Madeline Schill

Madeline Schill is a Curatorial Assistant at the Harvard University Herbaria currently working on the digitization of vascular plant specimens for the HerbariomiX project. Madeline completed a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from the Harvard Extension School.

Madeline is passionate about the ethical stewardship of collections, particularly digital collections, and wrote her graduate capstone on the treatment of derogatory language in digital databases.

As museum collections strive for relevancy in an age of technological advances, she is a proponent of procedural standardization, protocol documentation, institutional transparency, and collaboration.

Madeline Schill is speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2024 :

Leveraging Data Science to Advance Equity

Racism has been deeply embedded in museums since their inception, as they acquired collections through colonial activities that oppressed indigenous peoples. Minority communities saw little representation in museums, while their artifacts were displayed without context.

Recent movements have pressured museums to confront their racist legacies. However, behind the scenes museum databases still rely on colonial terms assigned by early white collectors that promoted harmful stereotypes.

This presentation examines using data science to systematically uncover and replace derogatory language in a botanical collection database of over 1 million specimens.

The goal is provide a means to purge museums’ digital archives of racist ideologies that have inhibited diversity.