Database Assemblages: Understanding Cultural Heritage Collections Infrastructures as Techno-Social Actors

This thesis proposes a medium theoretical interpretation of the collections database, which is positioned as a key constituent in the production of meanings and narratives within digitised and born-digital cultural heritage collections. A collections database is an infrastructure made up of object records, which contain structured and unstructured metadata descriptions of objects in a museum or archival collection. The study of these infrastructures is urgent given their implication in the overall politics of the collection and contributes to recent movements to decolonise, reinterpret, and diversify cultural heritage institutions and their collections, exploring how these movements might be reflected in, enacted through, or even impeded by database infrastructures. My research uses data ethnography as a method for interpreting the collections database; through close analysis and thick description, I produce it as an assemblage of lively object records, mediated through an infrastructure that is constructed through processes of negotiation between museum workers, activists, institutions, and publics. This research is informed by three case studies based on recent cultural heritage projects. The first explores efforts to reunify digitally the dispersed and deaccessioned Wellcome Collection, proposing a relation of ambivalence which underpins the construction of institutional databases in a postcolonial context. I investigate how the infrastructure’s ability to produce new collection narratives by establishing novel materialities and relations between object records is balanced with its capacity to remediate and reinscribe the harms of prior modes of categorisation. A second case study focuses on the digital archive of the campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland and considers the database as a historiographical technology. Here, I argue that the archival database of the Digital Repository of Ireland provides the foundation for the future narration of Irish abortion activism at the same time as it reactivates political and historical tensions that animated the campaign. The third case study, on the development of CIDOC-CRM, a linked data ontology for the description of cultural heritage data objects, examines the representational mechanisms of the database standard, moving beyond the limits of discussions of bias in data structures through close attention to the production of the CRM’s epistemological outlook. Drawing on insights from all three of these case studies, this thesis offers a plural account of the database form that seeks to understand its materialities and immaterialities, discursive and operational capabilities, capacity for novelty and continuity with prior forms, and possibilities for both liberation and enclosure. I consider the database as an affective form, whose usage in heritage contexts is rooted in relations of emotion – trust, ambivalence, shame – and whose infrastructures become active participants in the transmission of affect through the collection. I also argue for ethnographic attention as a constructive critical force in the medium theoretical interpretation of technological forms, which are always already imbricated with the human social world; the richly complicated portrait of the cultural heritage database infrastructure that emerges through this type of attention firmly establishes the database as an object of critical study, and offers a possible way through the challenges of decolonising the digital museum.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Delaney, Orla

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bassett, Caroline

• digital humanities
• cultural heritage
• database
• information systems
• reproductive rights
• decolonisation
• collections management
• museum studies

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/1aa5b20c-d63b-4f62-8d52-fee599cea2a5/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0002-7114-7929

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/393799