A workshop to seek interdisciplinary expert perspectives on ethically and visually representing the historical place of misrepresented peoples and locales.
Thank you for your interest in exploring the history of the French cultural imagination. To produce this dataset, the co-investigators have spent more than 4 years collecting, cleaning, normalizing, and scrutinizing this data to prepare it for ethical visualization. We request that, before completing this Memorandum and using the dataset, you read through all of this website.
Please familiarize yourself with the vastness and gravity of the historical violence that accompanied French colonialism, and by extension, the French cultural imagination of the nineteenth century.
We have benefitted from the many years grappling with data sources and historical details, and thus obtained what we believe is a fairly nuanced understanding of the limitations & pitfalls in the attempt to quantify racial violence. It is for this reason that we believe it is our responsibility to engage first with inquirers about their research goal(s), so that we can advise on these features of the Journal des Voyages Dataset. The purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding is to begin that engagement, so that our sharing of data helps advance responsible new research in the humanities.
Please describe your background research leading to this study and your current research question:
What working hypothesis(es) are you interested in?
What is the time period(s) of interest to your study?
What is the geographic extent of interest to your study?
Please list all other collaborators:
Please list your funding sources (including organizations providing your salary):
Please initial to indicate your agreement:
__ I recognize the historical grounding of this data goes back as far as 1860. While the Journal des Voyages dataset is based on
__ I understand that although this dataset contains details about over 100 countries, it can only ethically be relied upon as a colonial artifact that reflects the French cultural imagination of the time. Countries and peoples depicted in the Journal are not accurate or reliable, and reproducing them in the present day without significant consideration and editing would be highly unethical for several reasons, not the least of which being the casual dehumanization of non-French persons throughout the text of the Journal.
Since the publication of the Journal des Voyages, other authors have produced important studies, on the problematics of the French cultural imagination and depictions of non-French persons, including Dr Christopher Church’s ‘Paradise Destroyed’ and ADD SCHOLARSHIP HERE.
__ I agree to include language in my published output that acknowledges the personhood of depicted human beings otherwise aggregated by numbers. This includes some language, however short, captioned on any chart or graph that is intended to be interpreted or shown in isolation, whether in print or in presentation slides. and the underlying racism inherent in the text, or
__ I understand the methodology in the patchwork construction of this compilation as described in the documentation website. I understand the limitations that arise from that methodology.
_____ My research question does not involve the time period before 1860.
Having acknowledged above my commitments to its responsible and ethical use, I request access to the Monroe Work Today Dataset Compilation. I agree to cite as source material the Monroe Work Today Dataset Compilation using the details provided on the next page, including a citation to the underlying authors’ works.
Signature Print name Date
Please email this signed form to: christophermchurch [at] unr dot edu