Preserving cultural knowledge often requires more than documenting it. It also requires thoughtful approaches to organizing, managing, and making sense of the data that captures that knowledge.
A recent interdisciplinary project involving University of Oklahoma researchers and the Indigenous Achuar community of Sharamentsa in the Ecuadorian Amazon demonstrates how data expertise can support cultural preservation.
From 2024 to 2026, the project, “Safeguarding the Lifecycle of the ‘Jea’: Construction, Utilization, and Cosmology of an Indigenous Achuar House in the Central Western Amazon,” documented the Jea, a traditional Achuar house whose construction and use reflect generations of architectural, ecological, social, and cosmological knowledge.
The project was led by Dr. Felipe Flores of the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, in collaboration with Dr. Angela Person and Teresa Chiriapa, an Achuar community leader. Supported by a Small Documentation Grant from the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, the research was conducted in partnership with the Sharamentsa community.
From a Traditional House to a Digital Archive
The project documented the construction of a Jea built for a teacher serving Sharamentsa’s new Achuar centered secondary school. Community members, including elders, builders, families, young apprentices, children, teachers, and local filming assistants, participated throughout the process.
Researchers documented not only how the house was built, but also the cultural knowledge surrounding it. This included gathering materials from the forest, traditional construction techniques, collective labor, rituals, storytelling, ecological knowledge, and everyday activities.
Over two years, the project generated an extensive digital collection containing 1,169 assets across 42 interconnected processes. The archive includes photographs, aerial imagery, video and audio recordings, interviews, fieldnotes, architectural and handmade drawings, metadata, and photogrammetric models.
With such a diverse and extensive collection, organizing the data became an important part of preserving and sharing the research.
DISC Brings Data Expertise to Cultural Preservation
This is where the Data Institute for Societal Challenges, or DISC, at the University of Oklahoma played an important role.
DISC Research Scientist Sai Maryada collaborated with the research team to help systematically organize the project's digital assets. This included renaming files and quantifying the collection by file format in preparation for the project's final submission to the British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledge Programme.
The collaboration highlights a broader role for data science. Data expertise can help researchers organize complex information so that valuable knowledge can be preserved, accessed, and used for future research.
By bringing DISC's data expertise into the project, the research team was able to move from a large collection of individual photographs, recordings, drawings, models, and other materials toward a more structured and manageable digital archive.
This interdisciplinary collaboration demonstrates how data science can contribute to societal challenges in unexpected ways. In this case, data expertise helped support the preservation of endangered cultural knowledge and the organization of research materials for future use.
Preserving Knowledge With the Community
The project was grounded in partnership with the Achuar community of Sharamentsa. The Jea was constructed as a functioning home for a community teacher, while the documentation process created opportunities for knowledge exchange between generations.
Copies of the documentation were returned to the community, supporting future education and research, and reinforcing the community's role in determining how its knowledge is preserved and shared.
The project therefore produced more than a digital archive. It created a lasting record of cultural knowledge while contributing directly to the community and supporting future generations.
An Example of DISC's Interdisciplinary Impact
The collaboration between the Gibbs College of Architecture and DISC illustrates the value of bringing data expertise into research across disciplines.
For DISC, the project represents how data science can support real world societal challenges, including the preservation of endangered cultural knowledge. By helping researchers structure and manage a complex digital archive, DISC contributed an important component to the project's broader effort to document, preserve, and share Achuar knowledge.
As interdisciplinary research continues to grow at the University of Oklahoma, collaborations like this demonstrate how data expertise can strengthen research across fields and help turn complex information into resources that have lasting value.
Learn more about the project: Safeguarding the Lifecycle of the “Jea”
