 All right. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be here. My name is Ruto. Today I'm very excited to be sharing with you about a whole different type of data, namely indigenous oral histories about their lands and how we are working with this data in a super remote context in the middle of the Amazon. So what I'm going to be doing today is to basically have two parts of the presentation. The first part is going to focus on the kind of local community context where this project was born. And then secondly, I'll talk a little bit about an open source application called Terra Stories that we are developing how it works and why we are building it the way that we are building it. So just a little bit about me. So I'm a geographer with an organization called the Amazon Conservation Team. It's an NGO that partners with indigenous people in South America to protect their forests and strengthen their culture. I'm originally from Curacao. I live in DC and my heart beats for South America. It's my first time attending CSVConf. I'm really loving it. I've been seeing a lot of synergies between the work that we've been doing. I've been in the open source space for about two years now working on Terra Stories. And I'm just like really learning a lot from the conversations about communities of practice, about data, about GIT. So lots of content and I really look forward to sharing with you and hoping to also learn from you a lot about how we can improve our workflow based off of your experiences and knowledges. So let's see. We're active in Colombia, Suriname in Brazil and you can follow me on Twitter. So I'd like to begin with this really kind of awesome, beautiful hand drawn map that was made in the 90s by the guy who's holding it. His name is Muta Wajimu. This was made before any kind of GIS or modern GPS software became available. And so the map is of Southwest Suriname, which is in the northeast of South America there. And it's representing a watershed region where his people, the Tareno Liv, it's about 3 million hectares in size. And Muta weighed the map because his chieftain at the time requested it because there were a lot more outsiders coming into his territory. And so they needed tools to kind of express what their territory looks like from their worldview, as well as the extent of their territory. So the way Muta did this was basically by sitting down with the elders in his community and asking him where are the sacred sites, where are the places they go hunting, medicinal plants, historical sites, battle sites. And then through his own memory, navigating the rivers throughout his lifetime, he drew this map, which is just kind of amazing. I can stare at this map for hours, just imagining Muta sort of navigating the rivers in his mind. So basically the government started to come in and Suriname at the time still doesn't have land rights. And so this was a tool that the communities were using to hopefully petition for land rights. And that was the reason for the creation of this map. Decades later, Muta would also say that the reason he made this map was to capture and safeguard the knowledge of the elders, so that he could be able to pass it along to his children. So one of the first things that ACT did as an organization was to geo-reference these maps and kind of overlay them with the national topography maps, so as to better provide them with a powerful tool that they could use for that petitioning of rights. This started in Suriname and eventually we also helped the Terreno who live across the border in Brazil make maps of their land so that the entire community, regardless of which side of the border they live on, which is of course a colonial fiction, the Terreno had been living there for centuries before the borders were drawn, would be able to have maps of their land for similar purposes. The maps are really fascinating. I actually spend a lot of my time in lockdown at night sort of staring at the details and I've blurted here because it's community data, and there might be some sensitive cultural information that the community would not want to share. But they're really fascinating maps with a ton of detail and sort of richness of cultural information that appears on them, but the way that these maps were produced at the time, and this is a map from 2001, you wouldn't be able to really get much of that information just looking at it. And so just right here on this screen, there is the depiction of a granite mountain, which you can see here with the Google Earth kind of satellite imagery view there in 3D, and this granite mountain is called Samuaka, and for the Terreno it's one of the most important sacred sites. They have a ton of oral histories going back hundreds of years about how their community came together here as a people decided to basically form the community that they are now and sort of started to settle the region, stop fighting, and a lot of other sort of sacred oral histories about this place. On the map it's just a point, but there's so much more richness of sort of oral history information about this place, which is not depicted on a paper map. So you know this is 2001, I think at the time the Terreno mappers who worked on this and ACT the team kind of realized this, and so they published a book about this place because that would be a way of depicting that oral history knowledge, and in the preface they have this to say why the emphasis on history and land use mapping, history is a part of the people's identity and among indigenous peoples, it is strongly linked to life in a certain territory. That's why this publication focuses so strongly on tracing the ancient history of the trio or Terreno. So there was already an awareness of the importance of history as it pertains to indigenous mapping. And so we weren't the only ones or ACT wasn't and the people that we were working with weren't the only ones to come across this need. There's this really beautiful video that I recommend to everybody called counter mapping, which is about the Zuni community in the southwest of the United States, New Mexico, Arizona area there, and sort of their mapping of their lands process where there's these really beautiful reflections about how much so much story would come out of this map making process. You know, initially thinking that they were making maps just to sort of challenge the notion of maps, maybe north doesn't have to be all the way at the top, but then the storytelling came out of it. What are more important are the stories that history described in these vignettes of experience when people have a map that is part of affirming their identity. It tells them there of this place, very, very similar to what we discovered in South America. And so I'd like to tell you a little bit about my own work with the Mataway Maroons in Suriname. This is a community of descendants of formerly enslaved Africans who over 300 years ago essentially fled from the plantations into the rainforest, fought for their right to exist there and still reside there today. So this is a picture that was taken in the 70s there. It's their communities that have a very strong traditional culture. They have their own language and an extremely rich oral history storytelling tradition that goes back to the first