Description
Over the last decades, natural history museums have invested heavily in digitizing their archival and specimen collections. Moreover, major efforts have been undertaken to aggregate and interlink specimen related metadata in large digital infrastructures (e.g. GBIF, DiSSCo). These developments do not come without pitfalls. By drawing upon a number of concrete examples from (digitized) Dutch natural history collections and archives, this lecture will tackle the following questions: What do digital collection information systems tell us about the colonial provenance of natural history objects? What is silenced? What can historians and social scientists bring to the table in order avoid the reproduction and reinforcement of colonial biases in the process of digitizing ‘biodiversity heritage’? This lecture will end with a plea to acknowledge the formative role of colonialism in shaping natural history collections which are nowadays the most important resource for biodiversity research. If we only use present-day ‘scientific’ aims and values as design principles for digital infrastructures representing millions of collection plants, minerals and animals in Europe’s collections, we fall short of accounting for and learning from their colonial past.| Period | 23 Jul 2024 → 26 Jul 2024 |
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| Event title | Digitization of Natural History Collections in Europe: State of the art and future perspectives 2024 |
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Loveno die Menaggio, ItalyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |