NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant
Spring 2022
Building and expanding on histories of botany and responding to the ongoing violences of colonial collecting, preservation, and display at work in western cultural institutions, our project tackles the digital representation of a perhaps surprising plant that travels the globe in unusual ways at multiple scales: moss.
Moss, in all of its miniscule, microscopic mundanity, might initially seem an odd choice of subject for a humanities-based project, especially after arduous years of existential, ecological, and political challenges. One of the smallest, oldest, and most common plants in the world, bryophytes thrive equally in Antarctica, in tropical rainforests and in the cracks of city pavements. These plants - like the invisible and largely forgotten indigenous subjects, colonial contractors, and female taxonomists who collected, shipped, and identified them - have been largely overlooked by both historians and botanists, ignored in favor of brightly colored orchids and tulips and economically valuable crops like rice and rubber.
In this project, we embrace moss’s ambiguous, downtrodden place as a starting point and provocation for a series of transdisciplinary workshops and the production of an archival website that invite much larger questions of colonial worldviews, systems of classification, and representational challenges and opportunities, many of which still govern the institutions within which the humanities function. Drawing on genres and forms from the creative humanities and with a design-led process, we aim to produce models for digital production that further the rich theoretical landscape of this project – a landscape that spans across the colonial geopolitics of scientific knowledge production, postcolonial and postnormal histories of science through the lens of different colonial subjects, and the incredibly rich world of and around moss.
Our proposal to the NEH focused on three core goals:
Using participatory design methods, which use designed materials to elicit and facilitate conversations, to run a series of interdisciplinary workshops around various issues around the production of disciplinary knowledge;
To have workshop participants produce outputs (texts, artifacts etc.) that speak to those issues and document them in an online archive;
To document the design-led research process (this website) and come up with a series of design frameworks and principles for the creation of transdisciplinary digital archives.
The Proposal
The Workshops
Through a series of three longitudinal workshops, we intend to create facilitated spaces of dialogue between humanists, artists and scientists with the intention of documenting their conversations around the issues we’ve highlighted in both the subject of our work, eliciting reflections and provocations from them, and using the information we gather to think through tangible design frameworks that might aid future researchers in designing transdisciplinary archives. Each of our workshops focuses tightly on giving participants a specific set of themes, frames and questions around:
Scale
How does privileging the mundane, the tiny, and the invisible tell radically new and productive histories of translation, migration, and representation across centuries? How do the geopolitics of knowledge shape both knowledge production and how we come to understand histories of the latter? How do we represent both the spatialities and temporalities of imperial and postcolonial knowledge formations as framing context in digital archives?
Subject
Who participates in knowledge production, and who has access to that knowledge across institutions and systems of power? How do the stories that we tell as historians change when we look beyond economically valuable objects and consider the roles that Indigenous communities, women, or working-class amateurs played in the construction of colonial collections? How can we design for and visualize the challenges of doing justice to the representation of historically excluded actors?
Sensation
How do we incorporate embodied experiences, from differently gendered, racialized, and abled bodies to the sensuous smells and sounds of sites as different as archives and rainforests into digitization work? What new materialities might we encode in the design of digital archives? What new metaphors does the study of bryophytes lend to us as we think of new kinds of digital interfaces and interactions?
A participatory design approach entails thinking about the redesign of digital archives in collaboration with our workshop participants. Design-led approaches to conducting workshops often involve developing tangible artifacts, both to elicit responses and facilitate conversations, and as outcomes from stakeholders that might be used in thinking through the designs of final products.
Practice-Led Research
Cultural Probe Kits
Our team will send participants a packet of resources in the form of a cultural probes kit including imagery, visualizations, a information booklet including prompts and guiding questions, and readings before each workshop, asking each participant to bring in a critical ‘response’ that will guide discussion and experimentation on the day of the workshop. Readings will also be provided beforehand to participants in order to complement the provocations. Together with our prompts and other materials, these readings will become part of a ‘curriculum’ that will be documented as a part of the final project website.
Producing Provocations
After each workshop, we wish to have participants produce something: an essay, sketches, artwork, as a response to the questions that the workshop posed. We hope that these artifacts help give us a sense of what a transdisciplinary archive might look like. Through this, we hope the website will act as a form of living document that showcases a novel approach using participatory design research that future researchers and scholars working in the digital humanities will be able to use and reference.