Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis from an ethical perspective of how the concept of indigenous wayfinding and voyaging is mapped in knowledge representation, organization and discovery systems.

In this study, the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Library of Congress Classifications systems and the Web of Science citation database were methodically examined to determine how these systems represent and facilitate the discovery of indigenous knowledge of wayfinding and voyaging.

The analysis revealed that there was no dedicated representation of the indigenous practices of wayfinding and voyaging in the major knowledge representation, organization and discovery systems. By scattering indigenous practice across various, often very broad and unrelated classes, coherence in the record is disrupted, resulting in misrepresentation of these indigenous concepts.

This study contributes to a relatively limited research literature on representation and organization of indigenous knowledge of wayfinding and voyaging. This study calls to foster a better understanding and appreciation for the rich knowledge that indigenous cultures provide for an enlightened society.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the representation of Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) Hula Dance in traditional systems of representation and organization.

This exploratory study analyzes the controlled and natural language vocabularies employed for the representation and organization of Hawaiian culture, in particular Hawaiian hula. The most widely accepted and used systems were examined: classification systems (Library of Congress Classification and Dewey Decimal Classification), subject heading systems (Library of Congress Subject Headings and authority files (Library of Congress and OCLC Authority Files), and citation indexing systems (Web of Science Social Sciences and Art and Humanities databases).

Analysis of various tools of representation and organization revealed biases and diasporization in depictions of Hawaiian culture. The study emphasizes the need to acknowledge the aesthetic perspective of indigenous people in their organization and presentation of their own cultural knowledge and advocates a decolonizing methodology to promote alternative information structures in indigenous communities.

This study contributes to the relatively limited scholarship on representation and organization for indigenous knowledge organization systems, in particular Hawaiian culture. Research suggests that access to Native Hawaiian cultural heritage will raise awareness among information professionals in Hawai’i to the beauty of Native Hawaiian epistemology.