From Missionary Records to Data Narratives: Reconstructing the Histories of Tamil Religious Objects (1706-1741)

A digital humanities study reconstructing the colonial-era movement of Tamil religious artefacts from South India to European collections, combining object biography methodology with computational analysis of missionary archives from the Danish-Halle Mission (1706–1741). Building a dataset from scratch from missionary journals, letters, and the 1741 Halle Cabinet inventory, the project traces both the micro-level narratives of specific objects and the macro-level patterns of colonial collecting.