This project is about knowledge production.

And about the bias and power inherent to data, databases, any kind of archive, and hence to knowledge production – both then and now.

The aim of DYNARCHIVING is to contribute to the slowly but surely emerging debate on data bias and to offer approaches to de-bias knowledge production. Especially while the data is being used.

As the word itself implies: it is about transforming archival material into something dynamic, highlighting its performative and unstable quality – as a disruptive counter-proposal to a finite and sure entity.
The archive is permanently created and re-created – with agency.

It is what the media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst called a dynamic archive, or “dynarchive”. He did so in reference to the digital archive as “memory institution and storage technology”. 
I adapted this term, sitting somewhere between “archive” and its subversive archival-turn-counterpart “anarchive”: “dynarchiving” – using the present participle on purpose: as an emphasis on the dynamic aspects of the acts of subjective knowledge production – and their ongoing, lasting impact.

This project is meant as a creative and practical intervention to address an as yet oftentimes overlooked problematic.

While feeling obligated to the FAIR  and  CARE  principles, alternatives to the visual-centred tools for visually impaired users was beyond the scope during the four months of the fellowship. Perhaps the available first versions can be a stepping stones for further developments.

You can contribute: with input for the chatbot-tool.

Here is an overview of the toolkit – and all available free tools.
You can find the code for every single tool on Github.
They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Who is behind the project?

I did my PhD in postcolonial literature, then worked as a journalist for over 20 years before returning to academia to focus on provenance research and museum work. From 2021 to 2023, I was part of a research project about the 19th-century German ethnographer and traveller Wilhelm Joest at RJM; wrote a biography about Joest and co-edited an annotated anthology containing Joest’s original texts (→ the books).
I currently work in Berlin as a freelance researcher; among my recent projects was the concept for a collection database, research about the colonial entanglements of a group of people buried in Berlin’s Nikolaikirche, and an ongoing basic research project about two companies in the GDR and how they expropriated and exported antiquarian books on a large scale. 
From May to August 2025, I was a senior research fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and started to develop DYNARCHIVING: the tools, for one; and a theoretical, normative underpinning, using a provenance research perspective: one that shifts the focus on the provenance of data in order to highlight agency in metadata.

Talks:
May 2025:
“Dynarchiving: Against the Bias of Data”
(BCDSS Bonn)

August 2025:
“The Provenance of Data: Confronting the Bias of Archives”
(IISG Amsterdam)

More info:
LinkedIn-Profile
www.annehaeming.de