=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2865/short9
|storemode=property
|title=Arctic Visible: Mapping the Visual Representations of Indigenous Peoples in the Nineteenth-Century Western Arctic
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/short9.pdf
|volume=Vol-2865
|authors=Eavan O’Dochartaigh
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/dhn/ODochartaigh20
}}
==Arctic Visible: Mapping the Visual Representations of Indigenous Peoples in the Nineteenth-Century Western Arctic==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/short9.pdf
Arctic Visible: Mapping the Visual Representations of
Indigenous Peoples in the Nineteenth-Century Western
Arctic
Eavan O’Dochartaigh1[0000-0001-5529-5625]
1 Umeå University, Sweden
eavan.odochartaigh@umu.se
Abstract. 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 dissemi-
nates representations of Indigenous peoples in the western Arctic (Greenland,
Canada, Alaska) between 1800 and 1880. The material is comprised of watercol-
ours, 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 geospa-
tial 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 Arc-
tic 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’ ar-
chival sources and the online platform will now only use images and texts avail-
able online and in the public domain.
Keywords: Mapping, Arctic, Indigenous, Visual, Nineteenth-Century.
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
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 in-
novation programme (grant agreement No 839477). The project gathers, maps, and dis-
seminates approximately one thousand nineteenth-century representations of Indige-
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
180
nous people in the western Arctic (present-day Alaska, Canada, and Greenland) along-
side 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 Na-
tional 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 Arc-
tic. 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 in-
cludes 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.
Fig. 1. Map of the Arctic Region showing the areas of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.
181
1.2 Data Types and Problems
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 con-
tent to documentary art made aboard an expedition ship and rough sketches usually
contain richer information than photographs or artistic lithographs. For example, on-
the-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 gath-
ered from the online catalogues of LAC, SPRI museum, KHM [10, 15, 17]. Websites
such as the Illustration Archive (based at Cardiff University) [8] and the HathiTrust
Digital Library [7] are also invaluable for the research. However, the pandemic makes
it difficult to obtain material that has not been previously photographed and to discover
uncatalogued material. Other potential problems include copyright issues meaning that
permissions to display images will have to be sourced individually from separate insti-
tutions, although, even when it is not possible to obtain/display an image the metadata
of that image can still be mapped.
2 Approach and Methodology
2.1 Data Collection
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 aug-
mented 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 Green-
land, 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 [6] and supplemented by regional databases. These include the Inuit Heritage
Trust Place Names Program [9] (Nunavut), NunaGIS [13] (Greenland) and Alaska Na-
tive Place Names [1]. Historical place names as well as those used today are included
in the database and when it is not possible to ascertain a location, a distinct symbol will
used to indicate that this is the case. Different data sources are gathered together man-
ually and information entered into an Excel spreadsheet using approximately 25 fields
based on ‘Dublin Core’ metadata terms [5]. Fields include the name of the archival
repository where the material image is held, its archive number and its contents, making
each picture findable for future researchers. Each record has a unique identifier based
182
on the original date of its making, its artist, and a short title
(YYYYMMDD_Artist_ShortTitle). A large proportion of records from this spread-
sheet and their associated images will form the basis of the open-access online portal.
Following the completion of the project, all the tabulated data will be preserved and
made available as an open-access, reusable .csv file.
Table 1. Sample Data Entry Showing the Field Names and Data.
Field Example
Filename (date, artist, short title) 18300109_Ross_FirstCommunication
Title (Inscription where present) First Communication
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/cata-
File
logue/article/y66.3.48/
Creator (Artist/Photographer) Ross, John
Engraver N/A
Date: From 1830
Date: To 1830
Format (Medium) Watercolour
Level 1
GeoNames ID near 5952057
Historic Location Felix Harbour
Location Near Felix Harbour
Territory/Municipality/Region Nunavut
Country/State Canada
Size h x w cm 14.5 x 22.5
Type Scene
Season Winter
Expedition Ross 1829-33
Source Scott Polar Research Institute
Identifier (Archive Number) Y: 66/3/48
See Ross, p. 242. “Going on shore this morning, one
Associated Text of the seamen informed me that strangers were seen
from the observatory.” (242)
This watercolour was reproduced as a print for Ross's
Notes Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north-west
passage.
