 3D objects
constructed from references in the village (Rodil et. al. 2011)
4.3.1
Features
The prototype was a 3 dimensional representation of the
village. The prototype had graphics to represent different
scenarios based on the real setup. Rodil et al. (2011) describes the
system whereby various mechanisms are used: firstly, by
embedding videos in a recognizable 3D visualisation of highly
familiar features of the users’ village and populate this with
Usability evaluation
The prototype was tested by elders and the youth of the
village in two groups [8]. They started looking around trying to
identify the visual with the surrounding. They recognised the fire
as they pointed to it as well as the houses in the surrounding. They
started associating the elements in the visual representation to the
real places one by one. One community member said that it
looked familiar to the real setup. The prototype was trying to map
the actual experience familiar to the community people by 3D
visual representation, so that the people could start seeing as to
how they would share knowledge.
76
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
Part I
only be used as internal additional categorisation and automatic
tools will be explored to extract the data out of the videos directly.
5.2 Prototype 2
Figure 6: Scenarios act as triggers to launch a video as a 2D
plane in the visualization. Here the scenario includes Elders
transferring information on branding cows and maintaining
the herd [8].
In general, users were comfortable with the prototype as they
could identify icons like cattle and people presented. They also
had numerous improvement suggestions on very detailed level
such as the choice and representation of scenarios and other
graphical representations.
It is concluded that embedding videos in a 3D simulation is a
novel and promising approach which will be pursued further.
It maps the sharing mode of using a basket, whereby a
narrator can have a couple of listeners. The narrator can decide
who should listen to a specific story. The narrator can log videos
which the narrator owns. The logged user being the narrator, was
able to see the listener, and to drag the video he has to a person he
wanted the story to be told to. The listener profile was shown, so
that the narrator can see what videos are in the basket that he can
share with others. When the narrator is logged on, thumbnails of
the video where displayed, the ones where the logged on person
has no access to should be locked, and can only be opened by the
owner. The uploaded video by the narrator was placed in the
basket of the narrator. The uploaded video is displayed on the list
of the narrator. The metaphor of knowledge sharing with the
baskets was well understood and can be further explored in the
following prototypes.
5.3 Prototype 3
As the community members identified the 3D representation
of a homestead, it made the community people view the scenarios
based on the actions, even though the community members could
not organise videos to present it to specific listeners but rather
geographically. The representation was so real to the users, which
made them feel like the real village. The challenge here is once
the amount of videos per location increases additional
mechanisms of selection must be defined.
6.
Figure 7: Usability evaluation session
5.
RELEVANCE TO REALITY
In the actual world an elder would have stories on his mind.
The elder would then decide who the listeners should be and tell
the story to them for the purpose of teaching or entertainment. The
listeners are able to convey these heard stories to other listeners
while some stories remain a secret between the narrator and the
listener.
5.1 Prototype 1
There is no mapping to the real setup on how videos are
shared. The listeners could listen to a video uploaded by a
narrator, but due to constraints, there was no video organisation as
a narrator could upload all the videos he owns, and in the real
setup, the narrator might have videos that are associated to each
other. So when a video is uploaded, the listener could view videos
one by one, not knowing which videos should be listened first
before another one continues. Thus the approach of metadata will
TOWARDS OUR NEXT PROTOTYPE
It has shown that concentrating on user requirements is
essential as this drives the development process by demonstrating
and stating life setups wherein ideas will be collected for the
significant ways by which knowledge is organised and retrieved.
Based on the different prototype explorations, it has shown that
the users are most comfortable with graphics and photos. The 3D
visual representation of the village was well adapted as it reflected
what they see in the rural environment. However having a pure
location based organisation is insufficient. Thus further
development will integrate the two approaches of the last
prototypes with a person-bound and location-based allocation of
videos. The sharing mode must be done in a way that videos can
be represented in a way that it maps the real lifestyle. In future,
work will be explored on the usage of agents. Also to identify
appropriate categorisations for videos at the user interface level
more design and evaluation sessions with the community
members will be held. Once that has been identified, the
organisation structure should be mapped onto the prototype. The
concepts of who the narrator wants to tell the story to, how many
stories the narrator wants to share, related stories not connected
should be finalised. Related videos will be linked together so that
when a listener is listening to a video, the listener can listen to
associated videos. All this must be mapped onto the system.
