Reflection
The hardest part of the building experience for me was using Palladio. It was difficult to find a way to put language data onto a Palladio map, since it is concerned with regions rather than individual points. While I did find lists of communities by languages spoken, there were thousands of data points I would not be able to reasonably map. I decided to instead map the number of speakers and language types. I have experience writing csv files from another class, and I enjoyed being able to use that skill here while inputting data. I wanted to make a node and edge graph, with the nodes sized to the number of speakers and the languages grouped by their families. The groups worked fine, but when I sized the nodes by the number of speakers, the nodes blew up and became a jumbled mess (Fig. 1). I troubleshooted and realized that fixing it would require redoing my whole data set. I decided to display my data with a table instead. However, I now know how to format the data to make the graph properly.
There are some ethical questions to using Indigenous knowledge and cultural materials in a digital exhibit such as this one. As discussed throughout this exhibit, Canada’s Indigenous groups are not homogenous. There are many parts of Indigenous cultural heritage that are highly local (Christen 2015, 8). Generalizing across these groups is unethical, as the cultures are too different. The best way to manage physical and intangible cultural heritage is to have the specific groups be in charge of them (Christen 2015, 4). I was concerned with this while finding my language data. In my research I had seen many conflicting sources on how to group Indigenous languages, and I was unfamiliar with many of the ones included in the Statistics Canada data. I also learned a lot about how colloquial terms for language groups were split, for example I hear references to the language “Cree,” but the data had listed many different types of Cree. This made me unsure when figuring out what data to include.