University of New England

Host institution

The University of New England is the host organisation, providing institutional resources, budget-related administration, and ethics oversight. The university also manages relationships with other institutional partners.

Taragara Research Group (Taragara Corp)

Research partner

Taragara Researchers provide expert Indigenous oversight for the Australian Message Stick Project. Taragara Researchers work within the Taragara Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginal-led enterprise and cultural broker between the University, government, non-government entities and funding bodies and the Aboriginal communities. Taragara projects are responsive to Aboriginal communities’ aspirations from which research is generated and culturally tailored.

Indigenous Data Network

Data governance

The Indigenous Data Network (IDN) was established in 2018 to support and coordinate the governance of Indigenous data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to decide their own local data priorities. The IDN provides third-party cold storage and legacy data management form the Australian Message Stick Database. Under the direction of Professor Marcia Langton, the AMSD is being showcased to government as an example of best-practice Indigenous data governance.

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Data hosting, management and storage (GWDG)

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (University of Göttingen) is a public research university in northern Germany. This institution is responsible for the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (GWDG), a computing and IT competence centre for the Max Planck Society (see below). The CLLD web application that underpins the Australian Message Stick Database is managed and hosted by the GWDG, as well as images and metadata.

ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research

Data-entry interface for the Australian Message Stick Database (OCCAMS), research partner

The OCCAMS module was developed at the Australian National University’s Centre for Digital Humanities Research by Junran Lei for the purpose of organising and analysing material culture collections. It provides a standard metadata scheme in line with the specifications of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The Australian Message Stick Database relies on OCCAMS as a data-entry interface for the Australian Message Stick Database, allowing flexible editing and pre-filtering of potentially sensitive data before it is made public online.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Public interface of the Australian Message Stick Database (CLLD), research partner

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, is a research institute governed by the Max Planck Society. The term “evolutionary anthropology” can have horrifying connotations for First Nations people in Australia and elsewhere. In the contemporary European research context it refers to research on how diverse global communities use cultural mechanisms to solve problems, encompassing such things as language, kinship and cognition: all of which are foundational to message-stick communication. The AMSD is one of around twenty cultural databases managed by MPI-EVA using the CLLD framework developed by Robert Forkel.