This week’s readings emphasizes ethical considerations when engaging with histories and archives of marginalized communities and navigating collections rooted in colonialism. Anderson points out in “Towards Slow Archives”, “the history of collection is the history of colonialism”. The colonial lens is evidenced in the history of violent dispossession, exploitation, and erasure of indigenous culture. 

Johnson’s discussion of the legacy of commodifying Black data argues against the spectacularizing of the horrific violence on Black bodies and proposes black digital practice as a way of challenging the problematic narrative. In the video, Cotera poses a similar argument in favor of the Chicano community retaining ownership of the archives primarily composed of their oral histories and archival documents. 

Cotera challenges our notion of archives by positioning the domestic spaces occupied by the Chicano women as archives and the women as knowledge repositories. Cotera and her students worked to slowly build trust with the community of women contributing to the collection and the value of the relationships is evident in the collection design. Access to the resultant collection of Chicano feminist history is restricted through login requirements and scholars/ students/ users engaging with the archives are expected to obtain permission from the rightsholder—the Chicano women. Cotera admits that enforcement might not be practically possible and the system largely relies on ethical, responsible behavior from the users. 

The painstaking approach to building and managing the collection is mirrored in the “slow archive” process (Anderson) that suggests slowing down to refocus archival practices to reflect indigenous temporalities and hold communal relationships at the heart to the process. The objective is to find safe spaces to share within the community and cites the example of Mukurtu CMS, a community digital access platform that utilizes Traditional Knowledge labels to provide cultural context and exercise control over access. Another initiative discussed is Local Contexts that works to reclaim intellectual property power structures and legitimize indigenous governance frameworks for decision making around ownership and access to cultural heritage collections.

Carrying forward the line of inquiry on online interventions, Johnson’s advocacy of social media as a tool for cultural critique and creation of online communities finds a common thread in the BLM movement’s online organization of activism efforts for social justice. “Beyond the Hashtags” report shows how digital tools provided a platform for oppressed voices to reach a wider audience and how BLM succeeded in engaging productively with the policymakers, media and the general public. The culmination of the discussions on knowledge production and ethical approaches to culturally sensitive archives was the initiative ”Possibly Impossible Research Project” that shares the benefits students and the scholarly community could derive from designing research assignments that contribute to a larger objective and allow emerging scholars to engage early in their academic journey with primary sources.

The readings this week were illuminating and completely changed my perception of maps as a reliable representation of the world.

Dr. Nelson’s discussion of the role of mapmakers in creating and sustaining systems of power was painfully insightful in its analysis of the ways that the representations of spatiality are and continue to be Eurocentric, patriarchal and racist. The consideration of implicit/explicit biases and the decisions made during map-making have a crucial effect on the outcome – size was shown to have a direct relation to the importance relegated to Western countries, categorization have consequences on programmatic decisions and allocation of resources/funding and design choices affect accessibility. The 4 minutes spent on the social impacts of map projections in the West Wing episode recommended by Dr. Nelson is commendable for this brief effort in an otherwise commercial venture.

The takeaway of the readings are that to use maps to promote social change, both the cartographer and the audience need to educate themselves and use that knowledge to challenge systems of oppression. These conversations are relatable to the data/capta conundrum we explored last class and Data Feminism’s assertion that data is power and more importantly, that data feminism is for everyone. It helps us understand what critical cartography requires from us. We need to question the context of what is being represented, examine the agenda of the makers and the purpose the representations are meant to serve. Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps was an apt precursor to comprehend the implications of concrete examples presented in the webinar of misrepresentation, underrepresentation, the political motivations driving polarizing mapping practices of disputed lands and gerrymandering all in the service of systems of power.

Visualizing Sovereignty provided some fascinating examples on possible ways to address some of the issues by taking out size considerations from the representation and introducing a significantly different narrative style to better accommodate the volatile conditions of Caribbean history. All the sites explored showcased examples of activism in action, worthy projects highlighting the inequality and blatant racism in mapping practices as well as ongoing efforts to decolonize representations. 

However, as someone who only now recognizes the immensely problematic practices employed in creating maps, the material did not provide enough direction to create a meaningful map on my own. My attempts involved using Carto and Tableau to create a map for the setting of Robin Cook’s medical fictions to show how he never ventured far from home in his fictional journey, but the result was not satisfactory enough to submit as an assignment. Since I could not find mapping data, I created a csv source file with the latitude and longitude for Cook’s 46 story locations and his place of birth, education and residence. Most novels are set in New York and without a specific location which would have required a review of each book, I avoided duplication by mapping the novels to current hospitals in NY. Another attempt with a dataset on world grain production was not very successful. Although, I was grateful to get a result because it came after several trial and error sessions and that helped me gain some understanding of the tools and the complexities of mapping.

Below is a screenshot of the Cook map.