Herbaria – collections of dried plant specimens – were once at the forefront of scientific research and global information systems. Now used mostly by expert plant scientists who are well-versed in taxonomy, these vast collections are simultaneously historic and scientific archives, but can seem bewildering to non-experts. This project uses digital scholarship technologies alongside interdisciplinary research to reconstruct the University of Oxford’s du Bois Herbarium and create an accessible, and open-access, digital platform to be used for research and teaching in history, biology, and ecology.
Composed of nearly 14,000 preserved botanical specimens, the du Bois Herbarium was once one of the most outstanding plant collections in its time. As its creator was also cashier-general of the English East India Company, the collection is global in its scope, and – unique among its contemporaries – incorporates vernacular Asian plant names onto its pages. Historians of science, ecology, natural history, and empire, working with biologists, ecologists, and digital research engineers, will thus use this vast archive to visualise and map eighteenth-century imperial networks of knowledge alongside the global movement of plants, integrating indigenous plant information with modern botanical systems while also integrating archival material from across the world. Rather than framing the process of ‘decolonizing’ as the removal of items, this project will use colonial histories and indigenous knowledge to expand the du Bois collection. The resulting interdisciplinary online archive will make the nature of early modern science as both a global and imperial system tangible and accessible, showing how local knowledge from around the world was ingested and modified to create our modern universal systems of scientific classification.
