About the Research Application
The Research Application is part of the data hub in the project 'Against Opacity'. This hub is a central access point for researchers and stakeholders from countries of origin for questions regarding colonial collections in the Netherlands. It brings together collections and objects from a colonial context present in Dutch museums and institutions. Through the research application, the user can access the data sets from these collections and get an answer to the question: what is present in The Netherlands? And how did it get there? In this way, the application supports the implementation of the Dutch policy on restitution.
Next to working on the accessibility problem of colonial collections in The Netherlands, the research application facilitates cooperation between stakeholders, communities, and researchers. This is done through features that allow users to add information, perspectives, and context to objects and collections of objects.
At the end of June 2023, the first version of the research application was made available containing all objects and persons from the data sets visible in the Dataset Browser. Users will notice that the application is very basic – although it works, it contains few features, a lot of dirty data, and a lot of comments like ‘not implemented’, ‘unknown’ etc. This is entirely by choice. The data hub team rather shows what data is available right now so that users can start giving feedback immediately, instead of waiting for improvements. Over the coming months, more and more features will be implemented, and data will be cleaned. The order and priority of the work are highly dependent on user feedback.
If you would like to have a look at the roadmap of the project, please click here. Curious to find out which data sets are currently present in the research applications? Please look at the Dataset Browser.
Project
The consortium initiated the project 'Against Opacity' in January 2023. The goal of this project is making datasets from museums and other institutions more transparent. The datasets must contain data that contributes to provenance research of objects collected in colonial context. Opacity/Transparency is considered as any hindrance that limits users in accessing data.
The project has three work programmes: (1) building trust, (2) from data opacity to data transparency, and (3) co‐creating knowledge of the past for the present and the future. Each work programme is further divided into tasks and activities for which project proposals are submitted to the consortium.
Within the work program 'From data opacity to Data transparency' the main task is the creation of an online research guide and the data hub. This is especially important for collections distributed across different institutions. The data hub will facilitate the matching of datasets across institutions based on categories such as people, events, and geography.
Context
For more information about the context of the project and the broader policies, please visit the Colonial Collections Consortium webiste at https://colonialcollections.nl/.