Abstract

This talk presents the project “IN_CONTEXT: Colonial Histories and Digital Collections” based at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Germany. As universities and cultural heritage institutions reflect on their roles in the histories of European colonialism, libraries are reassessing past and current practices of collecting and organizing materials and knowledge about the non-European world. Recasting libraries as active agents in the colonial project raises timely questions about acquisition policies, classification systems but also about data sovereignty, traditional knowledge and who stands to benefit from digital research infrastructure projects. It also invites queries into the entangled and transimperial nature of science and colonialism. Against this backdrop, the project IN_CONTEXT aims to enable new research into histories of empire, slavery and colonialism across the non-European world by digitizing historical collections held by the Staatsbibliothek and by making these available via a virtual research platform. The library’s wider holdings include personal records, photographs, maps and historical monographs that were acquired over the past 400 years. As part of these collections, a significant body of historical sources related to colonial histories of Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland will be made accessible for quantitative as well as qualitative research. The project also aims to make these historical sources available as digital research data to support computational methods of analysis. Curated collections will be made accessible via APIs and data sets to allow, for example, for text- and data-mining or data visualization. The talk will also highlight funding opportunities for conducting on-site research at the Staatsbibliothek and at other partner institutions of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin.