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JPICULTURE-Cultural heritage and global change

Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage

Alternative title: Flerspråklige fortolkninger av omtvistet kolonial kulturarv

Awarded: NOK 2.5 mill.

OsloMet participated in the project Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage (PICCH) with the professors Pia Borlund (PI), Nils Pharo, and senior researcher Ying-Hsang Liu. The project was funded under the call Cultural Heritage, Identities & Perspectives: Responding to Changing Societies conducted by the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) on Cultural Heritage in 2020. The project was led by Sheffield Hallam University, UK with the following partners: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL), Aix Marseille University (FR), the company VoiceInteraction - Tecnologias de Processamento da Fala (PT) and OsloMet (NO). Project duration: 2021-2023 The PICCH project was an international, interdisciplinary research project aimed at understanding audio-visual material of colonial origin in European archives. The project was funded by the national research councils of each of the participating research groups from Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and the UK. The project had three archives as co-partners, these were: the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), and the film and photography collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK. The project departed from the premise that, due to the Netherlands, France, and the UK’s history as colonial powers many audio-visual objects in these three archives contain visual and linguistic representations that perpetuate colonial ideologies, employ outdated or offensive terms and perspectives, or were otherwise problematic when viewed through contemporary critical frameworks. The overall ambition of the research project was to open a dialogue between the archives and the users. The task of the OsloMet group was to uncover who the users were, the information needs they had, the search strategies they applied, and the reasons for their search success and failure. Data was collected via questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaire data was collected to gain an understanding of who the users of the archives are, how familiar they are with the content, and what content they search for. Scholars and archivists were interviewed to obtain an understanding of how and why the searched the archives and the challenges they experienced. With respect to who the archive users are, the questionnaire results showed that they mainly have an academic background, e.g., as historians, archivists, university lecturers, and students. Further, the majority of respondents had some or a lot of familiarity with the archives. The users’ information needs were complex and often characterized by consisting of multiple facets. From the questionnaire data we identified four main facets: topic, place, time, and media type. In addition, ‘person’ was applied as a search facet. All five facets were also expressed in the interviews, and we noted the particular importance of person name and geographic place as search terms. Our results nuanced the findings of how archives were searched, we provided examples of many multi-facetted information needs from the questionnaires as well as the interviews. The examples were illustrative of the need for more item-level descriptive metadata. Across the interviewees’ we saw how their information needs matched Ingwersen’s three types of needs, the verificative, conscious topical, and muddled topical information needs. As for the users’ search strategies, we looked at how they planned their strategies. The scholars had in common that they planned for the specific collection they used, and they planned what keywords to search whereas the archivists that we interviewed seemingly did little planning before they searched. That archivists plan less than scholars may be caused by the archivists’ extensive combination of domain knowledge, archival intelligence, and artefactual literacy. The scholars had solid domain knowledge, and it was evident that the complexity of the archive systems made them adapt to the systems and hence improve their archival intelligence. This was for example seen by how time-consuming searching of audio-visual material was decomposed to searching of text only. The search challenges the participants experienced can be characterised as: search system complexity challenges, material challenges, and metadata challenges. The search system complexity challenges and the material challenges were closely related in terms of how users adapted to the systems. The third kind of search challenges, i.e., ‘metadata challenges’, was similarly closely related to the two other types of challenges. The quality of metadata was a challenge and differs across archives and collections. Hence this study contributed to the dialogue between archives and users by highlighting the complexity of the search situation, the diversity of the archive collections, the quality of metadata and the amount of indexed and digitized material, and, not the least, the users’ multi-facetted information needs.

The findings related to postcolonial and decolonisation theories coupled with critical heritage and archival studies form a strong new interdisciplinary direction for the study of colonial-related material and its dissemination. The NFR funded part of the PICCH project has contributed with identification of archive users and insights about their search strategies, their information needs, and the search challenges they experience, which will inform and qualify the infrastructures of the cross-language/natural language processing (NLP) technologies developed by PICCH's project co-partners as part of the European JPICULTURE-Cultural heritage and global change programme. PICCH will produce a co-creation toolkit for cultural heritage institutions to engage with minority communities on the sensitive topic of colonialism. A number of guidelines and best practice relevant for memory organisations responsible for sensitive material to inform future policies on how to decolonise their assets.

Many memory institutions across Europe contain holdings connected with its colonial past which for many years has been a focus of contestation from both communities of origin, ethnic minorities and civil society at large. Challenging questions are being asked by professionals in the field as to what to do with this problematic cultural heritage, from returning items when appropriate, to rewriting the historical context surrounding them in a more critical and inclusive way. This project aims to identify key instances of colonial audio-visual heritage across the three archives involved, draw a common map of shared racialised representations connected with their respective imperial contexts, identify problematic visualisation and language and open up a dialogue between the archives and a variety of users, including archivists, researchers, filmmakers, and grassroots organisations. The digitised colonial audio-visual heritage is provided by three national archives: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. All these archives have a rich collection of original film and sound, some of it produced at the height of empire, ranging from ethnographers' footage for 'educational' purposes to more direct propaganda films to bolster colonial ideologies. We will explore how archival material created in a ‘colonial mindset’ can be re-appropriated and re-interpreted critically to become an effective source for the 'decolonization of the mind' and the basis for a future inclusive society. The overall outcome of PICCH is to engender a polyvocality that can be incorporated into the archive itself providing new ways to enter and explore the past via a contemporary interpretative frame. To this effect advanced technologies will be used to study how to bridge archival and contemporary languages, and to support transnational exploration of multiple archives via a single interactive user interface.

Funding scheme:

JPICULTURE-Cultural heritage and global change