Dr Kathryn Simpson

I am interested in digital tools and platforms which support open-access historical research and enable cross-silo scrapping of texts, images and objects to allow us to renegotiate histories in ways which do not belittle or obfuscate traditional knowledges and frameworks whilst providing richer and deeper understanding of heritage.

My current research is three-fold. The project Boundaries of gender: ‘petticoat governments’ and secondary voices in nineteenth century European expeditions of Africa,  uses data mining to foreground the many women, both European and African, who assisted and enabled David Livingstone (1813-1873) in his journeys in Africa.

Ruled Margins: Annie R. Taylor’s Journeys to Tibet is creating a digitally interactive and searchable map of the missionary Annie R. Taylor’s (1855-1922) four journeys to Tibet (EADH funded). Digitally mapping Taylor’s journeys, and embedding the map with XML encoded text and objects, will aid in understanding the process of representation and object acquisition as it pertains to the constructed narrative of nineteenth century European travel. Importantly, this project uses data visualisation to explore ways to tell these narratives that decentre the European traveller.

The Spatial Poetics of Belongings: A digital enquiry into the humanity of objects in museum collections takes items held within a museum collection, and identified as being made by or belonging to women, and identifies ways digital tools can be used to reinscribe original authorship or ownership.

My work engages with digital libraries, digital archives, digitised images, online catalogues and critically reinscribed thick metadatas, as technologies of recovery. The research infrastructure of my work is rooted in a slow critical digital practice which is based in bringing multiple digital tools to bear on a single issue. Using digital tools to identify objects, places and people in the space they inhabit, and narratively, in the space they create.