Well, welcome again, everybody. Welcome to this final session of our two-day symposium on Decolonizing Histories in South Africa. My name is for people who have just joined us. My name is Wayne Doon and I'm a member of the Department of History here at SELS. And today, this afternoon, our final session is a keynote conversation between two of South Africa's premier historians and one is an historian and an anthropologist. About two speakers today, a keynote conversation around the theme of forensic museology, restitution, and archive. Our two speakers, firstly, will have Carolyn Hamilton, who is an anthropologist and an historian. Carolyn is currently National Research Foundation professor at the University of Cape Town in archive and public culture. Most of us historians probably know Carolyn best for her book, very big book, Terrific Majesty, the Powers of Sharkersloo and the Limits of Invention. Carolyn will be in conversation with Siraj Rasool. Siraj is a professor of history in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town. Many people don't know this but Siraj's earliest work was on the life and times of the Unity Movement leader, I.P. Tabata. But the reason many of us don't know this is because Siraj has moved so firmly to the area of heritage and memorial studies, as well as being involved in the mobilization for the repatriation of the remains of African bodies to South Africa. He's published very widely in this field and collaborated with a number of scholars in South Africa and the wider world and most recent publications include The Politics of Heritage in Africa, another volume called Unsettled History, Remaking of South African Public Pasts. So thank you both Siraj and Carolyn for joining us today. The format that we've settled on is that Carolyn will speak first and engage Siraj in conversation on our sex theme. Thank you very much. Thanks very much Gwen. So I suppose unlike the other panelists which the other keynote conversations which seem to have someone drawing someone else out, Siraj and I have realized that we have to prompt each other and get the engagement going like that. So I thought I would kick off by asking Siraj about the concept that he proposed as the title for our session which is that of forensic museology. Now I think it'd be great for the purposes of the symposium to go through what you mean by forensic museology and also perhaps open up to the audience and so on to see whether we can stretch it or do even more things with it and whether it's got some limits. So I'm interested in the term because forensics really is a term that has its greatest application in criminalistics one way or another and you sort of the term across into museology and we it has quite an electric and challenging effect when one does a jump like that and in fact we know that that kind of jumping from one field taking an idea from one field and jumping it into the other field often disturbs fundamentally the assumptions of the receiving field because that that sort of wonderful effect of being able to expose certain assumptions in the receiving field. So I want you to talk a little bit to that and to talk to it as I understand it to be a tactic of with a disruptive effect but then I want to push you and to say and then what's behind the tactic because as we all know having a bit of a shared political background in the day tactics always have to be underpinned by strategies and what is the strategy the methodological and the critical strategy that is enabled by the tactic. So that's the kind of question that I would love to see you kick us off with and then perhaps we might go on to the possible stretching of the term. Thanks. Thank you so much Carolyn and thanks to Wayne and Kai and other colleagues for this amazing two days of discussion. For people who who know my work who've been following the trajectory of my work you will know that one of my main interests is in transforming the concept of the museum that we have from one that's rooted in governmentality a 19th century museum that is about the classificatory order of collections and that that works with an assumption of care and of humanitarianism and you know that is work that I've done in South Africa sometimes in conversation with Carolyn and other colleagues about how you transform a legacy of the ethnographic in a democratizing society and what the future of the ethnographic in the museum might be in post in a in a in the decolonial project or in the anti-colonial project if you like and obviously this is a discussion about disciplines it's a discussion about disciplines in different societies in different colonial histories and so we have Germany which never had which never faced national liberation struggles and which have completely untransformed disciplines and where for the purposes of our discussion hosted partly by so-as it's important for us to note that the the the homeless bolus Wayne which we use the idea of western actually doesn't work the African history doesn't exist in Germany so they are different strategies and tactics in different societies in in different situations so I've my work on human remains restitution I'm fortunate to have been able to take that from having discovered the evidence of the modern museum rooted in stolen human remains from the northern Cape in the in the South African Museum at the beginning of the 20th century in the formation of the McGregor Museum in the competition that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century with European anthropologists and institutions in the South Africanization of science and in making an argument for the restitution of the dead and thinking about the dead not as collections but as ancestors especially since our archive has enabled us to name the dead and to to to think about restitution right through to me being part of negotiations in of helping shape a negotiate a restitution as one based on re humanization and thinking about that concept in relation to systematic forms of dehumanization so this is work that we're very fortunate to have done right through to reburial and now also being able to identify more sets of human remains and name them that are in Austrian collections and being able to work with colleagues and identify South African human remains in Germany and so forth and working with advising the Germans on their restitution of human remains to to Rwanda and to elsewhere in in in Africa and to work out precisely that the extent to which in our collections in collections in Germany collections in Austria extent to which human remains have been removed from it separated from material culture whereas in fact very often those human remains and material culture sound recordings were collected as part of the same field expeditions so I'm same for part of the same collecting expeditions as part of the same research projects and unfortunately those that places human remains and and material culture into the same equation so it's it's been easier for us to think of the the presence of human remains in museums of culture as unacceptable and it's becoming now widely accepted in Germany and elsewhere that restitution shall take place but we still maintain a kind of framework of care for material culture and for the ethnographic whereas we are learning just the extent to which museums are not we're not just beneficiaries of colonial violence but we're implicated in the very acts of violence themselves we're embedded in colonial in expeditions of conquest um and so you know this is emerging from this is like in the Saas-Savoie report you have it in the in the book that's just come out by Dan Hicks and for colleagues there's a conversation that a number of us have with Dan Hicks that's just come out literally an hour ago in the British art journal so colleagues can download that that explains this concept of forensic museology just very briefly I'm very fortunate to work with a team of scholars in my department who have been developing this field of forensic history who've been dealing with the kind of post-wars of the dead in relation to the dead of apartheid's violence that the the dead that the the murdered the mutilated and in on in the recovery of the dead body of of of the violence of apartheid and we have all we've made a case for putting these different categories of the dead into the same discussion as the remains of of the missing as the remains of of ancestors and the of of the remains of the remains of of of human beings and so the concept of the forensic that we work with yes it does have its origins in a legal concept in an evidentiary concept and you know people some people don't know this but I'm a lawyer by training and I got trained in forensic medicine and so I you know these are big these are things that I I went through myself in in legal cases around violence around killing around deaths and but we've also listened to the the scholarship that's come out and the activism that's come out of forensic architecture engaged with that a little bit and we accept that the idea of the forensic is more powerful than simply the deeply empirical the idea of the forensic opens up the idea of the forum and of social inquiry of spaces of social inquiry spaces of dissent and spaces of questioning and that is the concept of the museum that I am putting forward strategically a new concept of museum that's not rooted on the care of collections in fact what I've argued is that restitution itself becomes the basis of a new museology so then if I may siraj the I see that we've got a great question already up in the q and a which is asking about the matter of categorization and this is where I thought maybe you and I'm conversation and with the participants in the in the discussion could stretch the meaning of forensic because you put forensic very squarely in the area of human remains and restitution but prompted by this rather great first question for the forensic in the museology doesn't have to be to the question of the human remains and what does it mean to think about the forensic in relation to the ethnographic which you mentioned now I'm very alert to the fact that in the forensic in forensics in general there's a lot of debate and the fingerprint debates the classic one it appears to be the clean scientific absolutely validated procedure of forensics but in fact there's an enormous debate amongst scientists about whether the fingerprint is in fact start to think about these questions of categories and what happens when we start being forensic around the categories that would seem to suggest that we have to look very closely at the procedures and protocols of the