Veranstaltungsprogramm

This keynote inspects how intersections of race, class, and gender in museum spaces manifest themselves as data biases in digital museum collections. By applying intersectional feminist theories and anti-colonial concepts to the process of digitisation and datafication of museum collections, the focus of this talk will be the breeding grounds of power differential in museums and other GLAM spaces. By combining intersectional feminist perspectives and visualisation of digital museum collections, this keynote highlights the importance of critical perspectives as an intrinsic part of cultural data as well as its graphical and visual representations. Exercising Audre Lorde’s provocation ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ in German cultural institutions that are digitising their collections, this talk will focus on historical examples of different tools that have been developed by marginalised communities in order to resist the dominant narratives. Counterdata visualisation will be explored as another tool that explicitly focuses on critical perspectives on the museum collection. Counterdata employs the tool of data visualisation as a way to challenge the power differentials under which the data is collected, analysed, or represented by qualifying and visualising structural oppression. It is argued that it is not possible to undo the centuries of colonial violence that some of the museum's collections implicitly or explicitly embody. However, it is possible to address and highlight these racial, gender, and colonial influences as well as make them part of the metadata schema associated with these colonial collections, and their consequent representation through online platforms.