7.
LIMITATIONS
This research project has been on-going from the time the
target group was identified. Irregular and sometimes short field
trips limits the time of interactions with the rural dwellers and the
opportunity for deeper understanding of the knowledge system.
The development took place remotely based on field notes. One
way to overcome this would be to try to extend field trips to
several weeks or months, depending on how practical it would be
in terms of ICT and electricity infrastructure. Despite, having
77
IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm
these limitations, the community engagement led to a number of
important design ideas and decisions.
8.
CONCLUSION
In the search for an appropriate representation of a collection
of videos to be shared between rural dwellers and urban youth,
classical and new approaches were explored. The standard method
of metadata only seems suitable to societies who have a long
history of term and concept based knowledge organisation. The
people bound and location based approach of organising
knowledge maps African indigenous knowledge systems based on
oral and performed knowledge transfer much better. However
little research has been done in this field therefore the need to
explore new ideas with the community and carefully evaluate
results over time.
9.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Appreciation is shown to all the community members for their
commitment to this project and their active participation in it. A
special thank you to Alex and Sascha for the numerous hours of
prototype 1 and 2 development and having come along to the
village and run the usability evaluation sessions, including Kasper
Rodil for the implementation of prototype 3, the usability
evaluation with the community as well as for having agreed to
continue working on the system towards the next implementation.
Special appreciation is given to Nicola Bidwell for her invaluable
contribution during the video representations in ITunes and the
Thumbnail sorting. Gratitude is expressed to Heike WinschiersTheophilus for continuous support and facilitation of the project
as well as critical feedback to this paper. Acknowledgement goes
to the Polytechnic of Namibia for recognising the importance of
the research project and providing the basic funds. The project has
been partially funded by the Polytechnic of Namibia and under the
South African-Namibia Research Partnership programme.
10. REFERENCES
[1] Bidwell, N. J., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Kapuire, G. K., &
Rehm, M. (2011). Pushing Personhood into Place: Situating
Media in the Transfer of Rural Knowledge in Africa,
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 69
(2011) 618–631
Part I
[2] Bidwell, N. J., & Browning, D. (2009). Pursuing Genius
Loci: Interaction Design and Natural Places. Pers. Ubiq.
Comp. 217.
[3] Blake, E., (2010). Software Engineering in Developing
Communities. CHASE Workshop, ICSE.
[4] Gruijters, D., & Blake, E. H. (2008). Developing user
interfaces for managing bio-diversity and human resource
data in nature conservation. In Proceedings South African
Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference
(SATNAC).
[5] Kapuire, G.K., Blake, E., Winschiers-Theophilus, H.,
Bidwell, N., & Chivuno-Kuria, S. (2010). Exploring Success
and Failure in Development Informatics :Innovation,
Research and Practice. A revolution in ICT, the last hope for
African Rural Communities technology appropriation. IDIA.
Cape Town.
[6] Niikondo, A. (2011). Migrants to cities and towns in
Namibia: The dynamics of investing in urban versus rural
areas. Academic Report, Polytechnic of Namibia.
[7] Oyugi, C., Dunckley, L., and Smith, A. (2008). Evaluation
methods and cultural differences: studies across three
continents. Proc of NordiCHI 2008.
[8] Rodil, K., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Bidwell, N. J,
Eskildsen, S., Rehm, M., & Kapuire, G. K. (2011). A new
visualisation approach to re-contextualize Indigenous
Knowledge in rural Africa. In: Proceedings of
INTERACT2011, Lisbon, Portugal
[9] Winschiers-Theophilus, (2009) “Cultural Appropriation of
Software Design and Evaluation”. In: B. Whitworth (Ed).
Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and
Social Networking System, IGI Global.
[10] Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Blake, E., Bidwell, N. J.,
Kapuire, G. K., & Chivuno-Kuria, S., (2010). Being
participated - A community approach. Proceedings of
Participatory Design Conference PDC, Sydney, Australia.
78