In their study, Chauhan and Soden look into Himalayan digital archives to see how they navigate knowledge conflicts and address epistemic injustices by encouraging community engagement and activism. Digital archives are not just collections of historic media, but also the center of a group’s political, social, and cultural power. They have been established to support and enact political action in the current day. They have been created to reveal the injustices experienced by marginalized, ecologically sensitive, and culturally diverse regions, and allow for the mediation of conflicts, as well as counter the narratives of colonialism. In order to achieve these goals, they are designed as digital commons where communities have the chance to get involved in solving issues they might be facing. Fogg’s work involves eight steps towards creating a persuasive technology. The steps taken towards the creation of the digital archives are paralleled in Fogg’s work.

Globalization, infrastructure development, migration, tourism, and urbanization have threatened the cultural practices and knowledge used to maintain the health of the natural environment. With this comes the promotion of colonial powers and neglect of local practices—knowledge conflicts—which then marginalize communities and threaten environmental harm.

Conflicts in open-source software and crowd-contributed projects like Wikipedia have been researched. They involve the attempt to balance autonomy, motivations, and participation with how data is formatted and presented and community policies. The way these conflicts are addressed will affect the Himalayan communities either positively or negatively. Making these conflicts explicit is key to negotiating and finding out the direction the community is going.

Soden and Chauhan interviewed those involved in various Himalayan digital archive projects. In their findings, individuals have been involved in seeking and addressing knowledge conflicts. Oration of history, storytelling, and photo exhibits took place as part of the project’s goal. The online archive implemented comment boards, peer-review processes, open-blog pages, and content submission forms which were steps towards collaboration and cooperation. Archives designed in such a way became efficient tools to address policies and historical subjugation that led to the marginalization of communities.

The challenges of establishing these archives included maintenance and ensuring relevance to the community, as well as resource limitations like data storage. Overcoming these challenges involved using open-access platforms, open-source software, and training for navigating the technical infrastructure.

The digital archive projects had implemented an approach where everyone is responsible for maintaining the archive in an effort to strike a balance between community concerns and publicly available content. Such an approach uses peer monitoring and graduated sanctions so users can decide based on collective interests. A digital archive acting as a commons involves peer governance in order to reach a consensus in the event of a conflict.

In Fogg’s work, he describes the eight steps in a design process to create persuasive technology—start small, choose the right audience, find the obstacles encountered when trying to follow the target behavior, choose the best-suited technology channel or software, find and learn from those who have succeeded, test and build, then, finally, build upon what has succeeded.

The Himalayan digital archives have built with community engagement in mind, in an effort to protect and teach the customs and practices done by the communities of the region, as well as pushing back against the hegemonic narratives that have proven harmful to them and their environment. The organizers have encountered obstacles that prevent what they want to achieve and have dealt with them using open-access technology and collaborating with other organizations and institutions.

The organizers have chosen a website for their digital archive as websites are widely accessible. They can be accessed with anything that is connected to the Internet, and if one lacks a computer on hand or at home, they may visit a library to access the archive.

These archives bear similarity to Wikipedia, the largest and most referenced archive in history, where contributions are made and governance is done by any individual. It would seem that the organizers have take inspiration from Wikipedia. The aforementioned work states that archival projects have taken place to garner public interest, which is something Wikipedia has also done.

Digital archives in Himalayan communities have sought to stir collaboration and make known their cultural practices to the world while also become the site where people act against the colonialist powers that have marginalized them and endangered their home region. Designing digital archives as digital commons creates a space where knowledge conflicts can be resolved and community issues and needs are addressed. In such technology, the responsibilities of governance, curation, and authorship are distributed.

References

[1]

Y. Rogers, H. Sharp, and J. Preece, Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction, 6th ed. John Wiley & Sons, 2023.

[2]

A. Chauhan and R. Soden, “Digital Archives, Knowledge Conflicts, and Epistemic Injustices in the Himalayas,” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–14, Apr. 2025, doi: 10.1145/3706598.3714084.

[3]

B. Fogg, “Creating persuasive technologies,” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, pp. 1–6, Apr. 2009, doi: 10.1145/1541948.1542005.