Birmingham

ethics

Themes to emerge and reflect on:

ownership -- how can we build models of co-ownership of co-created digital scholarship?
language -- what about best practice in labeling and language? using Indigenous names and labels before English terms?
architecture -- what can be done to address the cataloguing and organisation of the information?

hacking

In the practical session, we looked at how to create object biographies through mapping software. Where things were produced and where they are displayed and how to uncover those journeys? What are the journeys to be uncovered in paintings and illustrations? The insects that travelled on-board a slave ship to be collected by William Hunter. Which African etymologists and experts found those specimens to be included in the Hunter collection, knowledge about the natural world which became embedded into the structure of the university, through medical and scientific research. The unexpected ways that deathways and lifeways are entangled in research and the production of knowledge. How can museums reflect those connections?

An example story-map: Harriet Tubman memorials

This exercise led into a discussion of mapping and what other kinds of mapping would be useful to bring together digital scholarship into the museum space, and vice versa.

mapping

A map of emotions: is there a way to capture and feedback and reflect on the emotions people feel when they encounter digital scholarship? engaging with collections? The Information Wanted advertisements are memorials, as much as requests for information -- they are a testament to the enduring power of family relationships.

A map of family: how and where were people separated and reunified? How knowledge is nurtured and passed through family, across time and space? How can we map the movement of time/generations? Timelines -- but perhaps related to the birth and life-cycle of individuals as well as events? Changing period maps -- maps which reflect changing colonial knowledge systems and accumulation of wealth ans the resulting changes to built environment. The movement and transfer of objects is also about the transmission of knowledge.

A map of power: we didn't talk about how maps are / were produced in the context of colonial conquest and exploitation. Maps, like archives, have troubling origins -- can we trouble their reproduction. Who can make a map? How can they reflect patterns of migration within a global system?

Areas to explore?

How can we address the creation and the curation of traveling/ temporary exhibitions through digital scholarship? Reaching isolated, rural, hard-to-reach communities?

The Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow (UofG) has a collection of African objects, which are mostly unidentified and uncatalogued. Would it be possible to work between YCBA and UofG to 'hack' this collection? Have an intensive period of working on cataloguing and identifying materials?

Maria Economou at the University of Glasgow is working on emotive responses to digital museum displays, in the Glasgow workshop we can bring her into the conversation?

Cassy Kist a PhD student in Information Studies at Glasgow is working on how Glasgow Museums are incorporating narriatves / displays about slavery into their work both online and off-line. She is interested in exploring social networks and communications as both means of resistance and oppression, historically and today.