Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data

Abstract

For readers of this special issue, data are likely defined in technical terms as established by information and computer scientists. Data, for the informaticist, are facts, measurements or statistics. For the historian, data are historical remnants—often preserved by an archive. For the anthropologist, data can be quantitative or qualitative depending on the question and methods. Disciplinary methods aside, data are not value-neutral and thus must be contextualized in terms of their acquisition, analysis, and interpretation in order to transform data into information. For humanists, the cultural complexities of data and information are not new. Anthropologists, historians, linguists, museum curators, and archivists have long probed the contextual subjectivities of knowledge production and representation. From ink and quill maps representing the New World to the carefully stratified layers of an archeological site, data in the humanities are always subject to the systems of knowledge that were used to capture, represent, and disseminate them.