La’akea Ai

Biography

La’akea is a Digital Humanities Specialist at the Bishop Museum, responsible for supporting the migration of multiple humanities collections databases, multimedia, and content into a centralised collections management system (EMu). She collaborates with collections staff across the museum to develop and implement data standards, digitisation processes, and photography. Her department has the important task of creating an interconnected, consolidated online collection and knowledge platform that will provide access to scholars, educators, and the local community.

La’akea’s position requires collaboration with numerous museum departments. She supports these teams by assisting with collections inventories, identifying data errors through analysis, completing data clean-up, creating cataloguing protocols for data entry, documenting community oral histories, and developing training materials for staff. Her current work interests include indigenising the Bishop Museum database by incorporating Indigenous data sovereignty and Indigenous data governance.

Through her work at the Bishop Museum, La’akea is interested in how community input can inform how digital online collections are presented—and equally, how they are not presented. She is also interested in incorporating the Hawaiian language and a Hawaiian worldview into collections records. La’akea hopes to rebuild and encourage sustainable connections with the Native Hawaiian community by involving them in current and future projects. She believes that inviting communities to take part in the museum’s digitisation efforts will help build a positive and engaging identity, creating an environment where Native Hawaiians can interact with their material culture and, in doing so, strengthen cultural identity.

At the British Museum
During her time at the British Museum, La’akea was based in the Oceania section of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas and her UK partner placement was spent at Norfolk Museums Service.

La’akea’s participation in the International Training Programme was generously supported by the Edith Murphy Foundation.