Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce
Summary
This project aims to reconnect zoological specimens with vital collection data. From 1758-1900 millions of specimens were commercially traded to and between museums and collectors, frequently without retaining the data associated with the specimen. This project pioneers spectroscopic techniques to reconstruct data and enhance material conservation practice. The impact of the project will provide new pathways for recovering lost ecological data, creating a resource to improve future biodiversity research.
Investigator
Professor Deirdre Coleman (the University of Melbourne)
Image: Col Ford and Natasha de Vere. Seeds at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany at Adelaide Botanic Garden - South Australia 2011 (detail) CC-2.0 Generic PD-US
Themes related to this project
Research projects
- Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds
- Azuchi Screens Research Network
- Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation
- British Romanticism and colonial modernity in India, 1780-1840
- Climate Science Denialism and its populist Analogs
- Critique, Creativity, Innovation
- Extremism and the Australian Imaginary
- Gothic Fictions: Emotion, Contagion, and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity
- Human Kind: transforming identity in Australian and British portraits 1700-1900
- Islam and the Left in Indonesia and Turkey
- Kenzaburo Ōe and William Blake: Modernity, Romanticism, Japan
- Literary Romanticism and the Media of Romantic Love
- Natural Born Subjects: A Cultural History of Naturalization in Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1660-1850
- New tastemakers and Australia's post-digital literary culture
- Observation and Analogy in Enlightenment and Romantic Natural History
- Planters, Plantations and the State in the British Caribbean, 1713-1834
- Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce
- Regency Flash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1788-1848
- Slave Narratives in British and French America, 1740-1840
- Slavery, Empire, and the Great Divergence (1690-1756)
- Slavery in British Guiana in the Age of Revolution, 1804-1834
- The Butterfly Men of Kuranda: natural history dealers in the 'deep north'
- The George Lyell Collection
- The Imperial History of the American Revolution
- The Past and Present of Sugar
- The Pasts and Futures of Virtual Reality
- Theorising the online anti-public sphere
- Transatlantic Gardens and Enlightenment Ideas in American Art
- War-Widow, Mother, Slave, Refugee: Andromache in Romantic Europe
- William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization
- World Literatures, Theatres and Cultures research network