I am a settler information and museum studies scholar and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Information, where I research the connection between documentation, culture, and technology. From 2021-2024 I was also the co-editor of the journal, Museum Anthropology.
My book, Cataloguing Culture (UBC Press, 2020) is a history of ethnographic documentation practices and the classification and the cataloguing of material culture collections in the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology.
I collaborate with Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien) and Kate Hennessy (Making Culture Lab) on Jaad Kuujus’ transmediated digital weaving, Wrapped in the Cloud (2018). We have also collaborated on her new weaving, “Untitled”, using a digital loom with Emily Carr’s Material Matters lab. Wrapped in the Cloud (2018) was in a touring exhibit, BoarderX, curated by Jaimie Isaac; and the descendant robe, Untitled, was most recently on display at the Bard Graduate Centre in April 2024. Read more about the process, and more about Jaad Kuujus’ work on the Making Culture Lab’s site, or our recent DIS Paper on Transmediating Sky Blanket.
With Dr. Laura Gibson (Kings College London), I collaborated on a Wenner-Gren funded documentation project called Amagugu-Ethu/ Our Treasures. With community experts, we documented stories from KwaZulu-Natal experts about Zulu collections in the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. We worked with a team of Zulu-speaking experts, artists, storytellers, technical wizards, museum workers and academics in Cape Town and developed a Museum in a Box resource that plays the recorded object stories.
I was a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at SFU. I completed my doctorate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. I am also on the board of the YVR Art Foundation, which funds Indigenous artists from communities in BC and the Yukon.
Research/Publications
Books
2020 Cataloging Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation. UBC Press: Vancouver, Canada.
Special Issues
2025 Julia Bullard and Hannah Turner, Editors. “Knowledge Organization and Nations.” Special issue of the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science. Vol 47 No. 3.
Articles/Chapters
2025 Kate Hennessy, Hannah Turner, Jaimie Isaac, Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien). “Chapter 27: Digital”. Routledge International Handbook of Visual Research Methods in Anthropology. Edited by Christ Wright and Rupert Cox. London: Routledge.
2024 Hannah Turner, Nancy Bruegeman and Peyton Moriarty. Provenance and historical warrants: histories of cataloguing at the Museum of Anthropology. Journal of Documentation,Vol. 80 No. 6, pp. 1419-1441.
2024 Hannah Turner, Reese Muntean and Kate Hennessy. “Making and Stewarding Digital Collections” in Collections Management as Critical Practice. Cara Krmpotich and Alice Stevenson, eds. London: UCL Press. Open Access.
2024 Kate Hennessy, Hannah Turner, Jaad Kuujus, Doenja Oogjes, Reese Muntean. Journey into Form: Transmediating the woven artwork of Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien). Proceedings of EVA London 2024, Pp 254-261.
2023 Doenja Oogjes, Meghann O’Brien, Hannah Turner, Kate Hennessy, Reese Muntean, and Melanie Camman. “Transmediating Sky Blanket: Tensions with a Digital Jacquard Loom.” In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 371–86. DIS ’23. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. Best Pictorial, Honorable Mention Award.
2022 Turner, Hannah and Candace Greene. “New Access to Native North American Collections in Museums and Archives: History, Context and Future Directions.” In Volume 1 of the Handbook of North American Indians (HNAI), edited by Igor Krupnik. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press: Washington: DC. 151- 164.
2021 Turner, Hannah, Laura Gibson and Clara Gimenez-Delgado.“Participatory Design for the Anarchive: The Amagugu Ethu/ Our Treasures Documentation Project.” Designing Interactive Information Systems Conference Proceedings June 2021, pp. 1783-1792.
2018 Turner, Hannah, Kate Hennessy, Meghann O’Brien, and Conrad Sly. “Wrapped in the Cloud: An Interview with Meghann O’Brien and Conrad Sly.” BC Studies, 50th Anniversary Issue, No. 200, Winter: 125-140. Invited.
2017 Turner, Hannah. “Organizing Knowledge in Museums: A Review of Concepts and Concerns.” Knowledge Organization: Knowledge Organization within the Museum Domain, Special Issue. 44 (2017) No.7: 472-84.
2017 Turner, Hannah, Gabby Resch, Adam K. Dubé, Rhonda McEwen, Isaac Record, and Daniel Southwick. “Using 3D Printing to Enhance Understanding and Engagement with Young Audiences: Lessons from Workshops in a Museum.” Curator: The Museums Journal, 60(3): 311-33.
2016 Turner, Hannah. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues.” Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues, edited by Hannah Turner. Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 102-10.
2016 Turner, Hannah. “The Computerization of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology.” Special Issue: Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues, edited by Hannah Turner. Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 163-177.
2015 Turner, Hannah. “Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.” Special Issue: Indigenous Approaches to Cataloging, edited by Cheryl A. Metoyer and Ann M. Doyle. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53 (5–6): 658–76.
Selected Talks
Upcoming
2025 “Records Stewardship in Museums: Colonial Legacies and the Work of Repair in a City Museum.” Paper presenter at the BC Studies Place & Power Conference, UBC Vancouver. May 1-3.
Past
2024 “Critical Terms for Cultural Heritage Informatics: A Scoping Review and Thematic Analysis of Digital Repatriation, Restitution and Return.” Short paper presenter with Shirin Gholamalamdari at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting.
2024 “Records Stewardship and Museum Practice: Provenance and Historical Warrant.” Keynote Speaker. Workshop on Collections Based Research: Recent Trends and Future Directions, Leiden, Netherlands. July 1-2.
2024 “Cultural Heritage Informatics, Old Idea or Emerging Domain? Stumbling into a Shared Definition for Research and Teaching.” Panel presenter and Organizer with Shirin Gholamalamdari for the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS). With Stacy Allison-Cassin, Isto Huvila, Diana Marsh and Andrea Thomer. June 4. Peer Reviewed.
2023 Absence and the Archive: Categories, Occlusion, and Recovery in Knowledge Production I & II. Chair and Co-Organizer. Organized with Sowparnika Balaswaminathan. American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario. Nov 15-19.
2023 Imperfect Archives and Bad Data: Museums and Mundane Bureaucracies that Matter.” Invited Presentation, Fall PhD Workshop on ‘Archiving.’ Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).
2023 “Museums and Digital Intangible Heritage” Invited presentation the International Council on Archives Symposium, “Building Connections and Forging Alliances: Strengthening the Intersections between Archives and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Canadian Advisory Committee for Memory of the World (CCMoW). September 19th, 2023. Online.
2023 “Understanding Colonial Legacies in Museum Documentation.” Invited presentation to the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM), Victoria, BC. March 13th, 2023.
2023 “The Work of Repair: Documentation and Colonial Legacies Museums.” Invited Panelist, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, Canadian Chapter. Université du Québec en Outaouais. February 1, 2023. Online.
2022 The Work of Repair: Documentation and Colonial Legacies Museums. Visual and Material Culture Research Seminar at the Museum of Anthropology, UBC. December 1.
2022 Invited Respondent, “Thinking With Wendy Hui Kuong Chun: Discriminating Data, the New Politics of Recognition”. Research Centre for Material Culture, Netherlands. September 26 2022.
2021 “Classifying Culture Data and Material Culture in World Anthropologies: A Conversation for IUAES Congress with Sowparnika Balaswamitnathan.” Invited talk for the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). April 21st.
Hannah Turner 