Prior to the workshop day, we sent each of our attendees a set of three texts each of the principal investigators had written thinking about the topic of scale, as a way to get our attendees thinking and inspire them.

In her piece, Subject Awareness, Elaine traces the subjects marginal or only alluded to in William Mitten’s curated bryophyte collections: expats like Richard Spruce who commissioned unnamed and unknown indigenous collectors, and women collectors and taxonomists like Flora Mitten, who is someone nameable among so many other anonymous contributors. She reflects on the labor and practices that attempt to bring to light, or fill in the gaps, in the stories and histories around moss collections. 

Tega Brain’s essay, Missing Datasets, continues this theme in her discussion of the absence of significant actors from collections, archives, and databases. Tega begins by pointing to the lack of attention to subjects impacted through the technological infrastructures that are themselves invisible, yet instrumental, in supporting contemporary forms of life, such as people who live on the lands where data servers are held and maintained. In taking up the artist Mimi Onuaha’s concept of ‘missing datasets’, she ponders on the possibility of representation to point to absences that cannot be filled in historical datasets.

In Bryophyte Sight, Ahmed Ansari plays with the idea of the trace, or the way that the invisible past still continues to glean through the present. Noting how the almost entirely invisible figure of the native collector - in his view, a subaltern subject that cannot speak through the archives - nevertheless ‘speaks’ as trace in the practices of modern botanical observation and analysis, through the ways in which botanists and curators alike translate moss into what we know about it.