Building an African Digital Archive: Product Architecture as Epistemic Governance and Community Memory

The argument

Every digital archive has to decide what belongs in it, how material should be described, how different accounts can sit alongside each other, and who gets to make those decisions. These are epistemic questions, because they concern what is recognised as knowledge, how it is organised, and whose judgment carries authority.

This paper follows those questions into the technical layer. Product architecture is used here for the underlying structure of a digital product, meaning its data model, the relationships it can hold, the workflows it runs and the permissions it enforces. Where an archive commits to something epistemically, the product has to be capable of representing it.

How do you encode another telling?

Anansi, or Ananse, is a trickster figure strongly associated with Akan folklore in Ghana, and Anansi stories travelled into the Caribbean and developed new forms there. Oriire already had a generic Related feature, but that relationship was inadequate for multiple tellings of the same figure.

So the platform introduced an explicit Other Tellings relationship. The records remain distinct, and the system can present them as different tellings connected to the same figure. The epistemic commitment here is plurality, and the architectural response is a relationship model that can hold separate accounts together without merging them into one record.

That relationship still has to be governed, because someone has to decide when two records should be treated as other tellings of the same figure. The architecture gives the platform a way to represent plurality while leaving the question of authority with the people who establish the relationship.

Digital Benin and Talking Objects show how questions about description and plurality can create requirements for technical design. FHYA shows the pressure running the other way, where the capabilities of AtoM became a constraint on the archival work the project was trying to do.

Authority

Epistemic authority at Oriire is distributed but asymmetric. Contributors participate in producing knowledge, editors hold consequential editorial authority, and I retain structural authority as founder because I can revise the taxonomy, the workflows and the permissions. The architecture does not create that distribution by itself, but permissions and workflows can make parts of it operational and repeatable.

I founded Oriire and still run it, which gives me unusually close access to how these decisions were made. It also means my interpretation is shaped by my role in making them.

What product architecture adds

Product architecture is one place where epistemic governance acquires technical form, and those technical structures can then condition how governance is exercised. That is why it is useful as a sensitising concept. It directs attention to a layer that can disappear when we look only at policy, metadata or the finished interface.