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Extractivism and the ecology of research infrastructure: digitizing precarious materialities in Iquitos, Peru
MEAP project lead, Amanda M. Smith, has published a recent article "Extractivism and the ecology of research infrastructure: digitizing precarious materialities in Iquitos, Peru" in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 7 (1). The article explores Smith's work leading an MEAP project to digitize materials from the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru within the context of Amazonian history, culture, and politics. Smith draws our attention to the challenges of preserving cultural heritage within this context by asking "How might the creation of digital research infrastructure for preserving archival materials in Latin America resemble the infrastructure of extractivism?"
The article offers insight into the work of the team in Iquitos, their response to a fire in the archive, and to the practices of MEAP that support community focused description work.
They turn down projects from scholars from the Global North to take equipment to the Global South, use it themselves, and leave with digital files, a practice which has been all too common in the history of Latin American libraries and archives. Instead, all of the work must be done locally by people from the community of the archive in question, and the equipment must remain in the community, too. The digital files generated must be made accessible through an online open-access repository, free and available to all Internet users. Furthermore, if those collections involve images or recordings of people, the principal investigators must consult them in the process of deciding what to share and how.
Through this community-grounded focus, a recent trend has emerged in which a specific project becomes a hub for people affiliated with other collections to learn hardware and software and borrow space and equipment. If, as Roberto Casati has suggested, the ideology of digital colonialism consists of, "If you can, you should,” then MEAP’s approach is more akin to, “If you have to, then how?”