Hannah Turner
I am a settler critical information studies scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Information, where I research the connection between documentation, culture, and technology. From 2021-2024 I was also the co-editor of the journal, Museum Anthropology.
My book, Cataloguing Culture (UBC Press, 2020), available from UBC Press, and distributed by University of Chicago Press in the United States. It is a history of ethnographic documentation practices and the classification and the cataloguing of material culture collections in the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology.
I collaborate with Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien) and Kate Hennessy (Making Culture Lab) on a digital artwork, Wrapped in the Cloud. We have digitized Jaad Kuujus’ weaving, Sky Blanket, as a media installation and on the digital loom in collaboration with Emily Carr’s Material Matters lab. The first iteration, “Wrapped in the Cloud” was in a touring exhibit called BoarderX, curated by Jaimie Isaac. Read more about the process, and more about Jaad Kuujus’ work on the Making Culture Lab’s site, or our recent DIS Paper on Transmediating Sky Blanket.
With Dr. Laura Gibson (Kings College London), I collaborated on a Wenner-Gren funded project called Amagugu-Ethu/ Our Treasures that sought to document stories from KwaZulu-Natal experts about Zulu collections in the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. We worked with a team of Zulu-speaking experts, artists, storytellers, technical wizards, museum workers and academics in Cape Town and developed a Museum in a Box resource that plays the recorded object stories.
I was a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Making Culture Lab at SFU. I completed my doctorate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto in 2015. I sit on the board of the YVR Art Foundation.
Research/Publications
Books
2020 Cataloging Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation. UBC Press: Vancouver, Canada.
Articles
2023 Doenja Oogjes, Meghann O’Brien, Hannah Turner, Kate Hennessy, Reese Muntean, and Melanie Camman. “Transmediating Sky Blanket: Tensions with a Digital Jacquard Loom.” In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 371–86. DIS ’23. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595965. Best Pictorial, Honorable Mention Award.
2022 Turner, Hannah and Candace Greene. “New Access to Native North American Collections in Museums and Archives: History, Context and Future Directions.” In Volume 1 of the Handbook of North American Indians (HNAI), edited by Igor Krupnik. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press: Washington: DC. 151- 164.
2021 Turner, Hannah, Laura Gibson and Clara Gimenez-Delgado.“Participatory Design for the Anarchive: The Amagugu Ethu/ Our Treasures Documentation Project.” Designing Interactive Information Systems Conference Proceedings June 2021, pp. 1783-1792.
2018 Turner, Hannah, Kate Hennessy, Meghann O’Brien, and Conrad Sly. “Wrapped in the Cloud: An Interview with Meghann O’Brien and Conrad Sly.” BC Studies, 50th Anniversary Issue, No. 200, Winter: 125-140. Invited.
2017 Turner, Hannah. “Organizing Knowledge in Museums: A Review of Concepts and Concerns.” Knowledge Organization: Knowledge Organization within the Museum Domain, Special Issue. 44 (2017) No.7: 472-84.
2017 Turner, Hannah, Gabby Resch, Adam K. Dubé, Rhonda McEwen, Isaac Record, and Daniel Southwick. “Using 3D Printing to Enhance Understanding and Engagement with Young Audiences: Lessons from Workshops in a Museum.” Curator: The Museums Journal, 60(3): 311-33.
2016 Turner, Hannah. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues.” Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues, edited by Hannah Turner. Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 102-10.
2016 Turner, Hannah. “The Computerization of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology.” Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues, edited by Hannah Turner. Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 163-177.
2015 Turner, Hannah. “Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.” Special Issue: Indigenous Approaches to Cataloging, edited by Cheryl A. Metoyer and Ann M. Doyle. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53 (5–6): 658–76.
Selected Talks
Upcoming
2023 Absence and the Archive: Categories, Occlusion, and Recovery in Knowledge Production I & II. Chair and Co-Organizer. Organized with Sowparnika Balaswaminathan. American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario. Nov 15-19.
2023 Imperfect Archives and Bad Data: Museums and Mundane Bureaucracies that Matter.” Invited Presentation, Fall PhD Workshop on ‘Archiving.’ Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).
Past
2023 “Museums and Digital Intangible Heritage” Invited presentation the International Council on Archives Symposium, “Building Connections and Forging Alliances: Strengthening the Intersections between Archives and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Canadian Advisory Committee for Memory of the World (CCMoW). September 19th, 2023. Online.
2023 “Understanding Colonial Legacies in Museum Documentation.” Invited presentation to the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM), Victoria, BC. March 13th, 2023.
2023 “The Work of Repair: Documentation and Colonial Legacies Museums.” Invited Panelist, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, Canadian Chapter. Université du Québec en Outaouais. February 1, 2023. Online.
2022 The Work of Repair: Documentation and Colonial Legacies Museums. Visual and Material Culture Research Seminar at the Museum of Anthropology, UBC. December 1.
2022 Invited Respondent, “Thinking With Wendy Hui Kuong Chun: Discriminating Data, the New Politics of Recognition”. Research Centre for Material Culture, Netherlands. September 26 2022.
2021 “Classifying Culture Data and Material Culture in World Anthropologies: A Conversation for IUAES Congress with Sowparnika Balaswamitnathan.” Invited talk for the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). April 21st.
Hannah Turner 