This article sketches key concerns surrounding the digital reproduction of enslaved and colonized subjects held in cultural heritage collections. It centralizes one photograph of a crying Afro-Caribbean child from St. Croix, housed in the Royal Danish Library, to demonstrate the unresolved ethical matters present in retrospective attempts to visualize colonialism. Working with affect and haunting as research material, the inquiry questions how museums and other cultural heritage institutions are caretaking historical violations, identifying themselves as hosting agents, and navigating issues of trust and accountability as they make their colonial collections available online. Speculating about what an ethics of care in representation could look like, the article draws on reparatory artistic engagements with such imagery and proposes how metadata could be rethought as a cataloging space with the potential to alter historical imbalances of power. Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant's words the bridge to the dead or the scriptural tombs in which they await us? ("Venus in Two Acts," Saidiya V. Hartman 2008) While researching I become part of your army of ghosts. Haunting. Haunting. (Unearthing. In Conversation, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński) 1

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During 2016, the Royal Danish Library digitized more than 200.000 pages from the library’s, collections all of which related to the former colonies in the Caribbean. This included books and other printed matter, but also sheet music, manuscripts, personal documents, photographs and drawings. Images were published in Digital Collections, the library’s platform for digitized materials, and were accompanied by limited metadata, thereby posing challenges in terms of accessibility and important historical contextualisation. This essay therefore reflects on the gaps and the silences that haunt indexing and descriptive practices in the migration online. Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Danish Library and has been project-managing the digitisation. Temi Odumosu is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University and has worked intensively with the collection as user and collaborator in the project What Lies Unspoken. As the Library embarks on initiatives to address the limited metadata associated with its digital collections, the authors come together to unfold key questions about approaches and process. They describe the characteristics of Digital Collections and the metadata currently provided, and ask what is left out and why; thereby engaging cultural biases that uneasily mirror the colonial project. The authors also explore how more inclusive user involvement, particularly in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), could shift language and epistemology. The leading inquiry question is: In the one-eyed colonial archive, what is it possible for metadata to do?

This study examines the complicated role that works of art play in colonial remembrance, and the ways in which they sustain stereotypes, biases and power relations over the passage of time. It takes as its case study Thomas Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes (1796), which has been used as visual evidence for the fragmented biography of an Afro-Caribbean entrepreneur, mythologised as a brothel-keeper servicing the British navy, against the backdrop of slavery. Since the story of Rachael Pringle Polgreen (c.1753-1791) is wellknown, I focus on an analysis of the artwork and its unusual composition, speculating reasons for its appearance in London's print culture. Tracing the spectral afterlives of this print, I also argue that the image functions as a colonial keepsake, treasured as evidence of intimate connection between metropole and (post) colony.