BOUNDARIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES IN COMPUTER-ASSISTED ETHNOBOTANY

Abstract

Designing software alongside ethnobotanists and Indigenous owners and practitioners of traditional knowledge, brings to light a range of issues which expose some of the assumptions underlying both Western ethnobotany and software design. In collaborating over the development of software to facilitate the use of digital objects in knowledge work, issues of knowledge politics, accountability, ontologies, and epistemologies arise. This paper discusses the ways these issues, in a particular context, led to the development of a flexible, ontologically flat, epistemologically open, ethnobotanical software design.