Storing Stories : Digital Render of Momentous Living Archives

Storytelling presented in digital archives can provide indigenous communities with a voice needed to tell stories and thus enhance the society’s understanding for that community. The objective was to evaluate a digital archive prototype from a perspective of rendering Sami stories and storytelling. This was done by collecting data with the method Research through Design where a prototype was designed and demonstrated in two steps to the indigenous people of Scandinavia known as the Sami people. The findings suggest that the prototype can render Sami storytelling to some extent but that digital archives, in regard to indigenous cultures, must be designed with sensitive ethicalities in mind. These digital archives must also be designed so that immersive stories can be rendered whilst also providing the indigenous people the right to be prosumers in order to provide them the empowerment to own their own culture. These issues and future research are discussed in the paper.