An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Jennifer Guiliano (Digital Scholarship Visiting Research Fellow 2022; IUPUI in Indianapolis)
Decolonizing Knowledge Production through Linked Open Data
A hallmark of the North American colonial process was the production and dissemination of knowledge about Indigenous peoples through the journals and records of colonizers. The violent, and virulent, practices that led to widespread disease, genocide, trauma, and displacement in the Americas were bolstered by data collection and distribution that relied upon physical death and cultural destruction of Indigenous peoples. Equally as damaging were 20th century preservation efforts by non-Indigenous peoples that form the core of most cultural heritage collections. Analog archival collections about Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous peoples were constructed through “salvage” ethnography which sought to document “disappearing” peoples. Collectors, anthropologists, and historians embarked on decades-long collecting efforts that led to the extraction (forcibly and otherwise) of cultural objects, knowledge, and even physical bodies from Native communities. They created the data culture that most historians operate within as they work with indigenous materials. Historians are struggling to connect data and decolonize data practices so that they align with indigenous communities and their ways of knowing. This becomes further complicated by the fact that an overwhelming amount of historical data is held by colonial repositories and not Native communities who have different epistemological and cultural priorities. This work in progress looks at two different examples of digitized Indigenous heritage and how the process of digitization, metadata, and display tie into Western knowledge systems and heritage data.
Please note that this talk will be online-only. Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2