X Close

UCLDH Blog

Home

Menu

New article ‘Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue’

By Lucy Stagg, on 25 November 2021

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird and Julianne Nyhan have co-authored a new article on ‘Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue: on the potential of digital technologies to perpetuate or subvert the silence and bias of the early-modern archive

The article, published in the the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities on 19 October 2021, is available by open access.

Hans Sloane's nautilus shell carved by Johannes Belkien in the late 1600s. C021.7733 ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

Hans Sloane’s nautilus shell carved by Johannes Belkien in the late 1600s. C021.7733 ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

The abstract summarises the article as follows:

The subjectivities that shape data collection and management have received extensive criticism, especially with regards to the digitization projects and digital archives of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions). The role of digital methods for recovering data absences is increasingly receiving attention too. Conceptualizing the absence of non-hegemonic individuals from the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane as an instance of textual haunting, this article will ask: to what extent do data-driven approaches further entrench archival absences and silences? Can digital approaches be used to highlight or recover absent data? This article will give a decisive overview of relevant literature and projects so as to examine how digital tools are being realigned to recover, or more modestly acknowledge, the vast, undocumented network of individuals who have been omitted from canonical histories. Drawing on the example of Sloane, this article will reiterate the importance of a more rigorous ethics of digital practice, and propose recommendations for the management and representation of historical data, so cultural heritage institutions and digital humanists may better inform users of the absences and subjectivities that shape digital datasets and archives. This article is built on a comprehensive survey of digital humanities’ current algorithmic approaches to absence and bias. It also presents reflections on how we, the authors, grappled with unforeseen questions of absence and bias during a Leverhulme-funded collaboration between the British Museum and University College London (UCL), entitled ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his collections’.

The full article can be read and downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab065

Comments are closed.