Liberating Labels. Decolonizing Language Use in Historical Collection Management and Data Contextualization

History writing, archiving and museum practices are at a critical crossroads in confronting their colonial inheritances, particularly in the realm of language. Key knowledge objects such as terminology and metadata, once considered neutral and objective, are now recognised as carriers of hidden coloniality, prompting the development of decolonization guidelines, glossaries and archival advice across the heritage sector. This presentation interrogates how viable these frameworks are in practice, drawing on two concrete case studies: the Words Matter Project (National Museum of World Cultures), which set a precedent for addressing discriminatory and colonial language in heritage contexts, and the Globalise Project (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam), which is building a thesaurus to define and contextualise terminology in the Dutch East India Company archives. Through these examples, the presentation reveals that transplanting guidelines across disciplinary contexts raises new challenges, and that decolonization remains a complex matter of praxis rather than a problem solved by theory alone.

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