museum itself so that those sorts of things can become one of the objects of our forensic inquiry which means then we want to track a set of fingerprints actually of all the curatorial hands that have touched the items with which we are concerned because we know and this goes back to a point raised in an earlier panel that the object that is constituted as the museum object is a transformed object it's not the same object that it was when it was in circulation in in in social life and in fact it's being transformed and changed all through the time that it's been in the so-called preservation institution by so-called of course I recognize there is huge preservation going on it doesn't mean there's inertia or that the object is frozen in time so there's all that forensics that's possible in relation to the museum so I would I would want us to consider that especially in relation to that first question absolutely these are matters that have concerned us now for many years as we have try to think about the life of objects and collections in museums in more complex ways and to think about all the entire life and the journeys that objects have made and and there are some beautiful there are beautiful exhibitions about that that is also that have also along the way questioned the way that objects and artworks have come to be come to be classified and so so the the beautiful exhibition on Senufo art that was done by Ghagyaddi and Etlides a couple of years ago moved along those lines and just questioned the category of Senufo perhaps the most powerful work about West Africa that I align with the work that you and Nessa Levama have done on thriving and untriving but I think also that those frameworks that we've had of looking for the complexity of the object in the in the museum have also sometimes fallen into the trap of a neocolonial position and this is the neocolonial position that you see in the response of Nick Thomas to the Saha Savoy report and it's but it is also a position that I think comes directly out of the practice of collections management and the history of collecting in the Pacific the very particular kind of politics of collecting in which they have made the most powerful arguments for co-curatorship and shared collections and thinking about the object as more complex yeah I think on the African continent we are dealing with certain things we are dealing with incomplete sovereignty you're dealing with the the entrapment the colonial entrapment of the ethnographic museum in which African people do not recognize themselves and yet they have these beautiful artifacts that need to be given life in a new relationship with the people so that people can can can see themselves in the museums and in their relationship with these these objects and that presents a new option and it's more than just changing the label I mean you and I spent a beautiful afternoon together in the Konanklaka museum in Leiden where you know in that museum they have they have this problem of what do you do what do you do South Africans with our labels which we call kaffa how can you help us change that and so the the process of authentication of the object is not what this project should be about this is a project that has to turn to I mean these museums have got to seek a new authority outside of the colonial framework that enable them to become the custodians and the owners if you like of those those artifacts and so yes I think there is work that we need to do which is about the meaning of the object the relationship of the object with people the relationship of the object with the dead there there there is an exciting world I think ahead of us with a completely different concept of the museum that is not rooted in a narrow framework of the care for collections for future generations and that is not trapped in the categories in the disciplines that were granted to us by colonialism that we've changed substantially in certain universities in certain countries that we're in the museum they've been left largely untouched so then Saraj I would agree with your critique of co-curation I would also I want to throw in the observation that I'm aware that African scholars are constantly being asked somehow to give the new label somehow to authorize the transformation of the museum sometimes even to exercise the past out of the museum particularly through the introduction of artworks and so and when I make the point about tracking the fingerprints it's not for the purposes of authenticating the object it's actually for the purposes of exposing the colonial logic of the categorization so that one can see how it comes into place but I'm wondering whether scholars like ourselves and our many students and our associates want to be part actively part of the project of transforming these European museums or do we want to be an enabling of a set of other projects and I'm extremely I really loved Ashile's phrase where he talked about at this moment where we are epistemically that curiosity and experimentation is the absolute thing that we have to underwrite and support and I'm not at all certain that museums can experiment at the edge of what they have to do I think they are in many ways subjected or imagine they are subjected to all kinds of pressures and I have a sense that young curators want to go to all sorts of other edges so the question then is what does it take to follow those fingerprints so that you actually know what how the thing became constituted as the museum thing that it now is so as to be able to critique that and unlock it from that but also how do you release that object for all sorts of other kinds of engagements perhaps of the kind that would raise the hair on the back of the neck of the museum director but I think it is a time of experimentation and I would then say that leads me to the kind of work that we've been most interested in in the 500 year archive which has been what happens if you take the material that's been stuck in ethnographic categorization and say this stuff is not representative of people and ethnicity whatever the category is that the museum put on it it's stuff that's in a museum and it came to be there by particular circumstances and a whole lot of other stuff didn't come to be there and the circumstances of why that stuff got there and the other stuff didn't is of course of interest but now it's it can be taken out and used for all sorts of other purposes and at its best that's what an archive is is that an archive imagines the place that somehow ended up with some stuff and you can go to it and make of it what you will it's the implication is that you come back again and again it is the forum which I think you're right I mean forensics you know the term does come etymologically from forum so you're meant to come back again and again not just in the next 10 years but over the next couple hundred years so where stuff stays in any repository what does it take to enable it to be treated as archive but also and I think this is absolutely crucial what are the limits of the inherited it's essentially a 19th century european concept of archive that has been visited upon us in other parts of the world because that's a concept of archive that imagines the archive is unchanging and those documentary sources which are the imagined objects of the archive are not unchanging they are also subject to all sorts of filtering shaping and reshaping over time so if we are if part of our exercise forensically is to treat those objects archivaly we also have to stretch the concept of archive not only do we have to stretch the concept of forensic but we'd have to stretch the concept of archive to do a whole lot of things that it needs to do in the 21st century when it's not the concept of archive that ranker put in place and that came was visited upon us through colonial bureaucracy I'll stop there your concept of archive is very exciting because yours is not simply the concept of the historian where the historian you know enters the picture as this is my site of research where I'm going to make discoveries and where they are where these archives are in disarray or in danger of of crumbling and of disappearing that their responsibility is to go through a preservation exercise usually framed as the rescue project of digitization and so forth that is fine but you know I mean I as you would imagine I would argue for a much closer association between archive and museum as similar collecting institutions as a similar kind that these are institutions of the constitution of citizenship and the concept of citizenship and I'm going to use Carol and Hamilton term now the concept of citizenship is that we talk about is not a convened citizenship it is a citizenship that encourages disagreement and encourages questioning and unfortunately that is a citizenship that is that is you know potentially regarded as dangerous in in in many societies because because I mean our you know South Africa is such a commemorative state in which we you know all we know is to arrive and to be to be compliant and we we have this you know our rituals of of of of of state making and citizenship are so based on obedience and and on gathering as in in orderly ways and I'm afraid you know what what what we are talking about is a citizenship of disruption where the disruption is is a necessary process and and the the we have to disrupt the order of these institutions in order for them to be meaningful in order for them to and and you're absolutely right I mean Ashile's idea of curiosity ideas of curiosity and experimentation is exactly what is required and this is the new generation and this is what we this is this is what we have to go we where we have to go and you know I've been thinking you know in our preparation just about how important archive is in this discussion just thinking of the work that's been done on the migrated archives that was secreted away and that what British government was forced to bring them to light not just for Kenya in the case of the the legal case and we yeah yeah I'm reminded of the fantastic work of of the beautifully named museum of British colonialism that you know uses that material and that does a digital mapping of of of of of Mao Mao camps and and so forth but you know your work I think your work on on um on archive as something that we do as something that we that that we don't just go to it we do it and we and we do it in certain ways and we do it as a kind of politics of knowledge I think opens up a different concept of of archive for us I wonder whether you can take that well but I see we've also got a great question I don't know if you've