about anima:

The animal narrative, identity, and microhistory archive (anima atlas, or just anima) is a digital resource and community project working within and beyond the environmental humanities to build an interactive global map of historical animal lives.

Anima's Atlas uses code originally developed to improve scholars' ability to make connections and explore commonalities between human histories, and aims to break and reform that code as a means of reimagining an archive focused on centering the details of historical animal lives. Conceiving of animal life broadly to include multiple forms of more or other-than-human life, Anima treats the presence of animal life in historical sources as biographical information. The project aims to reimagine the digital archive as a space to both change our relationship with cataloguing the more-than-human being and of actively centering animal life. Interactive layers allow for nuanced engagement with the historical animals whose lives are represented in this atlas. A basic tutorial can be found on the introductory screen of the atlas. The project was conceived in the interest of both doing greater service to these beings, and to better contextualise the histories with which they are entangled. You can follow along with its journey on Instagram. We are also excited to announce a collaborative essay series with the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE).

Anima’s Atlas is powered by a prototypal, open-source GIS program called Peripleo, and is further categorized in an analogue archive to improve accessibility options. The framework of the atlas was built from code first developed for the Locating a National Collection project via the British Library, and the Linking Islands of Data project from the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. To learn more about how to access any of these mapping projects’ data, please visit Github.

Historians' interactions with animals represented (and not represented) by archive dominantly involve details of human life, place, and animal death. Though old standards are rapidly changing alongside a wave of archival digitization, where, by whom, and why a specimen was killed are more commonly-prioritized elements to find categorized by institutional catalogues than information which centers details of that specimen’s life. Likewise, more-than-human life in digitized photographic and media archives are often lumped into broad categories – “dog,” “cattle,” “insect” – and indeed, our notice of them in print media, expedition logs or more unexpected representations of animal life in archival sources often present as microhistories which many methodologies find too narrow in scope for use on their own accord. As a complement to rich variety of work ongoing on animal afterlives, which (among other things) has made significant contributions to problematising the pathways of specimen animals after death or “collection”, how can environmental and animal historians better account for, recoginse, and address the histories of individual animal lives represented by archive? How might addressing the biographical details of archival animals assist in more comprehensive problematisations of the settler-colonial legacies with which they entangle? What is our responsibility towards centering these narratives?

Anima is still in the early stages of development. The atlas and its accompanying archive aim to combine community-contributed animal histories and microhistories with targeted, in-house digitization efforts to expand and nourish the networked map and broaden the scope of its applicability. The project is inspired by the bottom-drawer microhistories: the “animal encounters in the archive,” the animal artifact you can’t track down; the artwork you have puzzled over — or the specimen whose life you are trying to understand.

Anima holds that these stories form an ecology of their own, one which can be more considerately witnessed through our human lens if we work within (and beyond) our communities to understand not only the place of these animals in our human history, but their relationships to one another, to place, and to environment.

Let them come together here, in spirit (or in anima).