What might be the potential role of publics within the current digitisation project of the MFN collections? This research suggests that interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to digitisation can meaningfully enhance the promise of democratization created by the proliferation of online databases of natural history collections. Through developing practices of collaborative prototyping, we hope to experiment with and analyse digitisation beyond technical procedures and infrastructures; examine the democratizing potentials of technological engagement; and, in the process, embrace difference, conflict and political and ethical discussions as resources for knowledge production on the relations between humans, nature and data technologies.
Hagit Keysar is a postdoc of the Minerva Stiftung, her research is practice-based, focuses on civic technologies and their politics, and brings together visual work, activism and critical theory.
Cooperation
This research is funded and supported by the Minerva Stiftung.