seen it in the Q&A from Elirio and she's sort of saying I've had to paraphrase someone else's question but please do or read it but I take I take it from her question that she's saying well actually do the kind of reckoning that you're asking for and then she sort of suggests so does this mean we need a new kind of museum and the minute you brought the word forensics into our conversation it did occur to me that we know the word forensics forensic most uh it's most familiar to us in relation to the corpse and I do wonder if the museum is an institution for the 21st century or the museum as we know it which is the museum which has a twin capacity one which is that 19th century capacity of putting forward knowledge in some sort of form into the public domain speak actually authorizing knowledge or whether it it's a repository aspect is really the stronger aspect because the fact of the matter is now the digital curation can be done by anyone if you have a access to these items in digital forms you can curate them how you want to in digital form of course and I think that this was a point made earlier about the real thing has somehow its own powers that want to be explored in the in physical reality and indeed I'm sure that that is the case but nonetheless I think there's a tremendous space of experimentation but it does worry me that if we don't watch those fingerprints and if we don't keep our eye on one thing that is strongest in archival practice and that is watching where how the object got collected we sometimes forget that these objects which occupy such a big space are already being pre-selected to survive to be the ones that survive when all the others were selected out and the last comment I wanted to throw in here is of course the very division archive and museum is one of those colonial categories that we want to resist surely because it's a division that has been so dangerous and in resisting it it's not to favor one above the other but to understand that both come with an apparatus that we might want to look very particularly at as soon as one does as some of some of the scholars in my group do as soon as you start trying to work and think about the past before colonialism you're stuck in a space that historically has been described as the archivist space and then the next move was oh well maybe it does have an archive of sorts called oral tradition creation of all of these categories oral tradition archive set up as though the one has something that the other one doesn't have a lack turns out if you sit on that edge and look particularly from that margin of the discipline because who goes to study the past before colonialism very few scholars it's the outline margin that perhaps a really powerful interrogative one then you suddenly think hang on a second maybe I don't accept the inherited idea of archive or the inherited idea of all tradition why are these things pulled apart into these kind of categories don't they share certain custodial different but but they both have custodial imperatives and they both change actually absolutely you know it's it's I mean this was the lifeblood of our training in the the kind of post-vancina kind of era of of being inculcated into a discipline that had to reckon with the spoken word that had to be open to what we called in the old days non-written sources but which obviously we we think of in more complex ways today and to you know it's amazing what happens as I had to do a few years ago not being able to go into Britain any longer as I pleased I shifted my focus to a much easier visa regime area of Germany where as a professor I get a long-term visa etc and to shift into a non-English speaking environment and into a German environment where you have such a different history of disciplines a history of of of of the museum and so forth and you discover that quite frankly I mean I mean that okay they also have the concept of pre-history right and they also have the concept of proto-history so they are very clear about what makes the cut of history and let me tell you and even those scholars of ours who work on in in what they call African history you know and Berlin and so forth they actually do not work in African history they work in the field of German history in Africa so they are imperial historians if you like and they none of them have to face the possibility of voice as archive and the challenge of orality in all of its manifestations and so you you you actually realize how revolutionary it was to have studied African history you know how revolutionary it was that places like so has you know these fields of study developed at a certain point not accidentally there's a reason why at a certain point in Britain in some institutions some in in African universities that developed in the 60s and so forth why these developments took place and I tell my German colleagues you want to really make a dramatic change in your university you close down your department of african and stick which in German is not like what we call African studies and you appoint african historians into the department of history and you you you work with the concept of history and historicization that is outside of this narrow frankian documentary empirical political history kind of concept and it's a it's it's you know so so decolonization of course we know all the ways that our decolonization can be gentrified how it can be turned into a discussion or how it's been appropriated when people simply mean diversity and so forth but they are fun when you think of it as disciplinary and epistemic there are certain moves that can be made in the museum and in the university and what makes museums and archives so compelling is that they are part they are academic institutions they're marked by disciplines they have disciplinary struggles going on inside of them they are knowledge institutions they they they work with epistemic worlds and so forth but they also public institutions their relationship with publics is potentially different universities are so trapped in an outreach concept and in a public public appreciation of science and this and that that kind of notion of publics of the grateful public for the scholarship is not one that is productive for for i suppose for for critical citizenship so on this question of publicness siraj let me um bore us all with the discussion of computer software because actually we have to watch out for the software itself and what it forces when we started out to try with what was really a political project a political intellectual project to insist on an archive for let's say the 500 years before colonialism we wanted to do it digitally and we wanted to make it sustainable so we used a open source software the gold standard archival open source software developed by the canadiens and it's got all these wonderful standards and so on one of the most extraordinary things about it is it has no capacity for public engagement so it's impossible it has it has no imagining of the public the public presentation but it does what doesn't imagine the public's going to use it because it's quite complex and difficult to use it's really i suppose essentially starts as an archival management system so it's difficult to go and find this thing that you're looking for using the software but you can't ever engage it you can't ever add to it you can't comment on it you can't do anything and there's the archivists who are the custodians let you somehow into the system so there's no place there's no place for being able to engage the archive so it's again it's again one of those divisions so somehow the archive the only way you can engage the archive is to go research and then publish but in fact this division between the archive and the publication which happens somewhere else and used to be in a book is now in one space which is the digital space there's nothing to stop you putting up your publication and having an archive will link right there that clicks to the very thing that you're talking about if it's digitally available and then that leads us to some fantastic questions because who's controlling what's available in what form digitally is a really tricky question and if you can't engage the format and the organization or the error or the whatever then you've got it's it's it's pretty difficult i think and so just to say then you know if we are imagining all sorts of ways of releasing things from museums we have to think very carefully about even something like the software because it's so it's got these knowledge categories these procedures and protocols that come from way back absolutely embedded in in them and it's very authorizing in in particular ways so it's a big battle as it turns out by the way if you try and tinker with the open source software you then have to start paying like mad to maintain your little changes like if you introduce a public forum or or something of that nature can i just um can i just jump in and but i've started to to some of the questions uh that we have in the q and a so i'll i'll just paraphrase i'll try and bring together some of the questions that appear in our q and a box but there have been a couple of questions that in a sense speak to redeeming and one person asked specifically how can the museum be redeemed um and there was another question which i think is related and we can bring those two together there was a question as to whether we can cite specific examples of museum practice on the continent on the african continent and i guess the person but the thought behind that question is to have specific examples of museums that have been redeemed in some way um and i said i don't know you in a sense you you spoke to that to some extent when you had a kind of throw away line in uh when you spoke earlier you had to throw a line that said one of the things that museums should do is uh be spaces in which people can recognize themselves and i suppose that's part of the answer towards this question of already deeming and my own question which i'll latch on to that so you know how do we so if we do create museums in which people recognize themselves how do we stop those places but i'm simply becoming places about people seeing themselves so you know a museum in which i know you've been involved with the district a classic example is the district six museum which you've been involved so how do we stop the district six museum from simply becoming that colored museum um you know there's a phrase that i've heard um so i wonder if you could just uh comment on that and then i had a question for catelyn um catelyn you said you want to see the archive in the museum being