PARTNERSHIP FOR DIGITAL JUSTICE
Protecting Cultural Heritage, Archives, Records, and Artifacts — and the Solutions They Hold — Across the Digital Divide
The Partnership for Digital Justice aims to coalesce a movement to preserve and protect cultural heritage, archives, records, and artifacts that are threatened by the ravages of climate change, conflict, and time — particularly those from communities across the Digital Divide.
Not only do these communities often lack the resources to protect the precious vestiges of their heritage and history, but protecting these assets will also have universal benefits, such as enriching Artificial Intelligence by giving it a wider, more-inclusive lens (AI is only as “intelligent” as the sources from which it pulls — if we neglect wisdom from any corner, we hinder AI’s usefulness), and unearthing solutions to our greatest challenges (solutions that would otherwise be forever lost).
CHALLENGES
Our planet is currently in a very combustible place. The three Cs — Climate, Conflict, and COVID — cast a pall over the 2020s. And while COVID has abated, it revealed deep chasms in our society. Meanwhile, Conflict and Climate calamities now rage on.
Not only are people all over the world in great jeopardy, so is our collective wisdom.
Wisdom helps us navigate the simple and quotidian, as well as the complex and challenging. And we, as citizens of nearly 200 nations, have not only our own wisdom to guide us, but also the collective wisdom from other cultures on which to thrive.
But as precious as wisdom is, it is also highly vulnerable to threats, especially from Climate and Conflict, and the ravages of time. And while much wisdom in wealthier nations has been digitized for preservation, huge swaths of wisdom have not — primarily from communities on the other side of the Digital Divide. And if that threatened wisdom were to disappear, so might some of the solutions we seek for better custody of the planet.
There are other threats to our collective wisdom. Artificial Intelligence is already playing an outsized role in much of Western society. While there are wonderful benefits from AI that can help us tackle some of our greatest challenges, the wisdom from which AI pulls is skewed toward Western knowledge that has been digitized, and is exclusive of so much vital wisdom from communities that are not as digitally connected — and yet have managed to be better stewards of the environment. If we don’t digitize assets from these communities, the trajectory of the knowledge we develop via AI will be dangerously incomplete.
GOALS
We need to first preserve wisdom against the negative impacts of Climate and Conflict, and against the ravages of time, as well as make AI more inclusive so that our collective wisdom going forward will be fully actualized. Digitizing Cultural Heritage, Archives, Records, and Artifacts — particularly from communities separated from AI by the chasm of the Digital Divide — will also help develop timely solutions to the complex challenges we face.
Those are the goals of the Partnership for Digital Justice, a new, global coalition working to ensure that we preserve our collective knowledge before it is too late. The Partnership for Digital Justice will use a framework of Cultural Heritage, Inclusion, Archives, Records, and Artifacts — CHIARA — as a North Star to navigate four key pillar areas:
1) Preservation from the existential threats posed by climate change
2) Preservation from the ravages of time
3) Digitizing for more inclusive and therefore more robust AI
4) Digitizing for better scholarship and access
PARTNERSHIPS
We are currently seeking partnerships with communities for Content Partnerships, as well as Technology, Academic, Funding, and Corporate Partners, and others to help us expand the coalition. This is a chance to be part of a critical, solutions-oriented partnership founded on community ownership, equality, and inclusivity. A chance to ensure that all voices are captured. And a chance to use technology to document our past, before it is too late, to help us solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Time is of the essence.
The Partnership for Digital Justice was inspired by the work of one of our founding partners who took on the challenge of digitizing more than 300,000 recordings from Cuban television and radio that were otherwise slated to be destroyed. The Baeza Family Foundation and Tropix Media built a state-of-the-art digitization center in Havana and are at work with proprietary technology to digitize these recordings quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively, all while building 21st-century skills and creating high-quality jobs. Once digitized, the information within is tagged with metadata, making it available and searchable to academia, media, citizens, and other key stakeholders. The work in Cuba has provided a highly replicable approach, including a prototype for digital-mobilization units, which will be deployed throughout structurally excluded communities across the globe.
FOUNDING PARTNERS
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