Ortolja-Baird, A;
Nyhan, J;
(2021)
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.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
, Article fqab065. 10.1093/llc/fqab065.
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Abstract
The subjectivities that shape data collection and management have received extensive criticism, especially with regards to the digitisation projects and digital archives of GLAM institutions. The role of digital methods for recovering data absences is increasingly receiving attention too. Conceptualising the absence of non-hegemonic individuals from the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane as an instance of textual haunting, this paper 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 paper 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 paper 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 UCL, entitled ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his collections’.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | 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 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/llc/fqab065 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab065 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1093/llc/fqab065 |
| Keywords: | digital humanities, text encoding, archive, Sir Hans Sloane, history of collections, bias, absence, digital history |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10130676 |
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