The digitization of colonial archives opens up many possibilities for exploring collections in new ways – thereby making room for previously hidden perspectives – but it also has its challenges.
Digitizing Colonial Archives: Opportunities and Challenges
Archives are not neutral because they have been created from a certain perspective and preserved for specific purposes. As a result, they contain many biases. Digitizing these collections and making them searchable through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is therefore insufficient. In developing infrastructures it is important to find ways to highlight these biases, counter them where possible and help people navigate them, to be able to explore all of the riches these archives have to offer. To celebrate the inaugural lecture of our project leader Matthias van Rossum on January 24th 2025, GLOBALISE co-organized a symposium to critically reflect on this very theme of Colonial Archives and Meaningful Digital Infrastructures. In the course of four panels that were organized, speakers from diverse fields – historians, digital humanists, artists, archivists, and representatives from the heritage sector – together with attendees on site in Nijmegen and online discussed how to undertake this task in a meaningful and ethical way, and reflected on the challenges and opportunities that come with it.
Following the opening statements by Liedeke Plate, professor of Culture and Inclusivity and director of the Radboud Institute for Culture and History, and Matthias van Rossum, the first panel focused on the worldwide relevance of colonial archives and the potential of digitally unlocking them.
Moderated by heritage specialist and historian Wim Manuhutu, the panellists stressed the importance of access to colonial archives for communities from former colonies and of involving them in developing infrastructures to make them accessible. Nadeera Rupesinghe, the director general of the National Archives of Sri Lanka, highlighted the vital role that colonial archives play in current issues surrounding land ownership in Sri Lanka. Creative producer and visual artist Wisaal Abrahams considered the potential of using the archives to create narratives and experiences that initiate a joint agreement about what colonialism is. Historians Margo Groenewoud and Nancy Jouwe respectively stressed the importance of involving communities in contextualizing colonial archives and treating them as equal stakeholders while doing so.
The second panel, moderated by GLOBALISE’s project manager Lodewijk Petram, focused on what follows after collections have been made searchable by generating transcriptions: how to create meaningful infrastructures? What first became clear from the panel is the value of bringing different archival collections together. Professor Hylkje de Jong, leader of the HUF project, showed how connecting court records that were created in the early modern Dutch Republic to colonial archives can lead to a better and more expansive understanding of the past. Community manager of WO2net and Onsland Thomas van Maaren showed what bringing together different archival collections looks like in practice by discussing three platforms (Oorlogsbronnen, Onsland and Oorlog voor de Rechter) thereby highlighting the importance of contextualisation and user-friendliness. Brecht Nijman and Kay Pepping, GLOBALISE researchers, discussed different ways in which GLOBALISE provides contextualization to the part of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives it works with: through detecting and identifying entities and events, and the creation of reference data and a thesaurus.
Addressing Bias and Contextualization in Digital Infrastructures
After a lunch break, the symposium continued with a panel about bias in the archive as a challenge and a source, moderated by Lodewijk Petram. Mrinalini Luthra and Amber Zijlma, data stewards on the Combatting Bias project, discussed the different kinds of bias that are present in colonial archives, but also in the infrastructures that have been created to make them accessible, such as inventories and indexes. Instead of treating bias as a hindrance, they highlighted ways in which it can be used as a springboard to uncover marginalized perspectives and enrich our historical understanding.
The other panellists subsequently discussed how they put this into practice. Britt van Duijvenvoorde and Pascal Konings of the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) project explained how they try to map and visualize the characterizations of slavery in Asia to make room for people who have systematically been marginalized. GLOBALISE researchers Dung Pham and Henrike Vellinga talked about the project’s dataset on ethnicities, religious groups and castes that contextualizes (often problematic and harmful) terms from the archive to help users find marginalized groups in the archive while still alerting them to the problematic meaning of this terminology and why it is derogatory. Elisabeth Heijmans and Sophie Rose from the Resilient Diversity project demonstrated how to find subaltern people in the database of court records they created.
Engaging Communities and Expanding Access to Archival Collections
The last panel, moderated by GLOBALISE’s outreach officer Melinda Susanto, revolved around the question of how to reach new audiences. Manjusha Kuruppath, team lead at GLOBALISE, reflected on which groups will benefit from the archival accessibility facilitated by the project. Historian Luc Bulten highlighted the need for infrastructural transparency whereby users are made aware of the choices that are made in creating these infrastructures. According to Bulten, users should be told which (parts of) archival collections have been digitized and where they can find other relevant non-digitized collections.
Historian Mark Ponte and sociologist Stephanie Welvaart focused on reaching new audiences by allowing people to add personal stories to colonial archives. Ponte talked about inviting communities to share their views and knowledge about history and to co-create presentations like exhibitions, documentaries and websites, thereby constructing new narratives. Welvaart expressed the need to create a space for emotions where people can describe and share what it means for them to read about the history they are or feel connected to, and to place these stories next to the archival material itself.
The principal message that was echoed by various speakers in the symposium was the vital need to involve different stakeholders – from researchers to people from the former colonies – in creating meaningful digital infrastructures for unlocking colonial archives. It was reiterated that the colonial archives need to be contextualized in a way that does justice to the past and offers the means to explore its contents in accordance with today’s needs. In doing so, projects and persons have to be transparent about the choices they make when creating digital infrastructures and highlight the biases that are present or still persist in the archives, and parts of the infrastructure. This ensures that users are entrusted with all the information they need to be able to use the digitized colonial archives ethically, responsibly and optimally. After all, the colonial archives hold a wide range of meanings for different people and communities. They should not only serve as a useful source for historical research but can also be a deeply personal window into the pasts of individuals and societies, revealing how colonialism shaped the past and present.
