The digital infrastructure is presented as a neutral and technical solution to knowledge management. Owango asserts, “we are literally leveraging on existing technology to produce our digital object container,” framing this as a pragmatic inevitability. However, the proposed system explicitly makes indigenous knowledge legible through its incorporation into existing global classification schemes—“Visualize the digital object container… and you have your indigenous knowledge… If there’s any publication… there’s an ID assigned to it.”
This process of assigning persistent identifiers does more than organize information; it renders indigenous knowledge visible only through the dominant epistemological frameworks of global scholarly infrastructures. Such legibility, as scholars like James Scott (1998) have argued, is a prerequisite for control, management, and ultimately commodification. Similarly, Bowker and Star’s (1999) cannonical work has demonstrated how classification systems are not neutral but actively shape what becomes knowable and valuable. This infrastructural arrangement risks further standardizing and disciplining diverse knowledge systems under global capitalist logics, contributing to what could be termed a digital enclosure of the knowledge commons.
