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Paper short abstract:

Mapping Senufo, a collaborative born-digital publication project, aims to highlight ambiguity about African arts rather than attempting to resolve it. Here I focus on the team’s most recent efforts to visualize the reliability of evidence and demonstrate possibilities for attending to uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Curators and other scholars of African arts have long grappled with incomplete information about objects from Africa in European and North American collections. And yet, for decades, scholars outside the field of African art history have questioned African art specialists’ facile use of sources and evidence to make claims about so-called traditional arts. Often presented as certain in museums, classrooms, and publications, claims built on fragile evidence suggest authoritative information. They may also contribute to expectations for certainty, as museumgoers and students have reported unease at presentations of uncertainty. However, unease may be an appropriate response. As digital humanists and data theorists Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020: 91) assert, “best practices for communicating uncertainty” may result in “the perceptual, intuitive, visceral, and emotional experience of uncertainty.”

While we might long for better and surer details about African arts, the pretension that information is solid does not suffice to make it so. Through development of Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge, an in-progress, born-digital publication project, I am working with a team to find ways to highlight ambiguity rather than attempting to resolve it. We aim to engage readers in confronting varied sources and evidence and to encourage reflection on the reliability of any detail as well as gaps in historical records and narratives. In this presentation, I will focus on the Mapping Senufo team’s most recent efforts to visualize the reliability of evidence in order to demonstrate productive possibilities in attending to uncertainty.