Digitisation is often seen as central to decolonising museums and archives by enhancing access and inclusion. However, many practices risk reproducing colonial structures by privileging institutional perspectives and erasing crucial contextual relationships. This project addresses such issues through the re-digitisation of archival materials from the 1947 expedition to Colombia, Panama, and Peru by the Ethnographic Museum of Gothenburg, confronting gaps and biases in earlier digitisation efforts.
We begin with a critical review of previous digitisation projects, revealing undocumented selection criteria, loss of context, and institutional bias. Using a decolonising toolkit focused on reflexivity, transparency, and contextual integrity, we aim to re-digitise three photo albums from the expedition, preserving their original structure while integrating related, previously overlooked materials such as travel journals, correspondence, and financial records. This approach reconnects visual and textual sources to offer a more layered narrative.
Our method aligns with records-continuum theories, which challenge colonial provenance and advocate for concepts such as parallel provenance, archival multiverse, and critical reflexivity. These frameworks expose how archives shape historical narratives and highlight the colonial roots of many museum collections.Through the application of these tools, frequently guided by developments in AI, our goal is to decolonise and open the archive to multiple perspectives.
Through comparison with earlier digitisation efforts, we show how decolonising methods can reshape archival practices, fostering more equitable, transparent, and adaptive workflows that resist colonial legacies and support future reinterpretation.
