Inverting the Wunderkammer, Thinking with Moss

Inverting the Wunderkammer is a digital humanities project that attempts to produce new models for how we might develop new digital collections and archives that speak to the invisible histories of the development of the natural sciences. Modern botanical science is the product of the dynamics of colonial enterprise and empire, of the labor of many unacknowledged figures working across the span of empire’s reach and their suppressed knowledges and practices.

This project was made possible through the generous contributions of the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant and New York University’s Digital Humanities Seed Grant.

This project takes moss, itself also a miniscule and marginal subject in botany, and raises these histories of colonialism and the dynamics of global knowledge production, the labor and practices of marginalized and invisible subjects, and the different forms of representing scientific knowledge and its contexts through a series of workshops with humanists, artists and scientists to think through the contemporary challenges of creating rich transdisciplinary digital repositories.