Julie Nichols – författare

The need for decolonizing cultural institutions and their mismanagement practices in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, of First Nations peoples’ materials and knowledge has been widely recognised. However, this has not translated into an information systems design, nor a complementary solution representing an alternative world view. Instead, the entrenched legacy of the neoliberal sector’s curatorial and archival practices remains intact, and their authority stays unquestioned. This edited book’s unique viewpoint is its exploration of projects that investigate innovative data curation strategies through the thematics of visual representation of infrastructure, and bodies of knowledge.

Authors from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds underpin their chapters with a social justice approach to investigations around different knowledge systems. They powerfully challenge entrenched assumptions of knowledge capture and dissemination of the western academy. An emphasis on visualisations of cultural heritage materials across a variety of case studies using technologies that range from augmented and virtual realities to mixed reality aims to raise questions for debate in the way Indigenous data is collected, managed, curated, governed, and represented and by whom.

The need for decolonizing cultural institutions and their mismanagement practices in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, of First Nations peoples’ materials and knowledge has been widely recognised. However, this has not translated into an information systems design, nor a complementary solution representing an alternative world view. Instead, the entrenched legacy of the neoliberal sector’s curatorial and archival practices remains intact, and their authority stays unquestioned. This edited book’s unique viewpoint is its exploration of projects that investigate innovative data curation strategies through the thematics of visual representation of infrastructure, and bodies of knowledge.

Authors from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds underpin their chapters with a social justice approach to investigations around different knowledge systems. They powerfully challenge entrenched assumptions of knowledge capture and dissemination of the western academy. An emphasis on visualisations of cultural heritage materials across a variety of case studies using technologies that range from augmented and virtual realities to mixed reality aims to raise questions for debate in the way Indigenous data is collected, managed, curated, governed, and represented and by whom.

The aim of this book is to reflect on ''''vernacularity'''' and culture. It concentrates on two major domains: first it attempts to reframe our understanding of vernacularity by addressing the subject in the context of globalisation, cross-disciplinarity, and development, and second, it discusses the phenomenon of how vernacularity has been treated, used, employed, manipulated, practiced, maintained, learned, reconstructed, preserved and conserved, at the level of individual and community experience. Scholars from a wide variety of knowledge fields have participated in enriching and engaging discussions, as to how both domains can be addressed.

To expedite these aims, this book adopts the theme "Reframing the Vernacular: Politics, Semiotics, and Representation",organised around the following major sub-themes:

• Transformation in the vernacular built environment

• Vernacular architecture and representation

• The meaning of home

• Symbolic intervention and interpretation of vernacularity

• The semiotics of place

• The politics of ethnicity and settlement

• Global tourism and its impacts on vernacular settlement

• Vernacular built form and aesthetics

• Technology and construction in vernacular built forms

• Vernacular language - writing and oral traditions