This four-year project will expand on a previous initiative of postcolonial provenance research in Lower Saxony, Germany. The earlier cross-institutional project, completed in 2022, was the first of its kind to focus on collections from colonial contexts in Germany and involved several regional museums and universities. Prof. Rother will now collaborate with Dr. Claudia Andratschke from the State Museum Hanover and the Network for Provenance Research in Lower Saxony to make the collected data accessible and interpretable for computational analysis. A particular focus will be placed on geographical information, as its digital representation is particularly complex due to colonial territorial divisions and shifting national borders.

The project is part of a broader initiative, “Digital Provenance and Collection Research,” led by Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, with research conducted at multiple sites in Bremerhaven, Göttingen, Hanover, Lüneburg, and Oldenburg.