Decolonizing RDM

To decolonize Research Data Management (RDM) is to commit to preventing further harms and trying to undo or repair previous colonial violence. Artists at the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence are actively working with librarians, designers, and information and IT professionals to define and develop alternatives to decolonize RDM.

“The classificatory decisions – the rules by which information is placed or not placed within the archive – determines the very existence of some people, or the writing of a history of a people in a sense. […] At stake in replicating the strategies of archival practices, particularly colonial archival practices, are the very possibilities of what is sayable from within and to society’s margins” (Mark Campbell 2018).

“Problems of omission and bias within data show up […] in both familiar and distinctive forms.” Moltrup (2019) highlights the under-representation of women in archives of graphic design. […] Murphy and Villaespesa (2020) point to museum bias and machine bias combined” (Stephen Boyd Davis et al. 2021).

We are reimagining what a research data repository does, how it functions, what it makes possible, and for whom it serves.