This paper presents the conceptual foundations and early design of the Rahile Dawut Uyghur Culture Archive, a three-year, community-led digital heritage initiative that seeks to locate, preserve, describe, and ethically steward a dispersed corpus of Uyghur-language ethnographic materials.
Many of these materials were collected by, or under the direction of, Professor Rahile Dawut, a leading Uyghur ethnographer now serving a life sentence in China. The archive emerges in a context in which Uyghur cultural expression, language, and memory practices are under severe pressure, and in which informal and privately held collections have become both especially vulnerable and especially important.
The project is based at the University of British Columbia and is anchored in the Collaborative Digital Heritage Studio, the Department of Asian Studies and the University Library’s Digital Initiatives. It brings together fragile audio and audiovisual recordings, photographs, fieldnotes, manuscripts, and related materials that are currently scattered across personal hard drives, cassettes, laptops, and paper files in multiple countries. Working with Uyghur Elders, cultural practitioners, and scholars in the diaspora, especially in Istanbul, the project is co-designing a secure, multilingual, multi-script repository in Uyghur, English, and Chinese, with support for Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, Chagatai, and Old Uyghur scripts.
In relation to the JADH 2026 theme, this paper asks what it means to build digital sustainability under conditions of displacement, surveillance, and cultural erasure. Rather than understanding sustainability only as the long-term storage of endangered materials, the project treats it as a question of care, governance, usability, and situated meaning. The archive is being designed not simply to preserve files, but to sustain the worlds in which those files remain interpretable, searchable, and socially meaningful. In this sense, the project engages with the conference’s concern with digital Umwelts by examining how data become meaningful only within specific linguistic, cultural, technical, and ethical environments.
The paper focuses on three linked issues. First, it examines community governance. Because the archive concerns culturally sensitive materials from a community living under ongoing political threat, decisions about stewardship cannot be reduced to institutional best practice alone. Governance structures are therefore being shaped through workshop-based consultation with Uyghur participants, with particular attention to local authority, intergenerational responsibility, and culturally appropriate protocols for description and access.
Second, the paper addresses the politics of metadata. Controlled vocabularies, classification systems, transliteration practices, and search structures are never neutral. In a multilingual and multi-script archive, metadata design determines not only discoverability but also which categories of knowledge become legible, and to whom. The project therefore asks how metadata can better reflect Uyghur epistemologies and naming practices rather than simply reproducing external cataloguing norms.
Third, the paper considers access and sustainability in conditions where visibility may be both empowering and risky. Some materials are intended for broad educational and cultural use, while others require restricted or graduated access. Sustainability here depends not on openness alone, but on the careful balancing of circulation, protection, and future community control.
Empirically, the archive offers a concrete case of a community-based digital humanities project operating across multiple sites, infrastructures, and political constraints. Methodologically, it contributes to discussions about endangered-language data, local knowledge infrastructures, and the design of archives and collections as living worlds rather than static repositories. The project also raises practical DH questions concerning multilingual search and retrieval, script complexity, authority control, and the relationship between archival description and cultural revitalization. These are not merely technical problems, but questions about whose data are preserved, whose interpretive frameworks shape access, and what kinds of digital futures archives are designed to support.
Still in its first year, the Rahile Dawut Uyghur Culture Archive is best understood as both a preservation initiative and a collaborative inquiry into the ethical, technical, and conceptual limits of archiving at a distance from the homeland it documents. Having the good fortune to present this work at JADH 2026, the paper seeks to contribute an empirical and transferable model for digital heritage projects working under conditions of forced migration, authoritarian repression, and cultural loss, while also inviting discussion about sustainability, reuse, governance, and care in digital humanities practice.