or at least you want to see that separation being closed down or dismembered and i wondered how that sat with um the archive as a place where historians actually go and do archival work um and a museum being something a little different i'll end there um yeah i mean i've been looking at the quid some very interesting questions from uh all the colleagues and um i mean and i'll just go through through something yeah i mean renaming it belongs to this discussion um you know it it's something that that that is necessary something that that that happens it's in the ordinary course of of of remaking a society such as south africa and just like they were these renaming you know centuries ago and and so forth um i suppose the the issue that that i think needs to be thought about is that that process is trapped in a kind of a system of committees of naming and geographies and place names and so forth and it's done in the orderly fashion of governmentality and that's that that's fine but um the the the museology that i'm talking about is an inculcation of practices not simply by expert curators that is a practice of museum with the people you know it you you you see it far more far more of these possibilities in latin america um you know i was very fortunate to to get to spend time in brazil and colombia um uh and on a unesco thing where the the brazilians and other latin americans were you know putting pressure on icomb putting pressure on unesco to change the concept of the museum uh and and these were museums like the musee de maré in in rio de genero which is just the stones throw away from the porto de vallongo where you know as human remains of slaves were discovered in the preparation for for the world cup there and so forth it's it's uh and the eco museo de amazonia these are these are deployments of the idea of the museum for different purposes for purposes of of gathering of building resilience and self respect and of you know sometimes they are memorial museum so memorial museums become the the the way in which uh that you can in a sense redeem the museum the work that happens at uh at my my my colleague um uh uh nelson abiti does in at the national museum of of uganda of utilizing the the the crusty ethnographic dusty collections for the purposes of social healing in in sections of ugandan society that have experienced mass violence and that go through community discussions and where these artifacts are brought out so you get a very different set of possibilities that i think move beyond the ethnographic that move beyond you know the old work that is still in the museum on the peopleing of africa and you know this race and that tribe and so forth um so yes um and then the the the question of reparations of course you cannot exclude reparations from the discussion if you if you follow all of the research uh um you know on the on the commission that repaid owners of enslaved people uh in britain pertaining to slavery in the caribbean south africa moritius uh when you follow that forensically if you like then you are talking about a reparate a reparatory framework that needs to be brought into the equation uh when we can understand that when you follow the debates in the united states i think it's the situation is is is beautifully poised for reparations to to take on a very important meanings for us of course with the trc experience we know that um symbolic reparations is a very important part of this of this work and the the ideas that we are talking about belongs to the framework of symbolic reparations uh if you like in in other words where where it where we work with a concept of social justice in the general sense and not just uh you know transitional justice um and and um you know my my longtime colleague paul basu of course asks a very challenging question and of course i have no doubt that co-curatorship uh collaboration and dialogue of very important projects that museums need to undertake that you you see that in the work recently done in the pit rivers museum uh you you you see that in his eco um it and and and you see that in work that that happens in the district six museum all the time um and the the the the problem is that one cannot leave the matter there that that is not the end point that that is not the the format and and and quite frankly if you read the intellectual response you know if you and and i've been in conferences recently where where nick thomas's ideas get hauled out in his presence and get paraded for anti-restitution purposes and and he gets up and he says i'm sorry that's not what i meant now if you read if you read that article the most articulate argument against the institution that says no no no we've actually have we have a a much more a much more powerful toolkit to transform the museum and we've been doing it for many years we we work with indigenous people to to to to to co-curate and so forth but quite frankly you know lift just to that uh you have a problem especially when you are talking about artifacts that have a foundation in violent in the violence of acquisition and and it's it's it's not that one is wanting to redeem the museum that one is wanting to clean the museum sterilize it from all of this this terrible history and terrifying history it's that we are we are wanting a very new concept of the museum we are not wanting to reform the museum we want a museum revolution and then i'll respond to Wayne i suppose and i guess i think your question isn't the art aren't the archives the place where the historians go to work is perhaps a question that um worries me now why does it worry me because doesn't suggest then that the museum is not an archive where historians go to work so or is it doesn't sort of imply well okay well that's fine the art historians can go there because they like to look at a few things but i think if we try to split the archive and the museum the archives and the museums like that we're forgetting the extent to which some things got consigned to the one place and other things got consigned and framed differently in the other place you have to be able to bring the two together and subject them i think to the same procedures because if you don't we carry on investing in an idea that these that somehow the written document is some is quite a different sort of object from these other stored objects that they're all stored objects selected and stored objects procedures of a certain kind made those particular things the subject or the object i suppose of the repository's attention and not other things and only sometimes by going to the other place do you see what the one the exclusions in the other and that goes to that original point about jumping field because if you don't jump field you can't escape the colonial categorization you just locked into the colonial logic so the field jumping whether it's crossing mediums whether it's reconvening something that siraj mentioned where you bring bring back stuff that got separated where you move from the one authoritative category the museum into the other authoritative category archive and you crisscross backwards and forwards taking your concepts with you from the one place to the other to ensure mutual interrogation is one way of collapsing the silos from within and some of the congealed categories of knowledge that have been such an epistemic trap all of these things i think are actually experiments we're on i think a cusp a cusp of epistemic rupture really and that's why i wonder whether the museum as we know it is not actually dead you know you know and that's something else is going to have to come forward because i can't really see and well i can't see the intellectual interest in a lot of the redeeming activity i can see the extraordinary value of the things that are in museums some of which will never be the subject of even a restitution demands some of those things people don't want back don't need back some of them are too quotidian but also things but they are you know some of the things i mean what about our our museums in south africa which are national custodians for a national archival and a physical estate you know the stuff is home but it's just as surely trapped in the museum as it is when it's in a you know in some place abroad so i'm i'm wary of of imagining the work the historians work in archives i think historians not just art historians historians work effectively on intellectual history powerfully when they go into museums to look at what's happened to stuff in museums to see what museums do i think ethnographically it's very interesting not to look at the ethnographic collections for what they've got to say about the culture of people imagined as tribal people but actually for the museum culture because it is a culture just as surely as any other culture it's a european culture in particular and an ethnographic lens on it shows it up as full of the culture that the the values and norms of a particular culture so those would be my thoughts i'm very keen on collapsing these distinctions as firmly as possible thank you Caroline we've got um we've got a couple of couple more questions um there's a question from um um uh well the person doesn't give their name but there's a question that says the australian aborigine the remains in cambridge are subject of repatriation yet scholars continue to research on them reasoning they'd rather take data before they are gone is there prevailing ethical standard being followed in wisdom at a university laboratories um i'm not sure that's addressed at any one person but i wondered if either of you wanted to comment um you know it's these are this is a common practice when you get to spend a lot of time in museums i mean i about five years ago i was with my colleague uh paul turnbull in the anatomy museum at the university of cologne and paul is of course one of the leading scholars on the restitution of indigenous australian remains and one of the author one of the editors on some of the major texts on restitution and repatriation um and i you know witnessed his realization of what australian remains were in those um were in the collection of that anatomy museum and it's it happens all it happens all the time uh it it is because because um and especially you know society like germany you know they they've had other other stuff to to deal with and so suddenly this stuff is all coming out of the closet and they and you know they they they realize the extent to which all their subsequent 20th century violences might have an an origin somewhere else in another collecting history and that's not you know imposing a kind of um a a conspiratorial framework on this