On Digital Access and Ownership
To what extent can digitising museum collections improve accessibility and transparency? Who makes data and knowledge digitally available and for whom? And do these efforts have a real impact on the communities and countries from where ancestral collections and knowledge were extracted? Lives of Objects: Online Gathering #3 will illuminate the contrast between African-led and European approaches to digital accessibility and transparency, giving attention to important initiatives such as the Ghana Restitution Inventory Project and Digital Benin. In this discussion, Karen Ijumba, senior researcher of Open Restitution Africa, will be joined by Anne Luther, a specialist for digital heritage and a digital humanities scholar and principal investigator for Digital Benin, by Eiloghosa Oghogho Obobaifo, Nigerian anthropologist and researcher, and member of the Digital Benin Project, and by Temi Odumosu, an art historian, curator and assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School in Seattle (USA).
BIOGRAPHIES
Dr. Anne Luther is a strategic advisor and technology expert with a focus on digital heritage. Her work employs technology, design, and humanities research for the interaction, exploration, and opening of cultural heritage preserved and represented in digital data. She is the founder of
The Institute for Digital Heritage — which opens access to digital information about culture, artefacts, traditions and materiality — and principal investigator for
Digital Benin. As an expert on digitisation, Luther has worked with various museums and cultural institutions internationally on digital projects the German Museum Federation and RUSTlab at Ruhr University Bochum, among others.
Dr. Temi Odumosu is an interdisciplinary scholar and curator at the University of Washington Information School in Seattle, with a creative teaching practice focussed on developing critical awareness about information technology’s role within society, particularly how unfinished colonial histories and their inequalities haunt data, uses of information, and technology design. Her research and curatorial work are engaged with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, racial coding in popular culture, post-memorial art and performance, image ethics and cultural heritage digitization. Odumosu is the author of
Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017).
Eiloghosa Oghogho Obobaifo is a Nigerian anthropologist and researcher, currently pursuing a Master of Science in Anthropology with a focus on Museum Studies at the University of Benin, Benin City. In her career so far, her contribution to the development of Ẹyo Otọ in the Digital Benin Project stands out. In her role as a Project Researcher and Data Steward at the Museum Am Rothenbaum in Hamburg, Germany, which she holds currently, Eiloghosa played a pivotal role in gathering, documenting, and digitising collected data from Nigerian museums and archives, making cultural treasures more accessible and preserving them for future generations. She is also deeply involved with the Edo Museum of West African Arts (EMOWAA), where she served as a Researcher and Stakeholder Engagement Consultant. Her dedication to knowledge exchange and fostering connections among diverse backgrounds is evident in her facilitation of networking sessions within the EMOWAA Open Learning Programme.
Karen Byera Ijumba has worked at the intersection of research, cultural heritage, creativity and digital knowledge management for over 10 years. She holds an LLB and BA (Hons) in heritage and public culture from UCT, and an MA in arts and culture management from Wits. She enjoys encountering different ways of being, looking at things as puzzles and maps, and thinking through how bits come together under one nuanced conceptual umbrella. She is currently the senior researcher at
Open Restitution Africa.
Lives of Objects: Virtual Gatherings Curator
Sofia Lovegrove is a Portuguese-British independent researcher, curator, and heritage professional based in the Netherlands. Her research lies at the intersection of critical heritage and memory studies, with a focus on the colonial past, the role of representation in engendering narratives of belonging, and decolonial and reparative practices. She currently works at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, where she focuses on the topics of multiperspectivity, slavery past,colonial heritage and international cooperation. She is an alumni of TheMuseumsLab 2022 and a founding member of the collective
Disrupting & Reorienting Restitution.
Lives of Objects: Virtual Gatherings Moderator
Sherry Davis is an award-winning musician, filmmaker and curator with a passion for utilising the arts to inspire social justice. Her 2022 multi-disciplinary arts project
Ode to the Ancestors, commemorates the Black contribution to conservation and archaeology in East Africa. An exhibition of photographic archives that celebrates Kenyan heritage professionals from in and around the colonial period is on display at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in the UK until 3rd December 2023, and is touring Kenya with the National Museums of Kenya.
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