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Final Project Proposal: Decolonizing the Display

Confront the Canon: Examine Museum Collection and Exhibition Practices

Link to Slide Deck

Proposal Overview: In 2019, a statistics and art history team from Williams College and the University of California conducted a diversity study on eighteen U.S. museums and found that overall 85% artists in the collections are white and 87% are men. I envision the project as a way to explore the institutional bias reflected in the skewed diversity ratios prevalent in museum collections and reflected in their exhibition history that consistently privileges art created by white Western artists. The central question being explored is: How does the institution’s collection and curatorial practices contribute to the marginalization of non-Western art, women artists and artists of color? 

Project Objective and Inspiration: The objective is to confront the art canon (which constitutes the general standards set to judge ‘greatness’ in art) and examine the practices that determine whose history is represented in the institution’s collection and whose story is told in the displays. I propose a mediation in the spirit of Fred Wilson’s brilliant intervention in his Mining the Museum project, where the artist culled forgotten African-American artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society’s permanent collection and juxtaposed the objects in their conventional display issuing a powerful statement against institutional racism. The entrance to Mining the Museum featured the Truth Trophy, where three busts of white men from the collection who were not Marylanders was placed in front of three empty black pedestals that represented Black Marylanders missing from the collection, namely Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Bannekar and Frederick Douglass (Figure 1, right). Another introspective intervention was seen in the form of slave shackles placed in a metalwork display which adds the context of invisible slave labor hidden behind the glimmering objects (Figure 1, left). 

Exhibits from the project Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson
Figure 1: Metalwork on the left; Truth Trophy on the right from Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, 1992

Project Method and Execution Phases: My project aims to mount a comparable interrogation of museum practices that allows users to intervene in select past exhibitions, curate an equitable display highlighting absences and provide relevant context by studying the collection through a decolonizing lens. Roopika Risam proposed the postcolonial digital pedagogy approach as a means to understand the role of knowledge production in privileging Western voices and employing active engagement of the audience as creators and not just consumers to begin decolonizing the archives. In a similar approach, the Confront the Canon interface will enable users to curate their own equitable exhibitions and empower them to participate as creators in the decolonizing effort. 

Phases of proposed project
Figure 2: Phases of the proposed project, Confront the Canon

To execute the project within a semester, the scope is narrowed down to a single exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the aim of creating the basic framework for the selection of interventions resulting in the final outcome of the virtual equitable exhibition. The project can eventually be scaled up.

The project execution is planned in four phases (Figure 2):

  • Phase 1: Select a past exhibition catalog, cull the selected catalog to create the past exhibition dataset.
  • Phase 2: Identify relevant search parameters such as art period, style, gender, race to create the basis of the intervention object dataset selection.
  • Phase 3: Provide display panels to swap out objects from the exhibition and accept intervention objects or suggestions where appropriate interventions are unavailable with relevant context labels.
  • Phase 4: Display newly curated equitable exhibition.

DH Context: The environment scan revealed several institutional attempts to address canon exclusions through digital exhibitions such as the ones seen on the NMWA, Palmer Museum of Art websites that feature online exhibits around Women in Art, Asian and Asian American Art, African art etc. However, these exhibitions focus on the themes in isolation, in a way ‘othering’ the subject. My project’s approach differs from these efforts because the attempt is to emphasize the exclusions and the flawed premise of the canon from within and visualize equity as an alternative.

Screenshots of online exhibition from Palmer Museum of Art to show effective use of google slide template.
Figure 3:Navigation of online exhibition Women in Art: Activism and Resistance, Palmer Museum of Art

Confront the Canon will seek guidance from the simple yet effective platform and design choices employed in the Palmer Museum exhibitions (Figure 3). Their design layouts are impressive because the humble google slides are used to great effect providing an immersive experience of the exhibition with simple navigation through the galleries and clickable art objects moving to text or video content that elaborate on the context.

Blog Post#2: Short Response to Weekly Reading – History and the Archive

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.

Reading Response #2

September 25th – Data & Visualization, Short Response: 

For my second reading response, I wanted to dive into a few projects that caught my attention this week: Two Plantations, Every Upcoming Solar Eclipse (until 2080), and Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. Each of these visualizations uses data to tell a story in a way that’s both informative and interactive, but their subject matter and the way they engage viewers are quite different, which is what makes them stand out.

