Hannah Turner

Writing

Projects

Teaching

CV

I am a critical information studies scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Information, where I research the connection between documentation, culture, and technology.

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 was a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Making Culture Lab at SFU. I completed my doctorate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto in 2015.

I am currently accepting students working in the areas of information practices, histories of classification, museum work and reparative community based projects. If you would like to work with me, please email me.

My book, “Cataloguing Culture” is available from UBC Press, and distributed by University of Chicago Press in the United States.

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong.

For further publications see CV Publications.

Wrapped in the Cloud: A Digital Collaboration

Wrapped in the cloud is an ongoing collaboration with Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien) and Kate Hennessy at the Making Culture Lab at SFU. We are working to digitize (through 3D scanning and photogrammetry and digital loom), Jaad Kuujus’ weaving, Sky Blanket, as a media installation. The first iteration, “Wrapped in the Cloud” was in a touring exhibit called BoarderX, curated by Jaimie Isaac.

Read more about the process, and more about Jaad Kuujus’ work on the Making Culture Lab’s site.

Wrapped in the Cloud was on exhibit at The Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, and toured elsewhere in Canada throughout 2019/2020.

Amagugu Ethu/ Our Treasures

I worked collaboratively with Dr. Laura Gibson (Kings College London) on a Wenner-Gren funded project called Amagugu-Ethu/ Our Treasures; which sought to document stories from KwaZulu-Natal experts about some of the Zulu collections in the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. We worked together 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 story recorded about an object. Museum in a Box, is a company dedicated to making museum objects and stories more shareable and accessible.

You can read more about the project in the post by George Oates.

This project was generously supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the University of Leicester, and Museum in a Box.

Listening to the Earth: Student Oral History Projects

In the Spring of 2020, I taught the course The Theory and Practice of Oral History, and tasked my students to create an audio based exhibit using a Museum in a Box – a great tool I’ve worked with before. The task was – how would we preserve stories about the earth? What kinds of stories would researchers tell about their favourite organisms? We developed a Museum in a Box to be exhibited on UBC Campus; but due to the COVID crisis, were unable to actually install it. Instead, on May 1st, we launched the website: Listening To the Earth, which served as a virtual exhibit and archive of the interviews the students conducted.

Memory Institutions in a Digital Age: Interviews

In the Spring 2018 students from the Centre for Digital Media class that I taught, “Museums and Art Galleries in a Digital Age” presented their video interviews for the Museums and the Web Conference (April 18-21 here in Vancouver, BC).

As part of the Museums and the Web Exhibition event (MWX), the videos were installed in the conference venue and posted online, and we conducted pop-up interviews for the conference attendees and live-editing these.

Witnessing

Conceived of as a response to the 2016 exhibit “Witness” at New Westminster’s New Media Gallery this project is a series of three processing artworks developed by students at the Critical Media Arts Studio at SFU’s School of Interactive Art and Technology (SIAT) in the IAT 810 New Media Class. Witnessing was exhibited at the AHVA Gallery at the Audain Art Centre as part of the “Under Super Vision” Symposium.

The web-based projects all address the thematic issues raised in the Witness exhibit, that of human machine communication and mutual surveillance. Each work is presented in an online archive, and they all demonstrate the uneasy marriage of our shared technological fears and desires.

The project website is available here.

Unbelievable Exhibit at Museum of Vancouver

Co-curated (with Gregory Dreicer and Sharon Fortney) and designed in collaboration with HCMA Architecture, this new exhibit that examines our ideas of truth and believability on exhibit now at the Museum of Vancouver (MOV). Every museum object has multiple stories, and in many cases these histories have yet to be told. The exhibit looks at key objects in Vancouver and exposes these stories to ask visitors to examine how and why they believe what they believe.

Unbelievable is on view at the Museum of Vancouver until Spring 2018.

Press and Reviews:

Inside Vancouver //Georgia Straight

I Made This! Children’s Participatory Learning with 3D Printing

In 2015, I was a research partner with the project “I made this: Children’s Participatory Learning with 3D Printing”.  This research advanced a comprehensive scholarly understanding of children’s participatory learning in informal learning environments. We held workshops in a museum setting encourage children to acquire and create knowledge about the individual, cultural and institutional values underpinning both the technological systems used for making and the resultant artifacts. See our publication in Curator (2017) Using 3D Printing to Enhance Understanding and Engagement with Young Audiences: Lessons from Workshops in a Museum. I was a research partner with this SSHRC funded project within the Semaphore Research Cluster at the University of Toronto. Our workshop, “Footwear Futures” was held at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Ontario. For more, see the Bata Shoe Museum.

I regularly teach:

• INF0 200 Foundations of Informatics
• LIBR 508 Information Practices in Contemporary
• INFO 301 Digital Cultural Collections

I have developed and taught courses across disciplines such as information studies, museum studies, and archival studies.