Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK

 Home Research Data Models 

Aim and Scope

This Wikidata project aims at mapping knowledge generated by a DFG-AHRC research project on the history of colonial violence and the plunder of African cultural heritage. By creating new properties, engaging with existing data models and encoding historical information in Wikidata, it wishes to make information on colonial loot more accessible worldwide. By adding information on anti-colonial movements and leaders, the project also attempts to challenge Eurocentric perspectives on colonial history and museum collections.

Concretely, the project members will focus on 6 military expeditions during which colonial officers attacked African populations who would not submit to colonial rule and looted their cultural heritage. For each expedition, the project members selected 1 European colonialist, 1 African leader and 3 looted objects, today in the custody of German museums. The project members will either build on existing entities and link them to each other via metadata, or create new entities when these are found lacking.

Background

"The Restitution of Knowledge: Artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum" is a DFG-AHRC funded research project that brings together the Pitt-Rivers-Museum, the University of Oxford, and the Institute for Art History at the Technical University in Berlin.

By looking into museum inventories and archives, The RoK wishes to document and rethink the history of "plunder" in ethnological collections. Between 1884 and 1919, thousands of objects, artworks and human remains were shipped from all over the world to museums in Europe. Many of those were acquired during colonial wars or so-called "punitive expeditions". But what exactly can be called a "punitive expedition"? Can these collections be then considered as trophies or spoils of war? What responsibility do museums have today regarding these looted treasures? What histories of violence are attached to those objects?

The project ultimately aims to tell untold histories of colonial spoliation out of their material evidence. These collections are more than ever relevant for future transnational partnerships in the cultural sector and this project believes in an urgent need for the museum sector to work through their institutions' historical participation in assymetrical wars and colonial expeditions. At the same time, this history should also be told from the perspective of descendants of colonized people and members of civil society. Yet, even though descendants usually know about the past and this history of oppression, many still ignore the presence of those artefacts in European museums.

This project combines different fields of research (history of science and of collections, postcolonial studies, provenance studies and the displacement of cultural heritage) and strives for a nuanced but also accurate understanding of museum acquisitions, distinguishing plunder from scientific undertakings, gifts, purchases, commissions, and so on. A thin line separated military from scientific expeditions and their often violent or coercive methods of collecting. This is why this archive-based research project on colonial collections shall reveal detailed information that can influence new practices in museum anthropology.

Besides scientific publications, an edited volume and conference talks, the project members wish to produce a data-based output that translates fundamental research in knowledge for the commons. Hence this platform.

Roadmap

•  Done Discover wikidata, learn to edit, research wikidata precedents for modelling similar data.
•  Done Pilot study - Model test items (documented under Research):
  • Edit-a-thon with WMDE (19/06/2023): minutes of the workshop
  • Edit-a-thon with WMDE (24/10/2023): minutes of the workshop
•  In progress Document the pilot project and decisions made (documented under Data Models)
•  Not done Community consultation - present pilot and gather feedback
•  Not done Incorporate feedback into data models and wikidata ontology

Templates:  Not done  In progress  Done

Contributors and contact information

• Dr Yann LeGall: yann.legall@tu-berlin.de

WMDE login The_RoK_-_TU_Berlin (talk) 22 November 2022 (UTC)
WM login LeGallYann

• Jeanne-Ange Wagne
• Elias Aguigah Agigae (talk) 19 June 2023 (UTC)
• S.v.Mering (talk) 19 June 2023 (UTC)
• 1ucyp (talk) 19 June 2023 (UTC)
• Masssly (talk) 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Links

Related WikiProjects

• Wikidata:WikiProject_European_Colonialism
• Wikidata:WikiProject_Provenance
• Wikidata:WikiProject_Collectors_affiliated_with_the_MfN_Berlin

Resources

• Wikidata:WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/Example Project
• Template:Start tab