Today, digital databases are at the heart of research endeavors in the humanities across the board – oftentimes in the context of historical injustices and systemic violence with consequences until the present day; e.g. provenance research, research about the transatlantic slave trade, colonial networks etc. Increasingly, institutions refer to their obligation to the FAIR and CARE principles.
But still: transforming historical data into digital databases is, in most cases, just a change in the carrier medium: from information captured on paper to the ephemeral, to zeros and ones. And in doing so, the original points-of-view, ideologies, objectives are reproduced.
Or as others put it:
„Over and above the ritual of making secret, it seems clear that the archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority, which involves placing certain documents in an archive at the same time as others are discarded. The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.“
– Achille Mbembe: “The Power of the Archive and its Limits“, in: Refiguring the Archive (2001).
„[T]he hallmarks of colonialism in the cultural record—fissures and lacunas, politics of representation that render subjects of the Global South under the gaze of the Global North, and complicity in the act of world making—are being ported over into the digital cultural record, unthinkingly, without malice, in part because postcolonial critique has not made many inroads in the practices of digital humanities. […] As a result, the digital cultural record is in danger of telling the story of humanity from the perspective of the Global North alone.
In fact, colonialism within the cultural record is not only being reproduced but is also being amplified by virtue of the fact that the digital cultural record is constructed and disseminated publicly, online, in a digital milieu beset with its own politics of identity.“
– Roopika Risam: New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (2019).
„This requires first and foremost that we reconceive all data as capta. Differences in the etymological roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.“
– Johanna Drucker: “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display“, DHQ 5.1 (2011).
„The new colonial histories that can emerge are not dependent on archives as sources alone, but on an appreciation that the very production of documents and the genres in which they appear (commissions, semi-official correspondence, district reports, classified inquiries) are not just traces of colonial bureaucrats securing their jobs.
These are powerful technologies of rule where racial categories were altered, where new classifications were tried out, and where selective knowledge and disregard rather than more knowledge could confer more power.“
– Ann Stoler: “On Archival Labor: Recrafting Colonial History“, Diálogo Andino (2015).