BLOOM: Botanical Legacies through Open Online Materials
This project uses digital scholarship technologies alongside interdisciplinary research to reconstruct the University of Oxford’s du Bois Herbarium, an eighteenth-century global collection of plant specimens. The result will be an accessible and open-access digital platform to be used for research and teaching in history, biology, and ecology, showing how local knowledge from around the world was ingested and modified to create our modern universal systems of scientific classification.
Scoping research for this project was generously supported by the University of Oxford’s OUP John Fell Research Fund and a DiSc Research Development Grant.
Visit the prototype of the reconstruction here: https://bloom.discapp.link/
BLOOM unites scholars in history, biology, and digital scholarship to understand the interdisciplinary value of herbaria to research, heritage, and education. While essential for scientific research, herbaria are rarely integrated into public engagement programmes or displays. BLOOM demonstrates the potential of herbaria to ground historical research, develop digital approaches for collections management in the natural sciences, and promote science-led education. We aim to:
- Define historical herbaria as archives that contribute new histories of environment and colonialism.
- Demonstrate how digital scholarship methodologies, beyond basic imaging and metadata capture, enhance historical research and increase educational outreach.
- Foreground the role of indigenous actors and their knowledge, including colonial legacies, in histories of science and botanic gardens.
- Translate historical scientific collections to modern audiences of scientists, educators, and students.
For its first project output, BLOOM will explore the Du Bois Herbarium. The Du Bois Herbarium once existed at the centre of global trade networks, scientific discovery, and colonial administration. Comprised of 14,000 plant specimens from around the world, this collection of dried plants preserves rare samples of extinct flora, indigenous contributions to European science, and the role of otherwise unnamed individuals in the creation of environmental knowledge. It is an unprecedented resource for conveying the interconnectedness of environment and empire to researchers and public audiences.
We apply a heritage lens to the Du Bois Herbarium to untangle its contents for the first time. The herbarium has resided in the Oxford University Herbaria (OUH) for over two centuries, however, its histories and value as a scientific resource are little known. In 1884, scientific researchers dismantled the collection, turning its 80 bound early-modern volumes into 14,000 distinct sheets. Whilst undertaken with a view to modernise the collection, deconstruction ultimately rendered it obsolete. Subsequent high-resolution imaging, recording of metadata, and digitisation has failed to improve understanding or awareness of the collection. By combining historical analysis, scientific expertise, and digital scholarship, SEED will reconstruct the original herbarium and make the collection’s contents and history fully accessible,t ranslating its content to a wider audience.
BLOOM project uses digital scholarship as a tool to enable collections-based historical research, rather than as a vehicle to host research outputs. It relies on manipulation of preexisting digital materials, rather than digitization. The digital reconstruction of the Du Bois Herbarium enables researchers to effect near-immediate manipulation of the collection according to different research parameters, allowing early modern plant specimens to be arranged according to modern taxonomic theory, as well as their original, pre-Linnean structure, date, geography, and collector. This facilitates research analysis that is otherwise physically impossible in real life due to the size of the Du Bois Herbarium and the constraints of appropriate collections care.
The digital platform will provide visual evidence of how digital approaches augment the Du Bois Herbarium beyond what is possible in its physical form. Examples include the pairing of specimens with contemporary correspondence and trading records held in external archives, biographical information about agents in the collection process, x-ray images, filmed encounters with the collection, and links to living collections in botanic gardens. Specimens will also be text-searchable by interdisciplinary categories such as vernacular plant names, collectors, date, and geography. Significantly, this means that the collection’s rich data will now be accessible to researchers in both the sciences and the humanities, as well as non-specialists.
Visit the prototype of the reconstruction here: https://bloom.discapp.link/
