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Retracing the Mobile Object
Digitising Biographies of Aboriginal Material Culture
Abstract The essay gives an overview about the benefits of applying a mixed method design in order to examine the appropriation practices of Aboriginal objects in Australia during the 19th and 20th century. The methodological combination of a quantitative data collection and a qualitative comparative perspective on the acquiring process and appropriation of the objects offers a unique view on the entanglements of local cultural material and global collector networks. The examination of written sources such as letters, diaries, official government reports, exhibition catalogues, contemporary publications and the objects themselves can be supplemented with statistical analysis of an online collected dataset in order to inform each other to the extent that the analytic outcome is greater than the sum of the parts. Most notably, the quantitative approach allows insights about competing explanations and helps to reason case selection strategies for the qualitative perspective, whereas these case studies help to advance the quality of measurement procedures and model specifications used within the statistical analysis. The essay addresses questions such as the identification of quantitative patterns within the history of appropriating aboriginal material as well as individual circumstances which caused the appropriation of an object. Moreover, the essay advocates for the importance of publishing replication files in order to lead to more transparency of the intersections of particular sensitive historical events and their (re-) analysis.
Keywords Australia, Collectors, Indigeneity, Mixed Methods, Statistical Analysis
