Persisting through friction: growing a community driven knowledge infrastructure

Abstract

Many memory institutions hold heritage items belonging to Indigenous peoples. There are current efforts to share knowledge about these heritage items with their communities; one way this is done is through digital access. This paper examines The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC), a network of researchers, museum professionals, and community members who maintain a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival research on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat cultures into a centralized database. The database, known as the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing System (GKS), is at a point of infrastructural growth, moving from a password protected system to one that is open to the public. Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, and users of the database, we examine the frictions in this expanding knowledge infrastructure (KI), and how they are eased over time. We find the friction within GRASAC resides in three main categories: collaborative friction, data friction, and our novel contribution: systemic friction.