Subject Netsilik, Inuit, British, Naval, Contact
In the Inuit Heritage Trust Place Names Program, the
place of first contact between Ross's expedition and
Inuit Heritage Trust Place Names
Netsilik Inuit is given as Qaplunasiuqvik.
Latitude 69.9839147; Longitude -92.0442772
183
2.2 Working with Sensitive Material
Although the representations do not depict living people, the material and their titles
can be overtly racist in their contents, design, and choice of words. The material, despite
its age, still requires a reflexive approach and ethical sensitivity “based on careful con-
siderations, continual reflections and conscious choices at every step of the project” [3].
Titles of pictures can also be problematic and the guidelines for writing culturally sen-
sitive titles established by Library and Archives Canada [11] will be followed where
necessary. This allows for creating a new title in square brackets, whilst retaining orig-
inal formal titles used by the museums or artists/photographers.
2.3 Online Portal
The research project will likely use a combination of open source tools, such as Word-
Press, Omeka, Neatline, and StoryMapJS [18, 14, 12, 16], to build a user-friendly and
attractive platform in 2021 that will encourage use by the broadest possible spectrum
of people. It is particularly important for the project that not only researchers make use
of the data, but that it is freely accessible and usable by local communities in the Arctic,
whose members are located thousands of kilometres from the archives that hold the
original pictures that depict their local areas and the people who lived there in the nine-
teenth century. Information about the project is being disseminated to Arctic organiza-
tions and it is hoped that the website and its material can be used in educational settings
for example.
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 copy-
right of their archives), image files will also be made available and permalinks to ma-
terial already in the public domain will be provided. A text file will also be created to
provide supporting documentation explaining the data.
3 Impact
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 aca-
demic researchers. This will enable users to search within their geographic area of in-
terest. 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 origi-
nal 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 [4].
184
The Arctic region suffers from sweeping generalizations and is often viewed by out-
siders as one homogenous area, however, this project will show not only portraits of
people but also scenes that include settlements and considerable environmental infor-
mation. 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 Indige-
nous people to the expeditions. Such exploration would have been increasingly diffi-
cult, 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” [2].
References
1. Alaska Native Place Names, https://www.uaf.edu/anla/collections/map/names/, last ac-
cessed 2020/11/26.
2. Boucher, E.: Arctic Mysteries and Imperial Ambitions: The Hunt for Sir John Franklin and
the Victorian Culture of Survival. Journal of Modern History 90, 40–75 (2018).
3. Cocq, C.: Reading Small Data in Indigenous Contexts: Ethical Perspectives. In: Griffin, G.,
etal. (eds.) Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities, pp. 112–
125. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (2015).
4. Driver, F.: Material Memories of Travel: The Albums of a Victorian Naval Surgeon. Journal
of Historical Geography 69, 32–54 (2020).
5. Dublin CoreTM Metadata Initiative, https://dublincore.org, last accessed 2020/11/25.
6. GeoNames, http://www.geonames.org.
7. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://www.hathitrust.org, last accessed 2020/11/25.
8. Illustration Archive, https://illustrationarchive.cf.ac.uk, last accessed 2020/11/26.
9. Inuit Heritage Trust Place Names Program, http://ihti.ca/eng/place-names/pn-goog.html,
last accessed 2020/11/25.
10. Library and Archives Canada, Collection Search, https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/collec-
tionsearch/Pages/collectionsearch.aspx, last accessed 2020/11/25.
11. Library and Archives Canada, Writing Titles for Descriptions of Indigenous-Related Ar-
chival Materials, https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/initia-
tives/Pages/Indigenous-related-archival-materials-title-descriptions.aspx, last accessed
2020/11/26.
12. Neatline, https://neatline.org, last accessed 2020/11/25.
13. NunaGIS Kortportal, https://nunagis-asiaq.hub.arcgis.com/pages/kortportal, last accessed
2020/11/25.
14. Omeka Classic, https://omeka.org/classic/, last accessed 2020/11/25.
15. Polar Art Collection, The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute,
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/catalogue/bpa/, last accessed 2020/11/25.
16. StoryMapJS, https://storymap.knightlab.com, last accessed 2020/11/25.
17. Universitetsmuseenes fotoportal, http://www.musit.uio.no/foto, last accessed 2020/11/25.
18. WordPress, https://wordpress.com, last accessed 2020/11/25.