June - July 2022
Biography
Dr Jennifer Guiliano is a white academic living and working on the lands of the Myaamia/Miami, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Wea, and Shawnee peoples. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in both Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana. She received a Bachelors of Arts in English and History from Miami University (2000), a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her PhD in History at the University of Illinois (2010).
Project Title: Decolonizing Knowledge Production through Linked Open Data
With the Decolonizing Knowledge Production through Linked Open Data project, Dr Guiliano will spend two months exploring knowledge production as it relates to the Scottish context of Indigenous data to build upon work completed in the United States of America and Canada as Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph. In that residency, I am exploring methodological knowledge about Linked Open Data (LOD) methods through immersion in the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project completing a comparative case study on indigenous data collections. 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. Thus, the project speaks directly to the thematic of “decoloniality” and the larger Institute Project on Decoloniality that is taking place at IASH. . There are general ethical and epistemological issues that researchers need to be attentive to when exposing historical materials (esp. photographs, documents, and artifacts) authored by and about indigenous peoples. First and foremost, there is the issue of identity politics: who has the right to speak for/about whom and what role should non-members play in articulating a community’s history, authority, or beliefs? Significantly, in colonial-centric collections, only legal access is required and/or commonly completed. Every community, every tribe, and even a single family might differ in their sense of what is appropriate for research or reuse and dissemination. When national borders divide those families, the question of research ethics becomes more complex. Can linked open data account for any of these issues or does it rely on colonial systems of knowledge production that cannot be teased apart from issues of rights and access?