Pictured: The CoDHerS team and community members, led by Dr. Aynur Kadir (third from right), following a recent workshop on using a 360° camera in field work. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI.
Languages are at risk, traditions fade, and cultural knowledge becomes endangered, sometimes faster than we realize. At the Faculty of Arts, the Collaborative Digital Heritage Studio (CoDHerS) is helping Indigenous and minoritized communities around the world resist these changes in an ethical, digital, and collaborative way.
One evening at home, a question from Dr. Aynur Kadir’s young son sparked an idea. He was playing a typing game but quickly grew frustrated. “Why were they all in English?” he asked, wondering why none were in Uyghur, his mother tongue.
For Kadir, an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, the question revealed a wider gap. Children learning widely spoken languages have plenty of digital tools to support their development, but those growing up with underrepresented languages often don’t, making it harder for their languages to be learned, used, and passed along.
At UBC’s Faculty of Arts, the Collaborative Digital Heritage Studio (CoDHerS), founded by Kadir, works with communities to address that gap by documenting and strengthening endangered languages and cultural knowledge through interactive media, digital archives, and multimedia tools.
Amid pressures of linguistic and cultural homogenization, CoDHerS stands out for its community-first approach, helping communities harness new technologies to protect and share their heritage.
Pictured: Dr. Aynur Kadir, filmmaker and founder of the Collaborative Digital Heritage Studio, stands in front of the CoDHerS gallery space at the Asian Centre. Storytelling is at the heart of her work, using technology to document stories, traditions, and everyday moments within communities. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI.
A studio built for community-centred work
“I was inspired by labs where anthropologists, artists, scientists, and designers collaborated on projects together,” Kadir explains. “I saw the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, but realized that to make this work meaningful, community members needed to be at the driver’s seat of that collaboration too. Anthropology, in particular, has a long history of extractive research methodologies tied to colonialism, taking traditional knowledge to advance academic careers without directly working with community needs. Our goal is to change that.”
The studio grew from a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant Kadir initially secured at the University of Waterloo. After bringing the project to UBC with the local support of Dr. Colleen Laird and the Department of Asian Studies, CoDHerS established itself as a multimedia hub with editing rooms and a gallery space for prototyping projects with Elders and cultural gatekeepers.
“We now have a full suite of audio recording and podcasting tools, DSLR cameras, mobile filmmaking setups, 3D scanners, and 360-degree video cameras and editing workstations. We can bring these tools to communities, locally or internationally, and work with them directly,” Kadir explains.
These technological resources allow for small, community-driven ideas to grow into meaningful cultural projects. Kadir points to the conversation with her son as a powerful example of the studio’s mission in practice. “That moment highlighted how small ideas can grow into such meaningful projects. Our student research assistants developed the Indigenous Languages Typing Game Initiative that now supports keyboard lessons in both Uyghur and Māori, turning a child’s curiosity into a resource that supports cultural learning.”
That same spirit carries into other projects, including Languages Carry Worlds: Language Preservation, a student-led initiative shaped by UBC Arts faculty collaborators reflecting on their relationships to language, memory, and identity.
Supporting secure, community-led digital preservation
CoDHerS has also invested in secure physical servers and software at UBC to allow communities worldwide to safely experiment with AI and preserve language and cultural data without risking their privacy. The platform currently supports underrepresented languages like Uyghur, Kazakh, and Tajik, enabling these communities to digitize manuscripts and oral histories, upload them securely, and collaborate with researchers and diaspora knowledge holders. The studio also provides tools to digitize obsolete or analogue audio and video, ensuring materials can be preserved and shared safely, while community members retain control over their contributions and anonymity, should they choose.
Anthropologist Dr. Mark Turin, associate researcher with CoDHerS, emphasizes the value of this more collaborative approach: “I often describe cultural and linguistic documentation and revitalization work with three verbs: collect, protect, and connect. CoDHerS supports all three. Collection needs to be rigorous and ethical, protection ensures communities retain access and that materials are forward migrated, and connection brings knowledge back into everyday practice, whether in print, online, or on air. That combination is rare, and it’s why this studio is so important.”
Pictured: Dr. Mark Turin is a socio-cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor at the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI
From local projects to global impact
For both Kadir and Turin, technology is both a challenge and an opportunity. Despite pressures like modernization and language dominance, marginalized communities now have better access to tools to document, analyze, preserve, and revitalize their own heritage digitally, something unimaginable just a few decades ago.
Drawing on his decades of field experience, Turin notes that “languages are not just being lost, they’re being pushed toward obsolescence by nation states who don’t respect diversity let alone invest in it. And at the same time, communities are harnessing new digital technologies to do remarkably innovative things.”
He recalls his early research with the Thangmi of eastern Nepal, a remote Indigenous community who was once a day’s walk from the nearest road, where he carried batteries for his headlamp and candles to read by. He adds, “now there’s road access, hydro power, and 5G connectivity. Community members regularly send me voice notes on Whatsapp and together, we are building a digital and print dictionary of their language.”
The studio’s impact is also clear in projects like Relational Lexicography, which supports the creation of dictionaries that combine audio, images, and contextual information. Turin shares, “communities often want bilingual dictionaries that include cultural context such as who is speaking, where a word comes from, and its ritual use. With the help of CoDHerS, I’m working on dictionary projects with Indigenous communities in Canada and Asia. The lab’s resources and collaborative environment make this possible at scale. Alone, I could never achieve this level of impact.”
A student immerses themselves in a dynamic virtual environment, exploring new worlds through a VR headset. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI
Faculty members, including Dr. Phurwa Dondrub Dolpopa (UBC Geography) and CoDHerS Research Associate Dr. Christina Laffin, attend a recent workshop at the gallery. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI.
Participants at a recent workshop learn how to use the 360* camera for collaborative, immersive filming with communities. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI
Dr. Aynur Kadir (centre) pictured with members of her research team. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI
Dr. Aynur Kadir (centre) pictured with members of her research team. Image by Clare Kiernan, VPRI
Shifting power in research and storytelling
Kadir adds that the studio’s community-directed approach shifts power dynamics, noting that “traditional preservation approaches often adopt a saviour mentality, documenting communities from the outside. We challenge this dynamic by working alongside communities as equal partners to document and preserve what matters to them, in the ways they choose.” As such, CoDHerS runs workshops to train youth in using phones and accessible technology so they can work with Elders, faculty, and students to document stories, giving communities full agency over their knowledge and materials. Participants can make decisions, co-author, review, and maintain control from the start, creating genuine partnerships.
At the heart of CoDHerS is a commitment to honour the cultural protocols of the communities they work with. Turin emphasizes the principle of “nothing about us without us.” He adds, “the communities with whom we have the privilege of working are partners, not subjects, and they guide research agendas and co-develop areas of inquiry. This requires slowing down long enough to acknowledge other forms of knowledge. This can feel destabilizing to some who are used to academic settings where we still so often see ourselves as authorities and experts, but it’s essential for meaningful, respectful work.”
Kadir’s advice to researchers and students echoes this principle: “Instead of approaching community partners with a fixed idea, start a conversation with them. Share examples, see what resonates, and co-develop projects together. Preservation and revitalization are a collective effort. Know that you are not alone.”
From video games for children to online dictionaries, CoDHerS is reimagining what cultural documentation and linguistic revitalization can look like today.
Turin sums up the mission: “Digital tools are all around us, and better access changes relationships. Communities are now using technologies that until recently only privileged researchers had access to, which means expertise is no longer about hardware. CoDHerS functions as an equalizer, a space where communities and scholars come together to collaborate, imagine, and shape new futures.”