The Two Plantations project struck me immediately because of how it maps out the lives of enslaved people across two plantations—Mount Airy in Virginia and Mesopotamia in Jamaica. The way this project brings historical records to life is extremely powerful. The interactive map, family trees, and details about individuals allow viewers to see the real human impact behind the data. What I found especially compelling is how it doesn’t just give you names or numbers; it restores a sense of identity and connection to people who were often reduced to property. This project is a strong example of how digital humanities can reframe historical narratives and add new layers of understanding. It’s a moving reminder of the importance of telling stories that might otherwise remain buried, humanizing the data in ways traditional history often overlooks.

On the other hand, the Every Upcoming Solar Eclipse (until 2080) visualization takes a more scientific approach but is still very captivating. Created by Denise Lu for The Washington Post, the interactive globe shows all solar eclipses’ paths until 2080. This project brilliantly uses digital tools to visualize something that would be hard to grasp otherwise. What stands out about this visualization is how it lets users interact with the data personally—you can enter your birth year and see how many eclipses will happen during your lifetime. The use of light and dark shades to represent time, combined with hover text tooltips, makes it both engaging and accessible. This project showcases how digital visualizations can make complex scientific information more relatable to a wider audience.

In addition to these projects, I explored Ben Schmidt’s Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews, which uses data from RateMyProfessor to analyze how students describe male and female professors differently. I found it super, super fun to play around with different search terms and see how language changes based on gender. This project is particularly engaging because it lets the user drive the experience—you input specific terms and get immediate visual results. The ability to personalize the data output based on user input adds a unique level of interaction and makes the findings feel more relevant. It got me thinking about how one would create such an interactive and tailored visualization, where the user shapes the narrative rather than passively absorbing information.

One of the most surprising takeaways from this week’s readings and projects is just how many tools and resources are available for creating digital humanities visualizations. I had no idea there were so many options out there, as highlighted in the NYU guide on digital humanities tools. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities for using these tools to create my own visualizations and tell stories in dynamic, user-driven ways.

Overall, these projects show the power of digital tools in making abstract or complex data come to life. Whether it’s through uncovering hidden histories, mapping celestial events, or revealing gendered biases in language, the potential for digital humanities to reshape how we interact with information is both vast and inspiring.

The Politics Behind Design, Space, and Maps

Short Response #1 | Madison Watkins

In exploring both Dr. Erica Nelson’s “Critical Cartography: The Subjectivity, Politics, and Power of Spatial Data” and Bonilla and Hantel’s “Visualizing Sovereignty,” I found myself deeply fascinated by the political nature of maps and spatial data. Dr. Nelson’s discussion on the politics of mapping, in particular, stood out to me. She describes maps as powerful tools that “delineate and reinforce power,” emphasizing how they’ve historically been used to marginalize certain groups and uphold the interests of those in control. This resonated with me because, to this day, we can see how the design of cities, borders, and infrastructure continues to reflect inequalities of power. Take the Mercator Map, for instance: it’s a stark reminder of how even the ways we visually represent the world can uphold power imbalances, distorting land masses and reinforcing colonial ideologies. 

To me, it’s almost infuriating how such maps are still so widely accepted and used. But, I mean, here in the West, it’s what we’ve been taught—so how is the average person supposed to know the truth? How are we supposed to uncover and then unlearn the lies we’ve been told since the beginning? Power, racism, and division run so deep that it’s scary to think about how embedded these forces are in each of our everyday lives. What excites me, though, is the potential to redelegate that power. I’m excited to see and contribute to more efforts that return the narrative, the representation, and the control of space to those who have historically had it taken from them. Throughout history, communities have been displaced, misrepresented, and marginalized through the manipulation of space, and maps have played a significant role in that process. Using mapping as a tool to empower these communities feels like a step toward justice.

These ideas, actually, connect directly to what we discussed in my Environmental Social Science class this week. We were to read Ingold’s “Culture, Perception, and Cognition“, he discusses how individuals’ sensory experiences shape their perception of the world. Ingold emphasizes that perception is not just shaped by cultural factors but is also deeply personal, rooted in how we physically engage with our surroundings. This made me reflect on how different people experience and interact with spaces based on their unique lived experiences. Access to resources, mobility, and the physical design of spaces all impact how individuals relate to their environment, especially in urban settings where marginalized communities often face greater barriers.

Edward T. Hall’s “Psychology and Architecture” from The Hidden Dimension (1969) builds on this by examining how physical spaces affect psychological well-being. He argues that the built environment shapes our behavior and interactions, but even more, it affects us on a subconscious level—how we feel and move through spaces is often determined by design choices we might not even be aware of. This made me think of how urban infrastructure like public transit systems and green spaces can either promote inclusion and accessibility or perpetuate exclusion. The way Hall connects spatial design with psychological responses emphasizes the importance of considering the lived experiences of individuals when designing equitable environments, much like Dr. Nelson’s call to critically examine how we map and design spaces through a political lens.

