Mira CSR Project Archive

The heart of the Digital Futures Project is Mira Canning Stock Route Project Archive. Developed by FORM’s Canning Stock Route Project with the Centre for Digital Archaeology at UC Berkeley (CoDA), Mira is a groundbreaking tool for preserving and sharing the Project’s invaluable intangible cultural heritage with both participating communities and where culturally appropriate, the general public.

Canning Stock Route Project filmmaker and Martu cultural advisor Curtis Taylor coined the name Mira, which means ‘to reveal what was hidden’ or ‘to bring something hidden into the light’ in Martu Wangka. Mira will both reveal and protect this immensely valuable content for participating Aboriginal art centres, giving communities access to and use of their own cultural heritage materials for the benefit of future generations.

Mira contains a vast trove of materials including over 40,000 unique items, amongst these more than 250 oral histories, including audio and filmed interviews and translated and transcribed documents, approximately 7,000 clips of raw film footage, around 150 short films, over 20,000 photographs, historical records, curated materials and other research. More than a mere archive, Mira is a groundbreaking digital storytelling platform, which allows users to engage with the people, stories, events and artworks that have defined the Project, in which rich associations are created between a diverse range of content that encourage continuing exploration and discovery and create a comprehensive insight into the Project’s development and its legacy.

Another key feature of Mira is its potential to deliver ongoing financial benefits to communities. In the same way that profits from sales of the One Road app are returned to participating art centres, requests for the use of content in the Mira archive for commercial purposes are granted subject to cultural approval by art centres with licence fees being evenly divided between them.