How to Cite

Schmidt, Friederike: Retracing the Mobile Object: Digitising Biographies of Aboriginal Material Culture, in Wergin, Carsten and Affeldt, Stefanie (Eds.): Digitising Heritage: Transoceanic Connections between Australia and Europe, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2024 (Cultural Heritage: Materiality—Text—Edition (KEMTE), Volume 4), p. 63–72. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1305.c18419

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-96822-223-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-224-0 (Hardcover)

Published

09/26/2024

Authors

Friederike Schmidt

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