@Debbie – I am glad to read that you are interested in the idea of ‘planning an effective, well-structured consultation for GBIF with the humanities and social sciences communities’! You suggest that I post in the Network Model section of the consultation, but I am not sure that this really fits. There are existent networks like learned societies for environmental humanities, for geography, for history of science – but the particular convergence of people who have history of natural history interests and skills and who understand the importance of collections as well is not yet a ‘discipline’ and only has a loose network that is growing fast. I have given some examples of individual research projects here: Extending, enriching and integrating data - #53 by MAFleming
I can give a more structured overview. At institutional level – and of course, an institution is not necessarily a network – here are some developments:
2009-2016: Centre for Arts and Humanities research at the Natural History Museum London
I was one of the people who set up this centre, and we ran a range of humanities research projects related directly to collections and which benefited collection knowledge/catalogues. This included a project about Hans Sloane’s early modern collections, Nathaniel Wallich (in collaboration with Kew).
2012 - ongoing. Humanities of Nature Department, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Set up by Johannes Vogel when he left NHM for Berlin, using the model of the NHM Centre. Currently the most active of these institutional departments at nathist museums, working on colonial histories of palaeontology, on historical relationships between Berlin Tiergarten and the MfN, on logistics of natural history collecting in 19th C., on philosophy of data modeling and digitisation of specimens.
2015 - ongoing. Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Gardens
Supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation (same funder for JSTOR Plants), the centre runs research projects and is based in the Gardens’ library. Botany and medicine, coffee plantation practices, histories of expeditions to Cuba, etc.
2018 - ongoing. Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative
Funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, working with scholars to directly to correlate the rare books and special collections of DOAKS with JSTOR Plants, and in collaboration with the team of developers at JSTOR Labs.
2020 - ongoing. Kew / Royal Holloway Humanities of Nature project
This project picks up where the Mobile Museums project left off, with the same leadership, and with the intent of articulating the value of the humanities to botanical collections and vice versa. Kew has made a specific commitment to collaborations with humanities scholars in their recent strategic development document.
So there are researchers, there are projects, there are institutional departments, there are learned societies, and there are emergent networks. It could be so valuable to look at where humanities, socsci, biology and collections can help each other to do better research. Some of the connective tissue is really critical to some of the questions relating to the DES: including equity, IP, credit, inclusion, accurate point reference data, data models, decolonial activities, etc.
As part of ICEDIG (development programme for DiSSCo), there was a WP concerning ‘cultural heritage’ and a survey of ‘Humanities Researcher Synergies with Natural Science Collections and Archives’. Unfortunately, not enough time was taken with this (barely two months, and over Christmas!) and the report itself states that there were only 34 surveys returned and ‘humanities researchers were underrepresented owing to short project timelines compounded by the holidays’. Further, ‘D. Koureas began by suggesting that these preliminary discussions could use better follow-up and continuity. In similar situations the tendency has been to put them on a shelf without further intervention.’ Here is where GBIF could step in with your well-developed non-chron, discourse-driven consultation platform!