Ananda Rutherford

Biography

Ananda Rutherford is a Research Fellow on the Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage project, led by UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute and funded by the AHRC’s Towards a National Collections (TaNC) programme. Her research for Transforming Collections explores prejudice, colonialism and racial bias in the language of artwork and object description in cataloguing texts, and the potential application of machine learning to evidence and problematise these issues. She is also looking at ethics as practice at the intersection of academic research, collections data and technology, in museum, library, archive and heritage organisations.

From 2020 to 2022, as the Research Associate on an earlier TaNC Foundation Project, Provisional Semantics, she explored the limitations of traditional cataloguing and classification practices, failures to address barriers to collections access, and ethical and equitable information sharing and knowledge production in GLAM.

Ananda is a former museum collections and documentation manager, with a career focus on the history of museum documentation and the digitisation and dissemination of collections information online.