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Museum : Data : Laundry

  • GLAM cataloguing, object description, interpretation practices: a Zotero Library …yet another (really useful) resource list…

    I put together a Zotero Library (which is basically a medium-sized list) as part of the TaNC funded Provisional Semantics project (2020-22). The intention was to collate the guidance and research available to support galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM), and the wider UK heritage sector to engage critically in professional practices that involve recording,…

  • Did a thing, wrote a thing…

    UPDATE: 21/09/22 : The final report for the Provisional Semantics project was published in early September this year and is available via Zenodo here: Provisional Semantics: Addressing the challenges of representing multiple perspectives within an evolving digitised national collection I haven’t posted here in a while as I have been attempting to do the proper…

  • Executive engagement and advocacy or: What is your boss actually reading? Part 1.

    This post is apropos of nothing much really, other than I did another list and I thought I would share it. There seems to be a continuing disconnect around so called “decolonisation” work in museums and heritage. Oftentimes, this divide is between those on the ground, without status, power or seniority, attempting to change the…

  • Decolonising the Database event, Centre for Design History, University of Brighton, July 5th 2021

    On Monday 5th July, 2021 I spoke at an event organised by the Centre for Design History at Brighton University and organised by Helen Mears, called Decolonising the Database. Shelley Angelie Saggar has written a report on the event on the University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History blog. The edited version of my talk…

  • Are you still reading?

    Book lists, shelfies, reading groups were big news this time last year in response to widespread public (media?) acknowledgement of racism in the global north as overt, insidious, structural institutional and constant. But how many of the recommended texts were actually read and how many are still being read? Two threads on Twitter this week,…

  • Documentation and Decolonisation

    This is the text of a talk I gave as part of the Doing the Work Programme, an online workshop series co-produced by Dr Ilaria Puri Purini at the Contemporary Art Society and Dr Anjalie Dalal-Clayton at the Decolonising Arts Institute (University of the Arts London). Kathleen Lawther chaired with incisive good judgement and care…

  • A bit of reflection

    Last year around June (also the last time I posted on here), I think, Tehmina Goskar responded to an announcement about the project that I am currently working on (Provisional Semantics), with a little gentle probing and holding to account. I wrote back delighted to make contact, and since then there have been many interesting,…

  • Performing Solidarity

    Yesterday I watched the rush to perform solidarity from the UK GLAM sector stemming, in part, from the Museum Detox call for GLAM organisations to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and from a discussion with colleagues about how to do this. There is so much to address right now and arguably critiquing…

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