begat that and that begat the other violence um and that that just uh is a certain genealogy that an argument has been made for and uh and so um but you know certainly in in germany especially with an active uh australian government you you have at a restitution program of course in south african collections we also have australian remains uh remains of indigenous people and which obviously means that um that our scientists were sharing collections so you know we we we went through a process of of up to a certain point of doing the provenance and finding collections in kimberley and capetown and you know this was being prepared for restitution at a certain point and then got interrupted because you know governments lose their memory it's a terrible thing when you get a new minister you get a new staff because this this involves it's difficult practical work it's like implementing restitution implementing a restitution program like the new zealanders do where they they hand the entire program over to uh te papa museum on behalf of the state and on behalf of indigenous people because there you have a different history of sovereignty and how we name these things as restitution and repatriation and when we use what term and when we use both and so forth because and and restitution i think means to become our term because it involves a claim and and and and really a lot of our effort needs to go into into building capacities to make claims to work with governments to make claims we have an incoming african union president who has put restitution high up on his agenda which unfortunately uh rama pausa didn't during his during his term and you know what this is going to mean for every country is very important you know saa saa applies mainly that is mainly about francophone west africa and it we need to work out what what it means in different countries and it's uh and it's very important that this be done that this thinking be done because restitution will fail if it is simply a program of european gift making it it it reproduces the problem and and so and yes i mean i was listening to some of this discussion yesterday you know people were worried about the framework of the nation of course you know that that is that is a problem but let me tell you in germany they had other problems at a certain point of the development of their human remains policy that i you know had to comment on at a certain point because the german colleagues thought that it's up to individual german museums to verify the authenticity of claimants and to go through a program of museum but of each local museum going through restitution themselves and you know the south africans are clear this is a state to state competence it's a national government competence but it can't be just that it has to be in association with local communities and you know and and obviously we cannot simply have the monumental museum as in agai is making in benin as we have in dakar as is being created in algeria supported by the african union you can't have the monumental museum as the as the model in the answer to that old european chestnut that africans don't know how to look after objects they don't have the capacity so you know so along with the new concept of museum must come what do we mean by restitution because restitution cannot be understood as events management restitution is not an event rest and you know unfortunately our namibian colleagues the namibian government knows how to do events management so yeah it's not an event we need to we this is going to be with us for another generation this is a new opportunity for us to rethink what we mean by museum wane would you allow me to come in on one other point you know there's one of the questions that were put to us in the q&a is what about the post-covid museum and it does prompt a very big point because if we think that the discussion today is about the past i think we're missing the point because everything that we've got to say here about these information data material holding institutions archives and museums really 19th century data repositories of a certain kind these questions are being blown out of the water by what's happening to data today so it's not just about looking backwards to think about what happened in the past in relation to the data which constitutes what becomes the knowledge of the world it's very much and i think again i shield touched on this it's very much about taking some of our insights about what's happened in the past to understand what's happening to the way in which that data is being organized and preserved now and where it is and how the categories are working we have to learn the lesson that who controls the organization of the data controls what is going to become knowledge and so the politics of this it's almost as though these deep and painful questions are just a learning experience to try and understand the huge power of the threat that faces us and i think that does take us back to our shield's talk where they're saying have to think about the future that we're heading into with every possible critical tool and faculty we have to understand where we're going so thanks to the person who gave that great question thank you very much Carolyn we need we need to draw things to a close there was a just um two points one one i mean absolutely Carolyn i couldn't agree more with you in the last the last point you made but i'd also like to remind us of the point uh very good point that Elsie also made yesterday and the point that she made about museums and restoration and collection was that you know that a lot of it is actually fairly mundane that there's just quite a lot of ordinary donkey work that needs to be done issues of categorization and cataloging and so forth um you know very basic things um was of course the point that she made and i thought that was really very very important to one that got lost i mean it's you know one could make the same point when you speak means that i've spoken a few minutes ago about you know issues of slave restitution and so forth um you know one can make the same point around uh if you're thinking about issues of slavery and restitution and so you know in the South African case that obviously example was the kind of issue of slave compensation payments that were paid to former slave owners um and i can't tell you how many times i've read um in papers i can't remember i've read people saying uh yes you know we absolutely this this would be very good to know if we actually did the work and you know but you know this would be a good thing to do but nobody actually does it it's only very recently only very recently that people have kind of you know cataloged on slave compensation payments indicate colony for example and you said oh of course let the field in in Britain um with regards to trying to catalog slave on the wealth but let me let's let's draw things to a close because we have five minutes between the end of the section and the start of our next section which is the closing remarks by uh by two speakers by Andrea and by David Lee so thank i thank you very much both Siraj and Carolyn for an incredibly stimulating talk and as i'm not saying that myself simply but many many people in the comments have said that so thank you very much for participating and please do stay for our closing remarks to members of the audience and we'll see you in just a minute thank you so much and Janet do we have a will the closing remarks be in the same session or yes um i'd just like to uh welcome um Professor Andrea Cornwall and Professor Rile Bonile Mollittani uh they are going now to give us the closing remark um i also would like uh yes the convener to the conference Wayne Dooli Mahesh Naidu and Kaisten uh perhaps you want to turn your video off as well and take part in in the closing remark at the convenience of the conference and thank you very much to everyone and i now um i pass it on to Andrea to start out with some closing remarks from the source University of London thank you so thank you thank you so much Angelica and thank you everybody um who is involved in organizing this extraordinary event it was so fascinating such a rich program um i think so many important issues that have been addressed but also as i can see and hear so much commonality between our institutions so much there in terms of potential shared projects for the future shared visions of of research of knowledge of the need for disrupting the ways in which things are done in the conventional um academy and the relationship between northern institutions and the institutions of the global south i think the opportunities there to build not only intellectual exchange between our academics and also our students but also shared programs where we are able to teach together uh shared scholarships that we can win together and work together on and other forms of sharing and for i've just been in the fascinating um panel on the archives thinking about our archive um and about something that gave me goosebumps going down into the archive having come back to so as after many decades um i was originally a student there um with a group of students which included a south african student um and students from british backgrounds in the uk and going in the the shelves of the archives and finding in our archives um an archive box that was from the village that the south african woman's grandmother had come from and just thinking about what it would mean to open up that archive and to decolonize our own archive and take our decolonizing understandings into the materials of that archive and what have got preserved but also what was being done with the things that have been preserved and our knowledge connections so the whole question of opening up that space sharing that space doing projects together on decolonizing and the materials in that space um and for our students the powerful experience of being able to engage across between our institutions um asking those kinds of questions um and i think this whole question about complicating our knowledge practices that's been these last couple of days have been all about and thinking about what counts as knowledge and again complicating and disrupting that question of what counts as knowledge building a shared critique of some of the ways in which knowledge about africa and i was very struck by the idea of a separate department of african studies that siraj talks about in germany um rather than having african historians um studying history as its caste and then the extent to which the ways in which we study and speak about africa reproduce these kinds of ways of thinking and