Hannah Turner

I am a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where I am researching how Canadian museums catalogue and digitize Indigenous cultural heritage.

My research explores strategies of collaborative documentation, postcolonial collections practices, and the representation of multiple knowledges in museums. I looks at how standards and categories as well as the architecture of digital museum databases work to construct and mediate knowledge about objects in museums. I am also interested in projects that seek to connect source communities with their cultural heritage online; I asks how these online search tools might create useful dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of knowing.

Drawing on methodologies of document analysis, usability studies and ethnography, my work is at the intersection of science and technology studies, information studies, and anthropology.