[Seminar Series] Reconnecting Cultural Heritage: Digital Infrastructure for Provenance, Community Knowledge, and Restitution

Digital Benin is an international digital humanities project that brings together dispersed collections, archival records, and images of royal artefacts from the Kingdom of Benin, providing an unprecedented overview of objects looted in the late nineteenth century by British forces and now held in museums worldwide. Building on five years of collaboration with more than 250 institutions and dozens of expert partners, the project not only aggregates data but foregrounds provenance research, community knowledge, and restitution pathways.

From this work emerged Ọkpan – Origin Knowledge Platform for Assembled Narratives, an open-source software designed to address structural challenges in heritage data. Ọkpan enables institutions and communities of origin to link and enrich museum datasets without altering original records, integrating indigenous languages, oral histories, and community-based knowledge. Centering origin communities as primary knowledge holders, Ọkpan supports collaboratively assembled narratives that reconnect fragmented object histories across collections and geographies.

This seminar introduces both Digital Benin and Ọkpan, presenting their conceptual foundations, technical features, and ethical framework, and discussing how digital infrastructure can support restitution, shared authority, and more accountable forms of heritage stewardship.

Speaker: Dr. Anne Luther (Institute for Digital Heritage / Digital Benin)

Language: English

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Image credits: DigitalBenin.org, 2026