doing and how important it's been for us as an institution to look very um self you know to look self reflexively our contribution to that but also what needs to change um building a shared critique of white saviorism and the problematic repercussions of development as they've reached their havoc in the countries that we have been in and including um britain also is a place that has a lot of development challenges which come from the ways in which empire has played out and its repercussions um in and the kind of structural adjustment ideas that have been visited in other countries coming now really to hurt us and divide us also in the uk so what we can learn from commonality around issues of social justice and the movements for social justice in our societies those movements of resistance um and also the opportunities we have for going beyond the english language for all its colonial dominion and actually really starting to think differently about how we engage with languages and with frames of reference with concepts with meanings and that are fundamentally um coming from a very different view of the world and allowing us to see the world in different ways something that happened earlier this week on mother tongue day um mother um was uh a new archiving platform was launched at so as from our endangered languages program which included 500 new collections with languages spoken in many communities including in south africa and nimbibia other countries in southern africa that are endangered and these records of local knowledge systems that are discovered and recorded by the holders of knowledge themselves in their own languages and just how important a part of it all of the decolonizing project that is as well um i think also part of this and it connects with this um you know reversing the plunder of knowledge of subordinate groups and this whole question then of restitution around those knowledge resources which comes out of that and the forms of practice that we have as researchers and the engagement practices as researchers and myself coming from a participatory research tradition of engaging those people around about who are usually studied in the process of studying for themselves and raising critical consciousness in the process i think as desiré louis put very powerfully and taking seriously the need to explicate and unravel these practices and to address the epistemology of the epistemic violence that's visited through them um and the very powerful uh uh contribution from um the session with desiré and uh we know but also in the conversation before about patriarchy and about the effects of patriarchy and the colonial effects of patriarchy in all of our institutions and the idea that we also need to de-patriarchize the academy as well as decolonize it um and we need there are opportunities to work together there's been so many interesting and important steps made in South Africa so much contribution from South Africa on these discussions around the violence of patriarchy and around what can be done to to make that change happen how to really dismantle patriarchal privilege and patriarchal power in all of our spaces including in the academy in all places within the academy both in our classrooms and in the way in which the academy is run and that is as much an urgent priority as the knowledge practices that are in what's being taught um so it's about ending this commonality i hear in the conversations and the contributions over this last couple of days about ending the practices that sustain colonial knowledge systems actively disrupting them and the ways in which we imagine what the academy is about and for and with it then a very different kind of international partnership than some of those that have been pursued um from the global north in the past uh a partnership based on a mutuality based on a co-equal relationship based on a sharing of resources and knowledge resources and critical inquiry and based also on honesty on openness on shared values shared norms and above all uh with that wonderful opening that we had this morning from Francis Namjo um on conviviality and on making conviviality um at the the core of the heart of our practices of coming together and in this um the international partnership that we take forward from this and all of those different strands and dimensions of it um and I think that idea of conviviality and of incompleteness and of the work that we can do in working with incompleteness um is a really great way to incomplete um my contribution at the end and to say again thank you so much to everybody it's been extraordinarily rich and I very much look forward to future engagements of this kind thank you thank you Andrea thank you very much and now um I passed the the the flow to Ralevonele Molitsani please thank you um uh good afternoon everybody I'm here representing the um deputy vice chancellor of our college professor Antlantlam Kizze um but I won't say what he was going to say because I don't know what he was going to say um so for me I listened to um the deliberations in the last two days um with an with an education year because I'm an education scholar and first of all what struck me was how almost all of the presentations um um were asking us to think about um the old question that was asked by Herbert Spencer many centuries ago what knowledge is of most wealth and to to that question who decides what knowledge is of most wealth it seems to me that what we continue to grapple with are those two related um questions a really a second question um that came to mind was um what impacts do the inequalities that have been identified in the various presentations as well as the hegemonies including the hegemony of English that um Dr Connell just spoke about even as we deliberate about the decolonization of knowledge we do so in English um I would have loved to do this in sasuto but I know how far that would have gotten me and so what impacts to these inequalities and hegemonies um um have on on on the on the knowledge that we generate as we decolonize um thirdly um what is our responsibility as scholars in terms of ensuring that the people that we do our research on or about or with actually benefit from the research that we produce so in terms not only of generating knowledge and challenging the existing knowledge canons how do we communicate the knowledge that we generate so that it benefits the communities that we we we're doing our research and generating knowledge um about so going forward for me I think the challenge between our two institutions and the various institutions um participating in these two days is how might our um collective deliberations um in this symposium and be and beyond um particularly in the context of the current um health pandemic and future pandemics um as well as environmental and conflict crisis um and emergencies how do how do we um generate knowledge that will help us not only anticipate um those emergencies but also ensure that the most marginalized people are heard and that their issues um are addressed so for me those were the four questions that emerged uh with those few words I would like to also thank um everybody who participated and to say on behalf of our university and college that we look forward to uh future collaborations as we take these questions forward thank you thank you thank you very much um perhaps um the the convener Wayne Doolin um Maesh Naidu and Kai Ister would like to say a few final words before we we say goodbye uh to everybody unfortunately we can't go for any drinks or any dinner or anything like that it's a shame but we will so perhaps uh just a few words by the my fellow convener uh Wayne Doolin and Kai and Maesh and also I just want to thank everybody for the fantastic symposium uh let me start uh thank you Angelica let me start by saying um thanks of all first of all to you of course for the enormous amount of work that you've put into making this symposium happen it will never kind of pull it off without your enormous effort so that's the first point but the second point I want to make is really to thank uh Maesh for coming to us I you don't know if people everybody present here today was here yesterday but um I did say yesterday that this initiative happened as a consequence of Maesh coming to us so um and and you know speaking to us about putting on uh some collaborative event or at least starting a collaborative relationship um now and into the future so um thank you to Maesh and to colleagues at the University of Cozillum Natal for for making this happen and of course thank you to all of our participants and members of the audience that's really all I have to say um Maesh do you want to say a few words I think Kai was trying to but sorry I was used to being off um today um now I just wanted to echo Wayne and and in a you know I think it's probably wrong to say it was easy it was it was a lot of work for absolutely everybody and especially um Angelica and her team and to do this during a pandemic uh from so far away on new platforms and yet it was organic in ways that are you know really inspiring to think about for future projects and the programming and all of the speakers that we asked to do different things and to to respond to our prompts but in their own way and on their own terms it's just been absolutely fabulous to see so I just want to thank all of our speakers and um both UKZN and SARS for for working so well together on this thank you yeah I just want to say ditto to um to everything that Kai said if you think two of me it's not a clone but I'm having to speak off one screen and and be viewed on another and Kai for a moment there I thought you were going to say orgasmic which is which isn't too far from the truth actually because several of the things that we've heard here has been just purely intellectually orgasmic so many things that I'm sure will resonate with you for days and weeks and months to come so I want to also thank everybody most especially Angelica I think Angelica we'll just condense your name and contract it to Angel there's a little bit of a twist there because you have been phenomenal and I want to also thank Profer Jong for for supporting what we and I went to her with this with this what sounded like a crazy idea I don't want to end by using too much of the words decolonial decolonialism but I want to speak more in terms of relationship and connection and in very human terms because really this has been an exercise in humanness in connecting and when I want to tease you a little when I sat at that table I came back thinking hmm he's a hard nut to crack I thought that you were the least