Museums, Big Data and the Violence of Empire

This project is a collaboration between the University of Liverpool, Lancaster University, Liverpool John Moores University, and National Museums Liverpool (NML). It aims to generate new understandings of the nature and legacies of imperial and colonial violence through a deep interdisciplinary approach that embraces the use of digital humanities technologies in the curation of collections to help understand how imperial and colonial violence has been conceptualised and perpetuated through imperial and colonial collecting, curatorial decision-making, and museum display practices. Research questions include "What terminology can be used to identify acts or processes relating to imperial and colonial violence in museum databases, and what do these reveal about the ways in which the violence of empire was understood?"; "What can the classification and representation of objects in museums reveal about the nature of imperial and colonial violence and the role of museums in propagating such violence?" and "How can museums take an active role in the decolonisation of technology?".
This project aims to develop new insights, research methods, standards, and protocols through which to explore the potential of digital humanities approaches to transform understandings of, and the interrelationships between, empire, violence, and the cultural heritage sector. Building on insights into the imperial and colonial archive, and museums, indigenous digitisation and a wide range of datasets, this project will also explore the potential of digital platforms to create spaces in which marginalised voices, including the origin communities of objects in cultural heritage collections, can challenge the Eurocentric frameworks through which such objects have been collected, curated and displayed, in addition to rethinking digital methodologies in the creation of data sets.