Herbaria Heritage: Visualizing 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 begun to address their colonial past. However, in this regard, computational methods for analyzing large collections tend to consist of static visualizations of collection provenance. Moreover, in regions where cutting-edge visualization technologies are only scarcely available - often these are the same areas from which most European plant
collections originate - there is a lack of simple, accessible solutions that can generate meaningful results. Thus, we argue that accessible, simple, yet interactive visualizations of collection provenance allow users to understand colonial bias in natural history collections better. Our solution allows users to focus on content gaps and highlights historical patterns and trends in collection data. Using a dataset containing metadata of five million entries from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center botanical collection as a use case, we created an interactive visualization with Microsoft PowerBI. The visualization showcases the origins and movements of botanical specimens from former Dutch colonies to the Netherlands on an interactive map and timeline. This addresses not only a gap in historical research on the colonial legacy of Dutch botanical collections but also a gap in digi-
tal humanities research regarding simple and easy-to-use computational techniques for distant reading of natural heritage data. The particular use case demonstrates only a fraction of the research possibilities that this tool enables. Our interactive visualization increases the accessibility of the available scientific data, and contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between cultural history and natural history, highlighting the greater importance of easy-to-use, interactive and accessible visualiza-
tions of biodiversity collection histories. Ultimately, our project suggests a way forward for natural history museums not only in the Netherlands to reinterpret the colonial past of their collections.