Data-bodies and data activism: Presencing women in digital heritage research

Abstract

As heritage-as-the-already-occurred folds into heritage-in-the-making practices, temporal and spatial fluidity is made more complex by digital mediation and particularly by big data. Such liveliness evokes ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges. Drawing on more-than-human theorizing, this paper reframes the notion of data-bodies to advance data activist-oriented research in heritage. Focused primarily on women, it examines how their distributed agency and voice with respect to data practices and the (re)makings of (digital) heritage could be amplified. I describe three methodological directions, influenced by feminist work in critical data studies, which could be employed by researchers: attuning to and becoming with data, making data physical, and changing narratives. From databodies to haunted data, performative data curation and mapping data-bodies, and attuning to data streams and re-voicing narratives, this paper contributes to discussions of how to engage critically and creatively with the datafication of digital heritage practices, knowings and ontologies.