interested of the bunch where everybody else was so enthusiastic and you were grilling me and almost testing me was so who's the expert here who do we connect here and of course that was just you asking the right kind of hard questions I am really really heartened by the fact that this is exactly the kind of relationship the kind of collaboration when Andrea came spoke and echoed what Vivian and I were talking about I was more than thrilled because it's the kind of reciprocity as an anthropologist you know that's an important word to us the kind of reciprocity that we have been pining for in many terms because the MOUs are so they so pass day they are so you know just trapped in words and on text and we were very keen that this was not going to be that kind of memorandum of relationship so I want to say thank you to everybody who's still here and to say that this augurs I think for some incredible things in the future along the lines that we have all collectively kind of envisioned in the context of what a shield started us off on beyond thinking of just the human but human and humanity encompasses the entire planetary kind of consciousness and I think for us to further collapse this illusion of separate and disconnected which we can do via zoom but in other kinds of beyond the intellectual as well the emotional sense which I think we have managed managed across I don't know how many thousand miles so thank you everybody thank you so much for for this opportunity thank you thank you everybody and yeah I think we have to draw a close like this unfortunately seems a little bit you know dry but that's the nature but thank you everybody again and less in touch and more soon for everybody who's come to attend that we will hopefully do more of these kind of events and so thank you everybody and goodbye bye everyone thank you so much you bye bye bye bye


Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in today. As Paul mentioned, my name is Sarah. I'm a field ecologist for NEON working out of domain 7, which covers the Appalachian Mountain and Cumberland Plateau Eco Region. I was really excited to hear about NEON's use in an earlier talk today. So I'm even more excited to talk to you about NEON's activities in the Smokies. So for anybody who's not as familiar with NEON, I'm going to try to very quickly give you a brief overview of what NEON is and why a program like NEON is important. I'll highlight some of NEON's available resources. And then lastly, I'm going to try to get to the meat of it and show you some current trends we're seeing in our plant data and discuss how you, as an external researcher, can build off these trends and then lastly go through some recently published research that are using NEON data in Great Smoky Mountains. So the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is a continental-scale data platform which records observations and collect samples from all major biomes within the continental US, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. So these ecoregions or domains represent distinct vegetation, landforms, and ecosystems that are capturing the full range of ecological diversity and climate variability. NEON provides free and open data on the drivers of and responses to ecological change, a standardized and reliable framework for research and experiments. And the data collection is structured for integration with other national and international network science projects. So NEON is truly continental-scale in that it has 81 sites in total, 47 of those are terrestrial and 37 are terrestrial and 34 are aquatic. And within Great Smoky Mountains, there's a terrestrial site that spans the Tennessee side of the park and just a little bit into North Carolina, as well as an aquatic site that's located at Laconte Creek near the Twin Creek Science Center. So samples are collected from all of the sites and are sent to a biorepository located at Arizona State University for use by the external research community. And of the 181 data products recorded during NEON sampling, 50 of those are organismal and there are 62 different organismal sample types that are archived at the biorepository. And as of February 2021, Arizona State has received over 231,000 NEON samples for archive and nearly 15,000 of those are currently in use. So NEON's breadth of sampling allows researchers to address questions across various spatial and temporal scales. NEON data sampling is designed to scale within a single field site like Great Smokies but also across multiple sites to enable researchers to ask questions at the continental scale. And NEON will be collecting data and samples for a 30-year timeframe. So the long-term operations will allow researchers to answer questions on scales from seconds all the way up to decades. By collecting data and samples from numerous physical, biotic and abiotic processes, NEON employs a consistent and standardized design in an operational infrastructure to address the complexity associated with these various scales. NEON is an ambitious program but is important as it's designed to address the need for eco forecasting as well as the growing global demands on our nation's natural resources. NEON has been designed to provide new information that can be used to challenge and advance current ecological theory and to partner with other organizations to optimize investment in environmental science. And it is the standardization of methods used for data collection which goes to the core of what makes NEON so special as an observatory designed to collect comparable data utilizing consistent methods across a huge diversity of ecosystems. So NEON standardized methods is functionally a combination of three different collection systems. There's the automated instruments that are integrated on our tower and aquatic infrastructure that are collecting a wide range of abiotic measurements. There's also the observational sampling that comes in the form of on-the-ground data collection recording both terrestrial and aquatic biotic data and airborne remote sensing is performed via scheduled flights that collect a suite of LiDAR and imagery data. The diversity of data collection methods allows for comprehensive sampling at each site. The data can be studied in conjunction with each other since they're collected in close proximity at each field site. This also allows researchers to examine linkages across aquatic terrestrial and atmospheric systems. The data are comparable across ecosystems as well as field sites which means researchers can study connections and patterns and develop models to forecast environmental trends locally, regionally and even at the continental scale. So that's really briefly a little bit of background about NEON. And so now you may be thinking, how does NEON work for me? NEON has a plethora of data from nearly all of our sites available right now on our public facing data portal. The data portal is going to be your primary source for exploring and downloading NEON data in any related documentation. You can search the data in a variety of ways. So by keyword, site location, selected dates or even by data theme, it's open access. So no login is required and the portal additionally has information related to siting and publishing with NEON data. All of the data are posted after processing and quality checks are performed and availability is dependent on the type of data product and when the site was constructed. For example, some of the tower sensors stream data every 30 seconds whereas other data products are loaded once per month or even once per year. For Great Smoky Mountains, our data spans back to 2015 when we first started sampling at the site. So NEON collects a lot of data obviously and that can come to you in complex data sets. So knowing how to get started and how to interpret the data is really important. So in addition to the actual data, NEON provides a wide range of data tutorials and workshops aimed at refining coding skills and specifically directed at how to work with NEON data sets. The tutorials cover a variety of software platforms including R, Python and Git. The self-paced data tutorials can be done independently online or easily adapted into guided activities. So the structure of NEON data support learning and practicing reproducible research methods so much so that a lot of faculty adapt them to being used in the classroom as lab or homework assignments which can also be seen in NEON's teaching modules that were developed by outside faculty who want to bring NEON into the classrooms. And these modules include all the necessary materials, their concept focus but also include important skill sets for students like statistical analysis and data visualization. A really cool one that was developed recently focuses on the impact of wildfire on bird communities using NEON data from the Smokies. NEON's coding resources include a variety of packages that have been built specifically to be used with our data sets to make it easier to work with and perform some common algorithms. Much of the available code is community contributed by external researchers using NEON. Code gets shared to GitHub so other researchers can use those resources instead of building their own from scratch. And all of that code and the packages are open access as well and available to download on GitHub. One package in particular that is incredibly useful if you needed to pick one is the NEON utilities package. It downloads NEON data directly from the API and merges it into fewer data sets to make it easier to use. So there's no downloading several Excel sheets and merging them by hand. And while NEON collects a lot of data we also provide a variety of other resources for the science community. And some of those include the thousands of samples we collect which are comprised of the biorepository samples as well as some that could be collected in excess each year. The mobile deployment platforms or mini towers carry a sensor suite that mirrors instrumentation currently present on the NEON towers. And these can be used at non-NEON sites for up to a year to support external research and also used in combination with existing NEON towers to further strengthen the size and comparability of your data sets. The airborne observation platform resources include a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer, discreet and waveform lidar and a high resolution digital camera. Researchers can request to fly over non-NEON sites during times when NEON does not collect AOP data which allows you to take advantage of the existing equipment sending you time and some material costs. Investigators may also request to