times that their that their ancestors first arrived in this territory. So really fascinating kinds of stories. History begins their entire worldview actually really revolves around that initial moment that their ancestors successfully fled for the front of plantations and fought for their right to exist there. So in 2015, ACT was invited by the Mataway to do some mapping because essentially there was a lot of land use changes taking place in their territory and they wanted to know what the territory looked like and have tools for that. So ACT came in to do trainings to train the community to make maps of their own territory because it's always done in a participatory way. And so essentially the very same process that we did working with the tarano 20 years ago just with newer technologies GPS handhelds, but also sketch mapping. And I still remember one of the very first workshops that we did, where we started to do this participatory mapping. The first thing that the Mataway wanted to do was to sit down with the elders, just like the tarano and sort of ask them about where are the place names the sacred sites the historical places the former villages, because that's important to their worldview of their land. And so that was the first thing that we did. Later on, we also went on expeditions with elders so at the top left there. That's me sitting on a boat with an elder Mataway named William and Ipa. And so we did, I was fortunate to be part of two different expeditions where basically crossing hundreds of kilometers of land and Mataway territory, where with younger Mataway as well, where the elders are pointing out the different places. And then the younger Mataway are recording those on GPS. And it's just this amazing experience where you see just like walls of forests to you anyway, or to me, which to them is this incredible storied landscape right. And so we mapped over 700 different places in that during those expeditions. And you really immerse yourself in the history as you're doing this, and you realize that it's such a big part of their perception of their lands as well. Kind of similarly, in the bottom right there, this is a woman named Dora Flink. We had the experience once where some of us with some young Mataway sat down with her to ask her about some places in the lands. And there was one place that we mentioned that just really brought her back into this really long, beautiful story where she picked up objects around her to illustrate, for example, a boat on the river in terms of what was happening in the story and started to break into song. You know, just really a beautiful experience where you realize that this oral tradition is such a big part of the way that these communities view their land and such a big part of their identity as well. So what we started to do in 2017 was to work with the younger Mataway in the community, like you see in the pictures here to interview the elders and to record them talking about the stories because we realized, you know, that many of the elders are of an older age, of course, and they are the ones that know the knowledge the best, that know the stories the best, and so we wanted to preserve that. And the community really had a desire for this so that the younger Mataway who are now in a more modern age, right, would still have the ability to know who they are and where they come from. So for about two years, we spent time interviewing the elders with the younger community members in partnership with a local community-based organization. And in a nutshell, this is what the result of that project where we interviewed 35 elders. This is a community of only a thousand people producing 17 hours of footage over 300 oral histories recorded for 150 places. And then we made some maps, of course, initially just paper maps, but we ran into very similar limitations as what I told you earlier, that you can only put so much content on a physical map. Here we try to kind of Nat Geo style, put stories along different places in order to give a sense of the meaning and the significance and the value of the place names. But not only do you have a limitation of space, but also you're losing the storyteller, right, and you're losing the way that the stories are conveyed in a sort of in a dialogical fashion. And so this, we knew that this was not enough in order to really depict what we had captured. So we started to think about what else is out there, right, in terms of technologies that are more digital, interactive. And so some of you might be familiar with the Esri story map format, which is what you're looking at here. And this is actually a story that we put together about one of the first Tarano cartographers who worked on those first maps that I showed you earlier, sort of telling stories about his life. He has this really incredible story about how he was born in Guyana, moved to Brazil. And so he's traveled all across the Amazon. But this format is more for using maps to tell stories, not really to map stories, if you know if you can see what I mean. And the other big sort of limitation here is it's online is dependent on an ArcGIS online template. So Kang who lives in a village called Kwamala Samutu where the internet access, it actually is there is internet but it's expensive would not be able to show this to his family, which is a huge limitation of this format for us because we did this work for the community so that they would have access to their oral histories and would be able to review those in the village itself. So we started to kind of think a little bit and brainstorm about what kind of tool we could we need to basically connect the maps with the stories and this is sort of what we came up with. So there's a need for customized base maps, because if you go on Google Earth or if you go on even open street map, you don't really see the life world of the communities right and in some cases the communities don't want to share that because it's their knowledge and it's protected in that regard, and they want to restrict it. So there's a need for customized base maps and easy elegant user interface not a GIS software, you know not something that's very complicated for community members to use. I'll talk about this a little bit more later as well but restricted content, the ability to set limitations on who gets to see what story because we're talking about restricted knowledge and data here. Ability to stream audio visual content that speaks for itself, you know we've got videos and audio of course so needs to do that free and open source really important for us because we didn't want to there be a software licensing limitation which is another issue that comes up with and then offline and online compatible it needs to work entirely offline and entirely online. And so we surveyed the landscape and there wasn't really anything out there that accomplishes all of that. So we decided to build a our own tool which is called terror stories which I'm going to tell you a little bit more about now. So first from a conceptual and I guess kind of technical point of view. Why did we decide to build in what went into thinking about that. So we're going to move to the right and then to the left here. First is the this notion of offline first design and we're we were really