Liberating Labels. Decolonizing Language Use in Historical Collection Management and Data Contextualization

by Juliette Huygen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)), Manjusha Kuruppath (Huygens Institute), Phạm Thùy Dung (Huygens Institute)

Wednesday 22 Apr 2026, 10:00 → 11:30 Europe/Berlin

online

History writing, archiving and museum practices are at a critical crossroads in dealing with the many colonial inheritances entrenched at their core. It is long acknowledged that colonialism has had a lasting, intrusive presence in the realm of language, and the dismantling of its contemporary afterlives has become closely associated with disinfecting language of its colonial inheritance. Historians have questioned how stories were told and which individuals and groups were written about. Archivists and museum practitioners have scrutinized the display, labelling and description of artifacts, seeking to highlight problems, mitigate their impact and re-conceptualize the creation of knowledge.

Central to this re-evaluation is the critical reassessment of key knowledge objects: terminology (used in reference to ethnicities, social groups, cultural objects and commodities) and metadata (contextualizing information for museum objects or archives). Once deemed relatively innocent and objective, these knowledge objects are now revisited for the hidden coloniality embedded in them. Metadata in particular is often found rife with misinformation, contested concepts and problematic silences. These findings have resulted in decolonization advice for museums, guidelines for archivists, and glossaries illustrating how to tackle problematic language.

However, this presentation argues that we are at a critical crossroads: copious guidelines are robust in theory but do not always translate well into practice. This presentation discusses two contexts that have proactively engaged with implementing guidelines and identifying solutions to tackle problematic language: the Globalise Project (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam) and the Words Matter Project (National Museum of World Cultures). The Words Matter guide set the precedent for numerous projects working on discriminatory and colonial language in the heritage field, but its implementation has highlighted that decolonization remains a complex matter of praxis. Globalise is an ongoing infrastructural project enhancing accessibility to the Dutch East India Company archives and creating a thesaurus that defines and contextualizes terminology encountered in this archive.

This presentation will assess how viable available glossaries, guidelines and methodologies are in tackling problematic terminology and labelling. Using concrete examples, it will evaluate how guidelines have been transplanted from one disciplinary context (the museum sector) to another (thesaurus creation for historical research), and indicate that implementation in new contexts has given rise to additional challenges for which new solutions need to be found.