Open Collections

Cho, Allan; Zhang, Sarah

The Canadian government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants entering Canada between 1885 and 1923 in order to restrict immigration. While a print register was created to keep track of the influx of migrants, the detailed recording unintentionally produced years of demographic information about the immigrants that is now a rich source of data for researchers. The dataset, while requiring a great deal of money, time, and effort to collect, has been largely underused by scholars and even run the risk of going obsolete. We therefore embarked on a project with three goals: first, lower the barriers to the data use, by converting the dataset and publishing the scripts of manipulating and analyzing the data; second,show the untapped potential in the data by demonstrating new or nuanced findings that contradict previous studies; and third, raise awareness surrounding the data and this history of exclusion and discrimination. Our exploration of this dataset comes with two approaches in mind: open scholarship and experimenting with the role of computational tools commonly used in the digital humanities (DH). All the converted datasets, scripts, and data visualizations are open available as an Open Science Framework (OSF) project, with the aim at engaging a broader audience. We were also amazed by the interplay between humanistic inquires and computational tools: the newly-developed tools can both help answer and ask questions. In particular, we chose a user friendly network analysis tool to analyze the migration pattern as opposed to overly complex tools. By using freely available open source tools, we want to avoid further marginalizing this data and the history it embodies. This project may represent an unusual attempt by librarians -- we are engaging the data from two roles, one as if we were the steward of the collection, one as a researcher. Traditionally, librarians' values have been in line with democracy; and in this case, when these values pair with open scholarship, subverting overly obscure scholarly work, the project will likely pave way for attracting more researchers who are not identify themselves as "DH" scholars to explore the data and the colonial frameworks behind it.

Text

2019-12-02

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72486

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/