Arctic visible: Mapping the visual representations of indigenous peoples in the nineteenth-century western arctic

• Main Author: O'Dochartaigh, Eavan
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Humlab 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Indigenous; Mapping; Nineteenth-Century; Visual; History of Technology; Teknikhistoria; Canada; Greenland; Alaska
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-183712

This paper describes progress of the ongoing postdoctoral project ARCVIS. The project is funded by a two-year individual fellowship from Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (2019-2021). ARCVIS gathers, maps, and disseminates representations of Indigenous peoples in the western Arctic (Greenland, Canada, Alaska) between 1800 and 1880. The material is comprised of watercolours, pencil sketches, photographs, and prints, such as lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. The visual material is scattered in archives around the world and this project's aim is to gather that material together and display it geographically, linked to its places of origin in the Arctic. A key element of this project is the collation and interpretation of the material through an open access online geospatial platform, which combines the visuality of exploration and travel with digital methods that seek to bring out the richly contextual information often bypassed in visual documentary records. The project will present the peopled western Arctic that was encountered by 'explorers.' Through the analysis of picture and text in archives and published nineteenth-century texts, it will strive to give 'voice' to the Indigenous people who were key to the success or failure of expeditions from the south. The project challenges the common outsider perception of the Arctic, which is often seen as an empty, icy region, devoid of human populations. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has not been possible to include 'new' archival sources and the online platform will now only use images and texts available online and in the public domain.