Reflection: exhibit building and ethical issues

The exhibit building experience involves basically three steps: preparation, writing and digitalized set-up. Preparation involves the researches in background information and relevant arguments and thesis. Different from writing essays, the preparation step during exhibit building requires me to look for relevant resources other than scholarly articles (e.g. images, videos, artworks) and apply digital infrastructures to the references (e.g. Voyant, Palladio). Writing involves the establishment of the main argument of the exhibit, which also requires me to integrate not only the textual references but also the digital items to the paragraph. While doing digitalized set-up on Omeka, there could exist potential ethical issues regarding indigenous people’s histories and artifacts. Namely, the process of archiving before setting up on Omeka the indigenous people’s data do not need efforts to “participate in equitable engagement as a way to understand their lives, communities or concerns”, and process of displaying on Omeka “presents opportunities for some to ‘weaponize’ the platforms and the data they generate” (Jules & Summers & Mitchell, 2018, p.3), creating ethical issues since the content in the digital exhibit shown may cause secondary harm to the indigenous people. Therefore, archiving and displaying on Omeka must be completed carefully. During my exhibit building process, I paid extra attention to the vocabularies used, references cited and the perspectives or narratives used while explaining events and culture related to the indigenous people.