Jane Jacobs’ “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety” and Kevin Lynch’s “The City Image and Its Elements” also speak to the power of thoughtful, human-centered design in creating more inclusive and socially cohesive spaces. Jacobs highlights how well-designed public spaces, like sidewalks, can foster community, while Lynch offers a framework for understanding how we mentally map and make sense of urban environments. Both authors underscore the importance of designing spaces that prioritize the human experience—spaces that empower rather than exclude.

These readings, across both my Environmental Social Science and Digital Humanities courses, have strengthened my understanding of how perception, behavior, space, and politics are all deeply intertwined. They’ve pushed me to think critically about how maps and urban design reflect power structures and, most importantly, how we can work to challenge those structures by creating more inclusive and equitable environments.

Blog Post#1: Short Response to Weekly Reading – Mapping

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.

Mapping of Robin Cook's novel settings

Praxis# 1 – Analysis of the National AIDS Memorial Project

https://www.aidsmemorial.org

The AIDS Memorial was initiated in 1988 by a small San Francisco community devasted by the AIDS epidemic as a response to the stigma attached to the condition and the Reagan administration’s inaction against the growing health emergency. Currently the site features an intriguing amalgamation of materiality and the digital to memorialize the victims. The AIDS memorial Grove was first conceived by a small group of San Francisco residents as a serene place for healing and remembrance of loved ones lost to AIDS as well as to promote AIDS awareness. The team chose a neglected site at the Golden Gate Park and through the volunteering efforts of a dedicated team of architects and designers developed the unusable space into a timeless living memorial that exemplifies civic beautification and urban-park restoration undertaken by a public-private partnership. Over the years thousands of volunteers from diverse racial, economic, cultural backgrounds cleared the overgrowth, reintroduced native species and constructed a landscape including six flagstone gathering areas, as well as designated areas such as the Circle of Friends, the Artist’s Portal, the Hemophilia Circle, several Sierra granite boulders, crescents, and benches designed to carry engravings of tributes to affected individuals and organizations. In 1996, the Grove was designated as the nation’s AIDS Memorial. 

In 2019, another massive memorial project that is considered one of the largest community arts project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, was brought under the stewardship of the National AIDS Memorial. The Quilt was the brainchild of human rights activist, Cleve Jones, who created the first panel in memory of his friend and formally organized the NAMES Project Foundation in 1987. The first display of the Quilt with 1920 panels was in 1987 at Washington D.C. and was as large as a football field. An ongoing annual tradition of reading the memorialized names emphasizes the goals of remembrance and awareness shared by both projects. The Quilt has since travelled to each of the fifty States and several other countries, growing as new panels were constantly added and today stands at nearly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals. 

The digital landscape include videos and documented stories of the individuals and AIDS support institutions memorialized in the Grove. An interactive searchable AIDS Quilt facilitates engagement with a wider audience and an online locator feature allows viewers to find Quilt displays in their area. Another offshoot, Surviving Voices is a multi-year project oral history project launched in 2015 that records, curates and preserves the untold stories captured in the Quilt.

The memorials are maintained and developed by community labor facilitated by regular volunteer workdays attracting enthusiastic participation under professional supervision and leadership. The website features directions, links and kits with guidance on adding an inscription to the Grove site, making/ adding a panel to the Quilt, hosting a Quilt display and the interactive AIDS Quilt feature that enables wider community participation. The memorials function as truly collaborative projects and provide a global platform to marginalized voices aligning with digital humanity goals of inclusivity and social change through activism as well as propagate DH values of open exchange of ideas, collaboration and connectedness. The initiative continues its efforts to feature underrepresented communities by adding chapters in the oral history project for Black, Latinx, transgender and AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) communities and organizing special Quilt displays to honor Black and Latinx lives as a way to raise awareness about the disproportionate impact on these communities. The diversity of the participating volunteers and the outreach to include different communities are in line with DH values.  

The memorial has a named board and small staff that includes professionals with extensive philanthropical/service experience, a Quilt conservator, a Quilt curator and members who have lost loved ones to AIDS. The sponsoring partners include biopharmaceutical companies, energy sector, health and diagnostics companies, the Library of Congress and the city of San Francisco.

