Hacking Cultural Heritage Collections to Understand the Limits of Access

Invited presentation in Deakin University’s Contemporary Histories Research Group History Seminar Series

The practice of historical research has been changed by the large volume of cultural heritage collections now available online. But as we celebrate the convenience of digital access, we also need to be aware of how ‘access’ itself is constructed and constrained — what is ‘accessible’ and why? In this seminar I want to explore hacking as a method for asking critical questions about cultural heritage collections. As historians, I’ll suggest, we should be prepared to engage not just with sources delivered through online systems, but with the technical, political, and bureaucratic processes that create such systems. To do this, we need to turn interfaces against themselves and understand what they hide as well as what they reveal.