Today, I am creating some Flash presentations for a client and I thought that I would give them a plug on the list since their work is related to an interesting aspect of the Indigenous digital divide - digital sovereignty. FirstVoices, out of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, is an Aboriginal led initiative run by Aboriginal people, executed by Aboriginal people and supported by Aboriginal communities. Indigenous digital sovereignty refers to Indigenous control over our own online institutions. FirstVoices and the First Peoples' Cultural Foundation have created a large web application which creates language archives in a rich way using audio MP3s and video (Quicktime mostly). The loss of language is a huge global problem. It has been estimated that about 50% of the world's spoken languages will disappear within the next hundred years. For Aboriginal people here in Canada, there are 17 languages which are considered "endangered".
I have a few minor quibbles with the FirstVoices site. It does not do enough to meet the accessibility needs of users and there are no plans to adapt the Flash objects I am helping to create into accessible versions; I am still pressing for that, but all said, it still is a very cool expression of digital sovereignty for Aboriginal people. I believe this is a good model to reduce the digital divide in Indian country. FirstVoices http://www.firstvoices.com/ Kelvin Wong Victoria, BC http://nativetech.blogspot.com/ --- More info? Endangered Languages - Linguistic Society of America http://www.lsadc.org/fields/index.php?aaa=endangeredlgs.htm Sovereignty - One of five components of the American Indian digital divide http://www.indiantech.org/ Connecting loss of language with loss of environmental knowledge http://www.explore.rice.edu/explore/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=6326&SnID=309232344 _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
