This paper describes progress of the ongoing postdoctoral project ARCVIS. The project is funded by a two-year individual fellowship from Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (2019-2021). ARCVIS gathers, maps, and disseminates representations of Indigenous peoples in the western Arctic (Greenland, Canada, Alaska) between 1800 and 1880. The material is comprised of watercolours, pencil sketches, photographs, and prints, such as lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. The visual material is scattered in archives around the world and this project's aim is to gather that material together and display it geographically, linked to its places of origin in the Arctic. A key element of this project is the collation and interpretation of the material through an open access online geospatial platform, which combines the visuality of exploration and travel with digital methods that seek to bring out the richly contextual information often bypassed in visual documentary records. The project will present the peopled western Arctic that was encountered by 'explorers.' Through the analysis of picture and text in archives and published nineteenth-century texts, it will strive to give 'voice' to the Indigenous people who were key to the success or failure of expeditions from the south. The project challenges the common outsider perception of the Arctic, which is often seen as an empty, icy region, devoid of human populations. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has not been possible to include 'new' archival sources and the online platform will now only use images and texts available online and in the public domain.
1 Umeå University, Sweden eavan.odochartaigh@umu.se 1.1
In this paper, I describe my ongoing work on the project Arctic Visible (ARCVIS), a two-year postdoctoral research project funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions Individual Fellowship as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 839477). The project gathers, maps, and disseminates approximately one thousand nineteenth-century representations of IndigeCopyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). nous people in the western Arctic (present-day Alaska, Canada, and Greenland) alongside associated textual extracts. These images include watercolours, pencil sketches, prints in travel narratives and periodicals, and photographs; they are located at archives around the world with large amounts of material preserved at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge (SPRI), Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa (LAC), the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (NMM), and the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo (KHM) among others. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to carry out any archival research due to the pandemic and the project now relies on material freely available in the public domain. The project creates an open-access geodatabase that connects the representations with their geographical origins. By connecting picture to place, the project seeks to virtually ‘return’ these cultural artefacts to people in the Arctic. Furthermore, the project aims to unsettle the dominating narratives of the empty, isolated, barren Arctic by showing the very peopled places and complex environments that travellers to the Arctic encountered in the nineteenth century. The project also includes the work of Indigenous artists and, in particular, instances where the Indigenous insider depicts the ‘explorer’ outsider, giving us a rare view through a reversed lens. 1.2
The data takes many different forms. It includes diminutive watercolours and sketches, handwritten notes, inscriptions, personal journals, hand-coloured photographs, as well as secondary prints such as lithographs, engravings and woodcuts. The prints are most often located in published travel narratives, periodicals and folios. The type of media is of great importance to the project; prints made in the metropole differ in style and content to documentary art made aboard an expedition ship and rough sketches usually contain richer information than photographs or artistic lithographs. For example, onthe-spot sketches are more likely to show damage indicating their creation in the field, marks indicating their handling afterwards, and inscriptions such as names of subjects, locations, and exact dates. These inscriptions and indicators provide us with rich sources of information that are often missing from published material.
Unfortunately, the current COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible to conduct
the archival research that was planned for late spring and summer 2020, meaning that
the project now relies solely on available digital sources. Metadata has so far been
gathered from the online catalogues of LAC, SPRI museum, KHM [
The project gathers data held at archives and museums around the world, as well as
published material, and includes image files, textual extracts, and metadata that is
augmented by the project. An important aspect is ascertaining where pictures were created
and who or what they depict. Material collected so far includes that created in
Greenland, Nunavut and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (Canada), and northern and western
Alaska. New data that is added aims to include locations (where the images were made
and/or the place they depict) using the GeoNames geographical database to give them
identifiers [
The data from the online portal will be placed in a suitable data repository approved by Re3data enabling reuse independently of the lifespan of the website and assuring adherence to the FAIR principles.
With the permission of the relevant repositories (some repositories own the copyright of their archives), image files will also be made available and permalinks to material already in the public domain will be provided. A text file will also be created to provide supporting documentation explaining the data. 3
The ARCVIS project portal will enable users to search for visual material in several
ways but perhaps most significantly by location on the map. It is hoped that the project
portal will prove to be a resource for local communities in the Arctic as well as
academic researchers. This will enable users to search within their geographic area of
interest. In a sense, it is hoped that this portal can allow Arctic communities to ‘reclaim’
a part of their heritage that is currently scattered in various archival catalogues, digital
libraries, and databases worldwide. This project draws together a wealth of resources
and uses documentary texts such as journals and travel narratives to pinpoint the
original locations of images. Historical geographer Felix Driver observes that the “visual
archive of travel” (and, I would add, the mapping of that archive) has the potential to
be used in Indigenous land claim settlements [
The Arctic region suffers from sweeping generalizations and is often viewed by
outsiders as one homogenous area, however, this project will show not only portraits of
people but also scenes that include settlements and considerable environmental
information. The maps of documentary art and photography that the project creates will open
up new avenues for researchers as well as showing the Arctic as a region that is highly
localised and specific. Importantly, the majority of the images were created by visitors
to the Arctic, mostly expedition members, and show the huge significance of
Indigenous people to the expeditions. Such exploration would have been increasingly
difficult, if not impossible, without that support. As Ellen Boucher notes, expeditions were
not above appropriating Inuit survival techniques, but their debt to Inuit was “easily
obscured and forgotten” [