Invited talk for the Humboldt University, Berlin Digital History Research Colloquium.

While “data” is often understood today in computational terms, as information coded and organized for interpretation with digital tools and algorithms, the term has a long history dating back to at least the seventeenth century. In its earliest uses, data was defined as a “given” and a basis for decision-making—and thus power. A study of colonial knowledge systems offers numerous examples of the link between power and data regimes. Revealing the integral role of data in the building and maintenance of empires, this talk takes up several methodological questions: How do we handle colonial data, both data generated by colonial administrations and data we recreate from fragmentary sources to address the absences in the historical record born from conquest? And how do we ensure that our own research does not replicate imperial extractive colonial data practices?

During the 1830 French conquest of Algeria, witnesses watched, aghast, as officers looted administrative buildings, and soldiers used official Ottoman documents to light their pipes. In the following years, the plunder continued until most of the official records from Algiers and neighboring cities were either lost, stolen, or destroyed. The case of Algeria, a palimpsest of overlapping Berber, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French legacies, highlights the problematic nature of colonial and colonized archives and the question of what decolonizing data means in such a complex context.

The few extant fragments of knowledge from Algeria’s Regency period emerge from French and Algerian chronicles of the governors, travel narratives, diplomatic correspondence, a few surviving Ottoman registers, and commercial records from the French coral concessions. Through close reading, structured notes, and developing a custom, context-specific classification schema, Sanders reconstructed data sets on the governors of Ottoman Algeria (1518-1837) for prosopographical study. This reconstruction does not simply reconstitute imperial ontologies but rather seeks to describe these men and women with categories that they themselves would have likely employed. Historical data set (re)construction is one way we can begin to address voids in the archive. Similarly, through text mining to identify named and unnamed entities and social network analysis to illustrate and study their relationships, unnamed women’s spectral presence may be recovered and represented despite their absence in the archival record. Hand-in-hand, these techniques allow us to reassemble data lost in the violence of colonial conquest and to resurrect the stories, if not the voices, of men and women long silenced. In this way, we subvert colonial weapons of quantification and convert them into tools for restitution.

This talk will present “restorative data justice” as a theoretical framework, building on the work of Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Julianne Nyhan, Alex Gil, Roopika Risam, and Adeline Koh, among others whose work seeks to ameliorate some of colonialism’s violences by highlighting and addressing archival silences. Restorative data justice is one response to common scholarly challenges we face when undertaking studies of marginalized populations, especially using colonial archives. It is also a response to this present moment, this era of capitalistic datafication and increasingly urgent calls for social change and justice. Sanders will show how this concept of restorative data justice may serve as a bridge between academic studies and work in current data cultures. It offers one way to redress the problematic past of colonial knowledge production and its legacy in information structures and systems still at work today in the present age of capitalistic surveillance and widespread data misuse.