Digital Cultural Communication: Tools and Methods for Community Co-Creation

Russo A¹*, Watkins J¹*

1. Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Only now are the communication technologies familiar to higher-end users becoming available to communities. When such technologies are married to traditional forms such as community narratives, they present an opportunity for communities to preserve their stories and distribute this knowledge to a wider audience. In some of the most remote parts of Australia, communities are partnering with cultural institutions to create digital cultural content. When communities create content in partnership with cultural institutions, both contribute to the sharing of cultural knowledge and distribution of this knowledge to a wider audience. In Queensland, a new initiative has created a mobile digital platform which travels into outlying areas of the community not just to capture and disseminate digital culture but to promote and train in new literacy.

This paper introduces Digital Cultural Communication as a framework for enabling both new literacy and access to media platforms for dissemination of community narratives to a wider audience. Silverstone (2003) identifies that the new literacy has limited value to communities if they cannot access technologies, nor have reason to. Digital Cultural Communication weds new literacy to multiplatform publishing by providing a cost-effective infrastructure through which communities can create content and partner with cultural institutions to distribute this content to a wider audience. Cultural institutions can extend the new literacy in this process by supplying training in new literacy for community co-creation and by promoting the end product, thus stimulating demand.

Using an ambitious and exciting case study from the Queensland cultural sector, this paper illustrates how communities can engage in the co-creation of content which both extends their digital literacy and strengthens their cultural identity. Further, by framing this case study within the domain of Digital Cultural Communication, the paper illustrates the advantages of partnerships between communities and cultural institutions in the capture, display and distribution of knowledge.

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