inspired by digital democracy, of course Emily's giving a keynote later of my friend Emily which I definitely recommend you to check out. The software should at the very first interface be designed to be able to work offline, and only then can you start thinking about online. That's a really important design principle for us data sovereignty is really important for indigenous people. It's really important for us in terms of just many experiences that indigenous people have had where researchers come in or NGOs and they collect data, and then they leave and then the communities don't have access to that data, or it's in a format that's, they can't use. It's not a CSV. It's a shape file or something else right where it's complicated to work with. So without this is for example when you think about the cloud and data being existing in the cloud for some indigenous communities that's a very uncomfortable notion, because that means that it's physically left the territory and it's existing somewhere else. And for some communities they prefer their data and their knowledge to be physically in the territory. So with offline you kind of get at that. So this is primarily a product for the communities for their own usage. So they can choose to share stories with the outside world they want to, but it's primarily for their own usage to transfer the knowledge to the younger generations. And then there's a few points here suffered created directly for indigenous communities not adapting something like we've had experiences with open data kits where it can kind of work for data collection but it's not built for the communities and so there's still that kind of user interface So I mentioned decolonizing maps already are referred to it really important to have the communities own maps and not have colonial place names where their territory is. And the reason again why it's open source is because it's not only an Amazonian issue we kept hearing about similar needs elsewhere in Canada New Zealand and so on and so forth. And this principle of when an elder dies a library is burned down which is attributed to a Molly and ethnologist. The, the, the guy that I was on the boat with William and Nipah passed away last year. And so it's something that we take very seriously that time is of the essence and software is needed to help communities retain their oral histories and their ancestral knowledge. So telling you a little bit more about the app now. There's basically three ingredients that you need in order for it to work. You need a map, or actually you don't need a map if you want to use just open street map and work it online but if you're working offline you do need to create your own map which can be designed a map box studio, which has a pretty user friendly interface. As far as that goes you don't need to do any coding or anything like that. You need audio visual content. So obviously the recordings and then you need to download terror stories. And then with that you can spin up your own instance of the application and feed in your own graphics for example logos and background. And I'm going to give you a quick tour of it and if anybody's interested I can give a more detailed tour later the screen share. So the application is entirely translatable into the native language. It's just a doc file that you edit basically add to the app. That's really important because many apps that we've encountered you can translate part of it, but the main user interface will still be in whatever your system languages right Spanish Portuguese English Dutch whatever. So we wanted to translate the entire app so that you can see here that is a very bottom there. It's now set to Mata why but you can switch it to English. The way that the application works is essentially it's a map right and here you're seeing that same map that I showed earlier of the Mata why where it's it's their data entirely and this works entirely offline. What's nice about map box to as you can set it to 3D, which is really nice with indigenous communities because what's frequently maps are kind of this abstract idea, you know this God's eye point of view that doesn't make a lot of sense. And so to at least have some 3D in there is nice to get a sense of the landscape. And then of course you have the stories on the left hand side so the way that this works is you can either click on points on the map. It filters the stories that are associated with that place, or on the top left there, you can use the filters to filter by type of place like type of sacred site and this is all taxonomies that you can that the communities can input themselves. Or by speaker, for example, so that you only see the stories that are associated with that speaker or place, and then it also filters the map so you only see those places that are associated with those stories. Just time check we have about one more minute. Oh, okay, sweet. Yes, so just to show you a little bit more about it. I mentioned restricted knowledge. So there's the ability to set stories so that you can limit who gets to view them. It works entirely offline and we have adopted the portable open street map format of a computer that generates a wifi beam through which other devices can kind of get in touch with that box to load the application on the phone. It's designed to be user friendly for kids. The kids are and educators really love it because it's a tool that teaches geography history language all in the same. So we have a methodology that we developed around how to do this kind of work. It's on terror stories.io for anybody that's interested. And I just want to give a shout out to the people who really made this possible and have developed this which is a volunteer group of coders called Ruby for good. And there's this wonderful quote that I really love by one of the team members Betsy Habel. Any coding project is a living system composed of both the code and the people working on the code, which I think it's just really expressive of how this is a living ecosystem. Right so we developed this in three different buildathons as well as at Hacktoberfest. I want to give a shout out to everybody that's worked on this. We are on GitHub so if anybody's interested in taking a look. It's there and these are some things that we're still working on. Just peer to peer, thinking ease of installation, building and compatibility with other applications, building a curriculum builder and guaranteeing indefinite access for community members into perpetuity. Which I would love to talk more about that but I think we're a little bit out of time, but that has to do with working with Indigenous archives across the world to get that going. Place matters we all know this because we're stuck inside, but just I put this up here it's this beautiful quote from the Museum of African American History in Smithsonian, because this is not something that's true for Indigenous people this is true for all of us right. So just to leave on that note just about place based data and why it's important. Thanks everybody. Yeah, thank you I'm sorry we have to move on but it's like we could talk about this for hours so the conversation will continue over on Slack, and we'll have to go ahead and get started on the next presentation so thank you very much. Thank you.