As a Cultural Heritage Informatics fellow, I am taking the first step toward making information about two prototypes of settler colonization – the United States and French Algeria – available for high school and undergraduate students and educators, as well as early-stage researchers and the general public through a website, entitled “Settler Colonialism Uncovered.”
This project will focus on where, how, and why settler colonies developed in these locations and will allow users to explore the regions’ geography, how the landscape and demographics changed over time due to the influx of settlers, and how colonial administrators, settlers, and Indigenous communities experienced these changes. Using the geospatial and temporal visualization capabilities of either Omeka/Neatline or VisualEyes, the interface will be an interactive temporal map of the focus regions with a narrative text and underneath, collections of primary sources, including sketches, news articles, treaties, transcribed speeches, correspondence, and selections from military reports and memoirs. It is my hope that this site will eventually serve as a repository for oral histories from colonized Indigenous populations so that their voices may be heard (literally and figuratively) alongside text-based sources that have historically been produced primarily by the colonizers. Thus, this project will be one step toward decolonizing historical memory and present the story of settler colonialism as it unfolded in two significant regions from multiple perspectives to encourage users to think critically about the past, especially that which feels most familiar, and develop informed perspectives about present socio-political debates.
Check out my Cultural Heritage Informatics tab above to read more about this exciting new outreach project.