add sensors to existing NEON field site infrastructure to collect their own data and can request access to NEON sampling locations as well as additional data or sample collection by NEON's professional field ecologists such as myself to support PI-Lib projects at NEON sites. So many of these options in our assignable assets program provides you with the opportunity to leverage existing systems that will save you time and resources as well as allow you to better align NEON's data with more specific measurements needed to answer your research questions. So with all of this, NEON has generated a lot of documentation to support our standardized methods. For observational sampling alone, there are over 30 sampling protocols that encompass the diversity of taxa and biogeochemical measurements. NEON sampling protocols are the result of extensive research and collaboration with experts in the community, especially through our technical working groups. We have adopted standardized methods whenever possible and completed field testing on a selection of NEON sites. At this point, most of our protocols have been implemented at multiple sites across the country for up to five years with revisions occurring annually to date to improve and clarify the protocol. So using NEON's current set of protocols means that you don't have to create and test your own methods. Since ours have already been built and tested, they're ready to use without additional work on your end. And using NEON protocols further allows you to combine your data set with NEON's for greater comparability. So that is just a little bit about NEON and all it has available to you. Now I wanna focus on one of our data products, plant diversity, and look at some interesting trends we're currently seeing in our data sets. So NEON measures plant diversity on 20 by 20 meter plots distributed outside of and within the tower area. For each plot, there are a number of subplots for which plant species are measured. And very generally, we start with the smallest one meter squared subplots and record all the plant species within that subplot area, cover it in height measurements for each species, and then get cover estimates for other biotic and abiotic variables within that subplot. So things like lichen, rocks, or woody debris. From there, we span out and check the 10 meter squared subplots and then the 100 square meter subplots to record any species that were not previously listed. And these are just presence and absence observations only. So from that data, we plotted plant species across elevations to get this graph. So this graph shows a number of unique species per plot as a measurement of species richness versus elevation for five field seasons and 165 observations in 36 plots. So those field seasons span from 2015 to 2019. The background grade dots are each an individual plot. So those are the actual data. And the trend lines are predictions from a generalized mixed model with a negative binomial distribution. The model predicts that both elevation and year have an impact on species richness, but they do not interact. It shows that species richness per plot goes down as elevation increases. Both of those fixed effects have a significant p-value and the r-square value for the fixed effects of year and elevation is 0.552. So it's no surprise that species richness is higher at lower elevations. That's pretty well documented in the literature. But a couple of interesting things that we pulled from this figure is that at lower elevations, each plot has a different species richness and that there are differences between years which suggests that there's a variety of factors that are influencing the data. Which leads us to ask questions like how does rainfall and drought factor in? Or what about the wildfire in 2016? There were also recorded high wind events in early 2017 and the images below demonstrate the effects of those high winds. So the leftmost figure is data being streamed from our tower phenology camera. And the time period I wanna focus on is this one in early May. Our camera stopped streaming at that point due to high winds. And the photo on the left is before the high winds and the photo on the right was recorded two days later after the high wind events. So as you can see, hopefully, we started with a full green lush canopy and we're left with one that was more reminiscent of early spring with much fewer leaves. So with this, you could explore if a change of canopy structure allowed more species to be able to establish themselves in the understory and maybe that's why you're seeing some increases in species richness. So these additional questions can be researched by looking at some of Neon's other data products like wind speeds, rainfall, looking at lidar imagery or leaf area index. And this is where you as an external researcher can come in and use Neon as a platform to further build research. And this was observed with just five years worth of data. So imagine what this looks like in another five years or even in another 10 years. So to wrap up the conversation today, I'd like to highlight a couple of projects that have used Neon samples or data from Great Smoky Mountains that demonstrate how researchers are currently integrating Neon into their programs. So the first study was performed in collaboration with Neon scientists to look at changes in soil pyrogenic carbon around the wildfire event in 2016. So anybody who studies wildfire knows that it's challenging due to the rapid post-fire changes in the ecosystem and lack of robust controls. So the researchers overcame some of these limitations by leveraging Neon plots and samples already located at the park. So they used soil samples collected from Neon's distributed soil plots and within the tower soil arrays. They examined pyrogenic carbon and soils from three time at three time points from areas of just low burn severity. And then at two time points from areas burned at a range of lower to higher severity. So they found several interesting results. A couple of revolved around burning even at low severity, increased pyrogenic carbon in their organic layers and moved into some of the mineral layers. And this was further significantly increased with increasing burn severity. And one other really neat finding is that the pyrogenic carbon concentration at Great Smoky Mountains samples are similar to those published values from study areas that have historically experienced frequent fire and are currently including prescribed burns as part of their management plan, which is consistent with the hypothesis that Southern Appalachian region historically had frequent fire events and indicates that even low severity fire may be an important mechanism by which pyrogenic carbon is produced and transported into mineral soils. So really this study is a great example of how scientists can leverage Neon's current infrastructure to opportunistically ask some really interesting questions around natural disaster events. And similar opportunities have been taken with other wildfire events in our Western domains and even with other natural disaster events like hurricanes and earthquakes. So the last study I wanna discuss is also a great example of how you can answer complex ecological questions solely using Neon data that is available on Neon's data portal. This study came from a group out of the University of Tennessee in Oxville. They looked at five of Neon's sites, including Great Smoky Mountains and built a new LiDAR structural metrics based on the leaf area density at each vegetation height layer and used metrics to study how different aspects of four structural heterogeneity explain variation in bird species richness. Their goals were to test whether leaf area density based metrics are better at explaining bird species richness compared to metrics based on the top of the canopy alone. And if the different aspects of structural heterogeneity had diverse effects on bird richness. And what they found is that bird species richness increased with horizontal heterogeneity while vertical heterogeneity had negative effects which is contrary to the previous research. So in brief, their findings highlight the need for structure animal diversity studies to incorporate metrics that are able to capture different aspects of forest 3D heterogeneity. And these are just two really great examples of how researchers are currently using available Neon data and samples. There are many more examples of research done at various Neon sites that can be found on Neon's website where they have lists of publications that are either mentioned Neon or are using Neon data specifically. You can also find them through the Zotero library platform where you can search for papers using Neon and further filter by site if you like. So with that, I'll just say thanks to NSF for funding such a great ecological opportunity to Great Smoky Mountains for being awesome site host to houses for the next several years. To Marie Faust, our outreach coordinator for helping me collate all this information to share today. And of course, I can't not mention our domain field staff. There's no way I could fit everyone into one of these slides. So I picked a few photos to represent our great crew. Without them, we wouldn't have an awesome data shed to share with you today. And then here's a quick list of contacts and places to find more information. We recently just launched a getting started with Neon and data and resources webpage which is a perfect place for you to start if you have a lot more questions. But there's also some contacts there. So feel free to take a screenshot or if you wanna scan the QR code, it'll take you to the Neon event page for the colloquium which also houses this information. So thanks again. Thank you very much. We have time for one question. If anyone has a question, please either raise your hand or put it in the Q&A box. Question, is Neon any closer to display real-time data on their website? Great question. Yes, so they're working on building quicker and quicker responses to being able to upload the data. They recently just did a big upload of some of our board recently and a few years past data. So I think it's still kind of a work in progress to get all of that up to speed more quickly but we're definitely getting closer and closer to that reality. So yeah, I think it's not quite a perfect system yet. We're still building that out but we're getting closer to real-time data and I can get some more specifics for you, Jim and let you know how close we are to that. Especially for our tower sensors. I think we're aiming to get that as close as possible to real-time.