Hawaii Island Digital Collaboratory

FAIN: HD-50054-07

Kohala Center (Kamuela, HI 96743-7462)
Karen Kemp (Project Director: November 2006 to November 2008)

Planning for a "digital collaboratory" engaging humanities scholars, scientists, technology specialists, and native Hawaiian culture experts in the development of a geospatially-referenced database of the island of Hawaii.

The Kohala Center and Redlands Institute propose a ?digital collaboratory? that will foster cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research and incorporate a geographically-referenced knowledge management system for humanities scholars, scientists, planners, teachers, students and the general public. The overriding purpose is to create an environment in which knowledge grounded in indigenous epistemologies can be integrated with information grounded in Western scientific epistemology, using the Island of Hawai?i as a test bed. We wish to explore how GIScience and the associated spatial-temporal toolbox can provide this bridging opportunity. This initial project phase explores the spatial element of Hawaiian epistemology, engaging experts from various disciplines in an intensive collaborative effort to uncover a means of representing interconnected cultural and scientific information in the digital environment provided by GIS and knowledge management systems.