Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines how museums deal with colonial histories embedded within their catalogues in a digital age.

Paper long abstract:

Uncertain histories, whether experiences of mass murder and violence or difficult histories of colonialism, have received increasing attention in the museum field as objects of study. However, much of this attention is limited to exhibitions: the display of artefacts and interpretation of events for museum publics. Less attention is given to the grounding of difficult histories within a core aspect of museums - the catalogue. As museums increasingly use the web to host their catalogue records, it is essential to understand how this seemingly 'uninterpreted' data contains evidence of these restless and potentially traumatic histories.

Our paper examines how museums deal with histories of colonial inequality that supported the creation of museum collections originally. Of interest are online catalogues used to incite conversation between source communities and museum staff, encouraging geographically and culturally disparate groups to converse in more accessible ways. We question access and notions of formality, and critically engage with values about property and classification that on-line presences require. We argue that museums' approaches to these issues are rooted within colonial histories but have become normalized within memory institutions. We question if this history of colonialism is being replicated online as part of a larger process of digital colonization manifest in the informational and material processes of ubiquitous computing. In what ways does the exchange of information on-line follow existing social, economic and political fault lines that originate in colonial histories, and more importantly, are there new characteristics of colonization within our digital world that need to be understood?