What kind of thing is a museum catalogue

Biography
Hannah is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where she is researching how museums catalogue and digitize Indigenous material heritage.

Abstract
What kind of thing is a museum catalogue? Is it an object that structures and narrates engagement with history and therefore with the present and future? Does it narrate meaningful engagements with originating communities? What kind of stories can we tell using this kind of documentation practice? This lighting talk explores the simultaneous durability and flexibility of museum information systems as collections of stories and narratives. What possibilities arise when alternate or marginalized practices engage with dominant forms of recording in institutions such as the modern museum?

As museums and other cultural institutions deal with the issue of fundamental differences in knowledge systems, new digital documentation methods are practiced. What other categorizations could produce entirely different meaningful understandings of objects? What new encounters are born in the wake of digital museums?

This talk is intended as a probe, but also as an introduction to my doctoral research on museum catalogues and documentation practices that are brought into contact with what are often called “Indigenous knowledge schemes” or “Indigenous ways of knowing”. I use museum databases as a way to explore how perceived fundamental differences or ways of seeing can be usefully addressed in public cultural heritage institutions in Canada. I look particularly at museums that seek to represent history in ways that pay respect to the multitudinous ways meaning is created, sustained and experienced.