ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the contributions of the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) to the Australian Research Council Linkage Project: Return, Reconcile, Renew (LP130100131). They were tasked with building a digital knowledge base that would assist communities engaged in repatriation efforts and provide information related to matters of cultural and historical significance to the general public. Through the use of archival informatics, the ESRC mapped the entangled historical and contemporary contexts of the removal and repatriation of Ancestral Remains. This chapter describes the essential archival categories – the key resources, core entities (people, organisations, etc.), and the multifarious relations between them – that were identified for the purposes of mapping this history, as well as the collaborative research processes that were employed in order to identify them. Through collaborative action research methodologies, the ESRC sought to consolidate the contextual information into a networked digital archive in a way that subverts colonial archival practices, many of which are still deeply embedded in contemporary archival practice.
