ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Digitising Plants, Networking Empire: Colonial Afterlives of the Kew Herbarium and Calcutta Botanic Garden Archives

• In Event: Findings in Digital Humanities 2: Modern

English Abstract

This paper investigates how practices of extraction, digitisation, and visualisation shape (and often distort) histories constructed from plant specimens held in colonial herbaria. Applying social network analysis (SNA) to data from the Kew Herbarium Digitisation Project, I examine both the methodological possibilities of SNA for histories of science and the ways contemporary digitisation practices reproduce older regimes of erasure. Recent scholarship notes that mass digitisation at institutions concentrated in the Global North risks reinscribing the epistemic hierarchies and datafication practices that underpinned nineteenth-century imperial science. As plant specimens move from field collection to metropolitan curation and ultimately into digital infrastructures, each stage privileges some forms of information while selectively obscuring the labour of collectors, curators, and transcribers—past and present.

To counter these abstractions, the paper draws on extensive archival research conducted in Kolkata, including herbarium records and administrative correspondence at the Calcutta Botanic Garden and the State Archives of West Bengal. Combining this “close” reading of colonial recordkeeping with the “distant” reading afforded by SNA reveals what is flattened, anonymised, or lost through digitisation. A case study of British colonial official James Ramsay Drummond (1851–1921) illustrates this approach: while SNA highlights his dense network of Indian collaborators in western Punjab, archival sources clarify why his network remains surprisingly detached from the central actors who governed specimen circulation in colonial-era Kolkata. This case demonstrates how foregrounding peripheral connections makes visible the plural, materially grounded scientific worlds often obscured when digital methods remain uncritical of their (post)colonial genealogies.

Author

• John Schaefer, University of Cambridge