meeting re-cap & recording: Lidia Ponce de la Vega on the decolonization of digital biodiversity archives

[Devon Olson]

Hello my dear Information Maintainers!

We had a FABULOUS meeting last Friday with Lidia Ponce de la Vega! Thank you so very much Lidia!!

Here is the link to the posted recording!

And here is a brief re-cap of Lidia's presentation and our discussion:

• Lidia's presentation was SO GREAT, with lovely visuals, which I appreciated. I won't try to give a detailed play-by-play, please see the recording for the full experience.
• I will say that I really appreciated the storytelling lens that Lidia adopted to relate how the different layers of the Biodiversity Heritage Library inform and control the stories that the collections tell, "Only a human minority have actual control over these storytelling mechanisms".
• She used the example of the orange trumpetvine to demonstrate how colonizing cultures create narratives, often fallacious, that obscure the true origins of plants and the agency of minoritized countries and populations. Lidia even had a lovely map which showed how the metadata attached to items relegated South America to being a subject, while colonizing countries were portrayed more often as authors or creators.
  
• our discussion
• role of language
• texts in the BHL are mostly english, even the computer code is in English, this meeting we're having now is in English
• "At the same time we should not let that obscure the presence of other languages in the way we represent and curate, because languages are so tied into the representation of other cultures."
  
• how to facilitate constructive criticism of a platform or archive, as well as interprofessional collaboration:
  
• we often don't feel like we can reach the people we're looking at
• but "I try to encourage people to reach out to scholars outside of their comfort zone. Even if you don’t speak another language, look at what’s happening across the world and reach out."

Yours,

Devon

Information Maintainers Co-Facilitator