Thinking with Shells: Digital Culturescapes Decolonising Digital Heritage

This chapter ‘thinks with shells’ to consider how digital heritage practices may be understood as part of our ‘digital culturescapes.’ Expanding on Tasmanian shell-stringing practices and drawing on the shell-work of palawa elder Dr. Lola Greeno alongside Julie Gough’s concept of “culturescapes” (2014), the chapter elucidates how computational codework can be learned as embodied, hands-on forms of knowledge transmission within shared ecosystems. In doing so, it delves beneath the shiny watermark of Big Tech to resist digital colonialism, offering an alternative economy of lovingly hand-coded strings that emerge through the practices of sandbox communities and the tendrilled realms of kelp, shell, and seaweed.

This text will appeal to students and instructors across disciplines as a provocative introduction to the social, cultural and ethical questions provoked by life in the Information Age.