A Guide to Finding Women in the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base, available to download here

The Sloane Lab is pleased to announce the release of three new resources — an online exhibition, dataset, and research guide — developed by Dr Rosalind White, Sloane Lab Community Research Fellow at University College London, as part of her project In the Margins of Early Modern Science: Pioneering Women in Sloane’s ‘Paper Museum’.

These resources leverage the rich repository of data provided by the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base to explore the contributions of women within Sloane’s “Paper Museum” — a vast compendium comprising over 1,000 illustrated books, 100 picture albums, an estimated 60,000 drawings, prints, and paintings, as well as manuscript catalogues spanning thousands of handwritten pages.

Together, they showcase how the SLKB can serve as a dynamic resource for critical inquiry.

The dataset establishes a foundation for enhancing the representation of women within Hans Sloane’s collections through the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base. It offers a snapshot of the various ways women are documented and represented in the collections detailing their roles (e.g., artist, author), the type of entries associated with them (e.g., Pictures Catalogue Entry, Printed Books Catalogue Entry), as well as additional information about their work or the context of their contributions. Where possible, a link has been provided to each entry in the SLKB, allowing for deeper exploration. The dataset can be downloaded as Excel file (.xlsx) or in CSV format.

A Guide to Finding Women in the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base offers a practical starting point for researchers seeking to uncover the hidden narratives of women in Sloane’s collections. It outlines the methodological approach used to identify women’s contributions, highlighting how often these roles are obscured by gaps in the original cataloguing efforts, where names and direct references to women’s involvement are frequently absent. The guide is part of a broader effort to enhance how narratives of marginalised individuals are accessed, understood, and valued within the SLKB. The guide can be downloaded as a PDF file in both double-page and single-page view.

The online exhibition, In the Margins of Early Modern Science: Pioneering Women in Sloane’s ‘Paper Museum’, invites users to explore the untold stories of the women who shaped Sir Hans Sloane’s vast collections. Research cases studies are brought to life through a variety of interactive exhibits.

The exhibition spotlights the work of Elizabeth Blackwell, author and artist of A Curious Herbal; horticultural virtuoso Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort; and illustrators Anna and Susannah Lister, daughters of conchologist Martin Lister. It also highlights contributions from lesser-known women, such as botanical artists Ellen and Margery Power, and the mysterious ‘Mrs. London,’ whose watercolour illustrations appear in her personal copy of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Insects of Surinam.

Collectively, these resources empower users to explore the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base in innovative ways, demonstrating the impact that digital tools and critical methodologies can have in uncovering the contributions of individuals relegated to the margins of early modern science.

If you would like to follow along with Rosalind’s future research projects, you can find her on X (formerly Twitter) @DrRosalindWhite.

We are delighted to announce the second edition of the Sloane Lab symposium series commencing on the 16th of April 2024, facilitated in collaboration with the Humanities Data Science & Methodology (HDSM) Oberseminar of TU Darmstadt, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS). This seminar invites international speakers whose work is situated at the intersections of collections as data, cataloguing histories and critical archival studies, heritage infrastructures, critical digital heritage, and information science.

The seminar papers explore and foreground:

• Computational approaches as means for historical inquiry, critique and creative takes on data driven research paradigms.
• The potential of digital tools and data aggregations to shed light on the geographic spread, collectors, and knowledge in historical cultural heritage collections.
• Reflections on the contested nature of museum and archival collections and the role of collections as data research in foregrounding overlooked or ignored and marginalised issues like imperialism, colonialism, slavery, loss, and destruction, that have shaped collections.
• The role of digital archives in addressing historical and present-day injustices.
• Creative approaches for virtual exhibition and collection data platforms design.

Paper presentations take place online between the 16th of April and the 16th of July, on Tuesdays at 15:30 BST/16:30 CET.

Register for the event and view the programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.