Colonial Metadata: Making the Past, Present, Future
Digital Humanities Seminar Series. Dr James Baker (University of Sussex)
A Digital Humanities seminar | |
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Speaker(s) | Dr James Baker (University of Sussex) |
Date | 13 January 2021 |
Time | 16:30 to 18:00 |
Place | This event will be held online via Zoom. |
Organizer | University of Exeter Digital Humanities Lab |
Event details
Abstract
Dr James Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and at the Sussex Humanities Lab. He is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James is an expert in the authority of the digital record, the history of knowledge organisation, historical interactions with information technologies, and the history of the printed image.
Prior to joining Sussex, James held positions of Digital Curator at the British Library and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), a committee member of the Archives and Records Association (UK) Section for Archives and Technology, and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
Please register through Eventbrite. A Zoom link will be sent out closer to the event.
Metadata and metadata systems have staying power, a tendency to outlive the social circumstances of their production, to normalise categories and categorisation. In the drive to improve access to cultural heritage, printed catalogues have been turned into metadata, their prejudices and preoccupations shaping our present in implicit and explicit ways, becoming vital interlocutors between us and the past. Taking as its case study one such printed catalogue - the late-colonial work by Mary Dorothy George in the British Museum's print collections - this paper addresses the need to explore the historical specificities of colonial metadata production. In conclusion, I reflect on how research into the histories of metadata production can inform public digital history practice.