The source code indicates that the website was built using Webflow, software provided by a San Francisco based company. The use of a software not requiring coding experience and the repetitive links in some of the Grove webpages suggest reuse of source code and the probability that the design team could be part of the nameless volunteer community. A few broken links and the occasional lack of cohesive design indicates that the Quilt pages were probably integrated from the archived Quilt website. There are minor hiccups that indicate a slight delay in updates on the massive website. For instance, the online locator shows three Quilt displays in NY including the Whitney Museum of Art, but the object is not featured on the museum website.

Having said that both the physical memorials and the digital components have been sustained and developed at such a massive scale over the past several years, depending solely on community labor and the generosity of public and private institutions which in itself is a testament to the resounding success of the AIDS Memorial’s mission to never forget.

Digital Humanities – In My Own Words

What defines a profession is not only what it does, but also what values it upholds and how it practices “professional responsibility”.

Spiro 2012

Digital Humanities is a discipline that employs digital tools and methodologies to experiment and find innovative ways to conduct critical inquiries, democratize data, tap the “collective creative potential’ to build projects and disseminate collaborative interdisciplinary research in an open, transparent, interactive form designed to reach a larger audience. Even that long-winded attempt at a definition probably does not cover all the critical aspects.

Digital Humanities aspires to be a platform that fosters inclusivity, cultural diversity and equitable access while embracing civic responsibility and provoking necessary conversations to inspire societal change. 

The young discipline demonstrates an earnest intention to build on the knowledge of the traditional humanities in the digital age and redress the failings inherited from traditional scholastic practice. DH hopes to achieve these goals by welcoming diverse voices into the conversation, focusing on interdisciplinary approaches and making space for collaborative research.   

The discussion of accessibility and inclusion in our readings is reflected in the features visible in all the listed sites/projects—namely the organized presentation of mined data, themes engaging underrepresented communities and the collaborative effort of like minded scholars from different disciplines. The sites arrange the content in various accessible forms including data visualizations (maps/charts), the text component, the compilation of objects in exhibits or archives and interactive elements that allow the user to participate actively in the way they choose to consume the content.

The “Torn Apart” project, for instance, takes on the humanitarian crisis that extends beyond the US border and showcases the disenfranchised voices through visualizations of the human fallout of immigration policies. The tragedy of immigrant detention is inescapable as one views the dense accumulation of orange dots splattered across the US landscape and statistics that are no longer mere numbers. The extent of the incarceration juxtaposed against the economics and politics reveals the grim reality of the business of immigration detention. The project team documents their responsible consideration and ethical decisions around the kind of data that could be revealed about the vulnerable population.

Evident in each of the projects is DH’s implied goal to address the pitfalls that are a product of the systemic biases inherited from the traditional disciplines.

Revisiting the idea of a definition in light of these projects shows a continued emphasis on representation, inclusivity, accessibility, social responsibility and collaboration. DH recognizes that the inclusion of underrepresented voices adds value and addressing the complications of inviting disparate voices is a necessity to build a more representative scholastic community. The field appears to resist the act of being boxed into a restrictive definition and the fluidity of the proposed definitions reflect its constantly evolving values and expanding community—a community that welcomes debates and challenges to prevalent DH practices. 

Despite the best of intentions, the control continues to be with the traditionally dominant Western voice. Perhaps instead of finding ways to expand acceptance of non-Western scholarly practices so they fit into the existing canon, the scholastic community should seek the conditions acceptable to the ones left in the fray. How could global scholars contribute to the conversation and retain agency on the terms of their engagement with the digital humanities thereby countering “representational inequality” and represent true inclusiveness? The self-awareness of the DH community will question any complacency that sets in and encourage the constant revival of our commitment to the core values of the group.

In all likelihood the definition of Digital Humanities will continue to evolve reflecting the emerging values of an increasingly diverse community that aspires to be global in the true sense of the word.

Welcome to DHUM 70000: Introduction to the Digital Humanities

Profs. Matthew K. Gold and Krystyna Michael at the CUNY Graduate Center.

What are the digital humanities, and how can they help us think in new ways? This course offers an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities (DH) work, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? How do you think like a humanist with and about data? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed? How can we read “distantly,” and how does “distant reading” alter our sense of what reading is?

Over the course of this semester, we will explore these questions and others as we engage ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches.

Among the themes and approaches we will explore are evidence, scale, representation, genre, quantification, visualization, and data. We will also discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship.

Though no previous technical skills are required, students will be asked to experiment in introductory ways with DH tools and methods as a way of concretizing some of our readings and discussions. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on our course blog and in collaborative annotations) and to undertake a final project that can be either a proposal for a digital project or a seminar paper. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.