Herbaria Heritage: Visualising Colonial Bias in Natural History Collections

As a result of the colonial entanglements of many natural history collections,
much of the world’s biodiversity heritage is housed in Europe. Increasingly, natural history institutions have started to address this history. However, computational methods for analysing large collections often consist in static visualisations of collection provenance. We argue that interactive visualisations allow users to understand collections better: their content gaps as well as interesting patterns and trends. Using a dataset containing metadata of five million entries from the botanical collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center, we created an interactive visualisation with Microsoft PowerBI. The visualisation depicts colonial origins and the botany collection’s movement to the Netherlands over time on an interactive map and timeline. This project thus addresses a gap in historical research on the colonial legacy of Dutch botanical collections, and also a gap in computer science research regarding computational techniques for distant reading of natural heritage data. Our interactive visualisation increases the accessibility of the available scientific data. It also contributes to understanding the cultural history of natural history collections and ultimately, highlights the importance of accurate and accessible visual representations of biodiversity collection histories. This project suggests a way forward for natural
history museums grappling with their colonial past.