Dr. Anne Haeming

The current focus of approaches to digital provenance research lies on freely accessible digital databases in Europe as the key to opening up European archives, creating transparency, and enabling institutions, stakeholders, and affected communities and individuals to participate in a multi-perspective process of "Aufarbeitung".
The catch: when transforming information/data from index cards, files, and accession books first into data sheets and then into digital databases, only the medium changes. The hierarchical system behind it and hence the ideological approach of the original knowledge collection is reproduced. The asymmetric power structures intrinsic to archives in their role as "implicated subjects" (Michael Rothberg) and the violent potential of data are mostly overlooked in the spectrum of "Digital Humanities": The uncritical reproduction of said violent foundations and the monolithic/eurocentric perspective ingrained in archives is visible on several levels, based on the analysis of dozens of relevant and often quoted paper.
The project’s objective is making visible what’s behind the data: its asymmetrical dependencies, its intrinsic systemic violence, the positionality of the knowledge producers. Especially by showing the data as "capta", making the positioning of the users visible, disrupting the underlying, exclusionary, Eurocentric, violent power gestures of data and databases, in both language and perspective. To that end, the aim is to create disruptive tools (cursors/bots) in order to provide them as an open access toolbox for other institutions and their database projects.

• 2023. Der gesammelte Joest. Biografie eines Ethnologen. Matthes & Seitz Berlin.
• 2023. As editor. With Carl Deußen. Aus Indien nach Santa Cruz durch die Ethnologie. Fragmente des Forschungsreisenden Wilhelm Joest. Matthes & Seitz Berlin.