Culture Translocated: Entities in the Ethnological Museum

Trace the people and corporations behind the Ethnological Museum‘s historical collections until 1950 by examining the 3.872 persons, companies, societies and government agencies recorded in this dataset.

This dataset contains information about each entity‘s chronological occurence in the archive, places individuals collected objects, people‘s profession as well as biographical context and references to authority files. As such, this dataset is an essential database for understanding the museum‘s relations with institutions and individual actors as well as local and Indigenous communities, not least throughout the period of colonialism across the non-European world.

Potential use cases include visualizing the museum‘s network of benefactors or creating partially-automated short biographies of individuals well-documented in online resources. What other ways can you imagine to reconnect/disconnect these entities with/from their histories?