Project:About

This wiki is used to produce and query a knowledge base developed as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded project Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950, running from 2021 to 2024, details of which are available on the project website.

Values

This wiki is underpinned by set of values. We anticipate these will evolve. And as the project develops we will provide examples of how we acted in response to these values. If you have suggestions, please make them in the Discussion tab.

• The archive is a technology of colonialism.
• Metadata and metadata structures organise knowledge. Both are situated in their circumstances of production.
  • linked data can support chains of URIs between, say, VIAF IDs and OCLC permalinks that readable by machines but incomprehensible to humans. Our production of data balances these two imperatives: to make data that can be queried with and against external linked data sources and to present data in ways that are readable to people using the wikibase via their web browser.
• Digital photographs of artefacts are digital representations of those artefacts: they do not replace the artefacts they depict, rather they are things in their own right.
• Building a website is an intellectual act.
• Websites are built to die. But data organised and presented by that website must be produced in such a way that it is ready for long-term digital preservation.
  • This website is backed up as a part of the Wikibase Cloud disaster recovery regime. Dumps of project data are regularly made, and will in due course be deposited as a dataset.
• The products of our labour are hard to understand unless we document that labour...
  • See Meta for our attempts to show our work. If you can't find something, ask us for it.
• ...and yet datasets like ours will always outlive the rationale for their creation.
• Digital infrastuctures are material resources that contribute to the climate crisis: their production requires energy, the storing and movement of data requires energy, and ideas like 'the cloud' can deepen the perceived ethereality of the digital.
  • This wiki uses the Wikibase Cloud infrastructure. Wikibase Cloud uses as a hosting platform. Google Cloud claims to be the 'cleanest cloud in industry'. We note that Google Cloud basis these claims on a combination of renewable "off-taking" and off-setting, the greenness of which is discussed in a recent report by the Royal Society (2020). We continue to monitor the environmental claims of Google Cloud.

Bibliography

{partial, incomplete, evolving}

• Anderson, Jane, and Kim Christen. ‘“Chuck a Copyright on It”: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels’. Museum Anthropology Review, 2013.
• Bender, Emily M, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,” 2021.
• Birhane, Abeba. “Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach.” Patterns 2:2 (2021).
• Bowker, Geoffrey C Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences (2000).
• Carlin, Claire. ‘Endings: Concluding, Archiving, and Preserving Digital Projects for Long-Term Usability’. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 2:1 ([ https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.35 2018])
• D'Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.
• The GO::DH Minimal Computing Working Group. (2014-) https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/
• Greene, Candace S. ‘Material Connections: “The Smithsonian Effect” in Anthropological Cataloguing’. Museum Anthropology 39:2 (2016).
• Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021.
• Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press, 2018.
• Onuoha, Mimi. The Point of Collection. 2016.
• Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra and Julianne Nyhan. 'Encoding the Haunting of an Object Catalogue: On the Potential of Digital Technologies to Perpetuate or Subvert the Silence and Bias of the Early-Modern Archive'. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2021).
• Parikka, Jussi. 'A Care Worthy of Its Time'. In Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (eds), Debates in Digital Humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press (2019)
• Pendergrass, Keith, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna. ‘Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation’. The American Archivist (2019).
• Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2019.
• Schroeder, Caroline T. ‘Shenoute in Code: Digitizing Coptic Cultural Heritage for Collaborative Online Research and Study’, Coptica 14 (2015).
• Sussex Humanities Lab Carbon Use and Environmental Impact Working Group, Jo Walton, Alice Eldridge, James Baker, David Banks, and Tim Hitchcock. The Sussex Humanities Lab Environmental Strategy (Version 1.3), 2020.
• The Shift Project. ‘Lean ICT: Towards Digital Sobriety’ (2019).
• van der Wel, Jack, et al. Homosaurus.org linked data vocabulary (2013-). http://homosaurus.org/
• Whose Knowledge? (2016-). https://whoseknowledge.org

Contact Us

• To contact us email beyondnotables[at]gmail[dot]com.