Digital storytelling as a method of utilising digital archives of academic resource:A practical study using the X-DiPLAS’s African Photo collections as an example

Keywords

digital storytelling、digital archives、African Area Studies

Objectives

In many cases, researchers taking photographs in cultural anthropological and other fieldwork take the photographs home into their private collection upon retirement, even if said photographs are deliverables of academic studies conducted on public funds, and said photographs run the risk of becoming lost. Perhaps deliverables created with a public budget should be stored by a university or other public institution so they can be passed down and utilized by future generations. Recognizing this problem, in 2016 the National Museum of Japanese History launched an open call-based digital archive initiative for fieldwork photographs (DiPLAS up to 2021 and X-DiPLAS since 2022). Over the last nine years, the initiative adopted 87 projects, accepted around 380,000 photographs, and compiled 67 databases. The initiative has already achieved a noteworthy measure of results for preventing the risk of loss by digitalizing and creating databases of photographs.
But to ensure they can weather hardships for another 50 or 100 years, it is important to continue preserving their academic and social value by repeatedly using the contents and adding and updating information. The current issues are how to enhance database documentation (textual information such as captions on photographs) and how to promote the use of created databases. As one solution, the inter-university research project will propose and carry out digital storytelling (hereinafter “DST”) that uses database contents. The objective of the research project is to verify the effectiveness of this method by carrying out DST while applying the results of discussions at workshops, and pursue possibilities for expanding it to digital photograph archives in general by accumulating cases of implementation.