Paper short abstract:

This paper examines community belongings digitised in 3D for museum education purposes in a Canadian museum. It argues that the scanners, software programs, and people have digital affordances and politics that shape representations and structure knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The philosophical concept of affordance is taking hold across media studies and anthropology and it connotes how epistemologies are encoded into technological infrastructures. In the age of digital reproduction - virtual scanned models and algorithmic representations for example - the concept of affordance has gained credence as we consider not just the representation itself but the reproduction technology, the modelling software, and the individuals who coded, scanned, and produced the representations; the immaterial and illusive materialities that afford new relations.

But what are the nature of these affordances in the context of digtisation of cultural heritage? How are these new affordances political? Through the 3D scanning and digitisation of Musqueam (an Indigenous community in British Columbia) belongings; this paper addresses the concept of affordance to map value systems embedded in digitised belongings. Based on ongoing workshops and the co-production of 3D digital surrogates, we plot the social and ethical issues faced by museums and artists who use digital technologies to represent objects. We ask: What are the affordances of scanning belongings? Are these models useful for educational purposes or community knowledge circulation? How do Indigenous practices of making challenge Western notions of digital authenticity? We propose recommendations for future museum digitisation policies that address how we should respect original knowledge holders when creating 3D models and to what extent we can modify scan data for the purposes of education and sharing. Ultimately these technologies are becoming ubiquitous, and grounding a critical study of affordances in local digitisation projects is needed.