Threading Histories: Nigerian Women’s Textile Traditions is a digital humanities project that maps the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of Nigerian women’s textile handicraft traditions from 1850 to 1960. Through interactive mapping and archival research, this project visualizes how British colonialism disrupted traditional knowledge systems and transformed women’s labor across ethnolinguistic regions. Over the course of my CHI Fellowship from January to May 2025, I will develop an open-access website at threadinghistories.org that centers women’s expertise and makes colonial archives accessible to descendant communities and scholars.
From Research Question to Digital Project
The history of Nigerian women’s textile work has been systematically undervalued in colonial and postcolonial archives. Traditional narratives privilege European perspectives and men’s labor, while material culture remains disconnected from the specific communities and geographic contexts that produced it. Perhaps more critically, the temporal dimension of colonial disruption is often flattened as colonialism is treated as a singular event rather than the ongoing process it was. These gaps in existing scholarship reveal a fundamental problem: how do we recover and represent women’s expertise when archives were designed to minimize it?
Digital humanities offers a solution that traditional publication cannot. Interactive mapping reveals spatial-temporal relationships invisible in linear text. By anchoring textile traditions to specific locations and tracking changes across decades, this project makes visible the process of colonial economic disruption. The research questions driving Threading Histories ask: How did textile handicraft traditions vary across ethnolinguistic groups and regions? How did British colonialism and foreign imports specifically disrupt these practices? Can digital mapping help us visualize colonial transformation as it unfolded over time?
Defining the project’s scope required difficult decisions. I chose to focus on 1850 to 1960 to capture the colonial period and its immediate aftermath, when traditional practices were most dramatically transformed. The geographic boundaries follow modern Nigeria, though I acknowledge the tension between contemporary borders and historical territories. The project includes multiple craft types; weaving, dyeing, embroidery, basketry, and beadwork, but centers on women’s textile work specifically because this labor has been most overlooked. These decisions balance comprehensiveness with feasibility, acknowledging that no single project can capture everything while still making a meaningful intervention.
Building the Archive: Methodology and Sources
The archival foundation of this project draws from multiple repositories. British Colonial Archives at the National Archives UK provide Colonial Office papers and trade reports, though these sources require careful reading against the grain. Museum collections at the British Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and Field Museum offer material culture documentation with provenance data. Missionary records from Rhodes House Library contribute photographs and ethnographic observations, which I approach with skepticism about their inherent biases. Trade reports and economic surveys round out the primary sources, each selected for geographic coverage, temporal span, and when possible, traces of women’s voices, even if mediated through colonial recordkeepers.
Each mapped location will include specific data points: geographic coordinates, ethnolinguistic group, craft type and specific technique, time period classification, and status indicators showing whether traditions were thriving, stable, declining, or had disappeared. Colonial impact documentation for each location connects material disruption to broader economic policies. The challenge lies in georeferencing historical locations when sources use colonial-era place names or describe ethnic territories rather than precise coordinates. I document this uncertainty transparently—some locations will be marked as approximate, and data gaps will be acknowledged rather than hidden.
Audience and Community: Who Is This For?
Threading Histories serves multiple overlapping audiences. Academic researchers, historians of Africa, textile historians, anthropologists, gender studies scholars, and spatial humanities practitioners will find geographically and temporally specific data often missing from existing scholarship. Nigerian diaspora communities seeking connection to heritage and contemporary artisans linking past practices to present work represent a crucial audience whose access to colonial archives has been limited by geography and institutional barriers. Museum professionals and educators contextualizing collections need resources that move beyond object descriptions to situate textiles within specific cultural and historical frameworks. Students at both undergraduate and graduate levels researching African material culture will have a model for engaging colonial archives critically. Ultimately, I wanted to create a project that would have been immensely helpful to me as I am currently conducting my own dissertation research.
Building community around this project means making research reusable and accessible. Downloadable datasets in CSV and GeoJSON formats allow other scholars to build upon this foundation. Open methodology documentation models transparent research practices. I envision future collaborative annotation features where verified community members and scholars can add oral histories and family traditions. My hope is that these collaborative aspects will also be utilized within my dissertation as well. Partnership development with Nigerian universities, museums like the National Museum Lagos, and cultural organizations remains a priority for ongoing dialogue beyond the fellowship period.
Significance: Why This Work Matters
This project makes several scholarly contributions. For African studies, it centers women’s labor and expertise in ways that disrupt colonial narrative frameworks. The geographic and temporal specificity often missing from broad surveys allows us to see variation across ethnolinguistic groups and track transformation decade by decade. For digital humanities, Threading Histories demonstrates how geospatial approaches can make postcolonial material culture legible in new ways. It models ethical engagement with colonial archives by reading against the grain and documenting uncertainty. The project shows how DH methods can make visible what traditional scholarship may obscure.
The intervention extends beyond academia. Making archival materials accessible to communities of origin counters extractive research practices where Western institutions hold knowledge about non-Western peoples. Contemporary artisans can trace their craft techniques back through historical practices, understanding how colonialism disrupted but did not erase traditional knowledge.
Deliverables and Timeline
The primary deliverable is an interactive website with five main pages. The landing page introduces the project with clear significance statements. An interactive map features a temporal slider allowing users to move through decades, watching craft traditions emerge, migrate, and sometimes disappear. Clicking location markers opens detail sidebars with archival images, historical narratives, anthropological context, and colonial impact documentation. The textile repository provides a curated image gallery with metadata and filtering capabilities. A methodology page documents the research process transparently, including limitations and data gaps. Finally, a comprehensive bibliography lists sources and suggests further reading.
Secondary outcomes include a downloadable GeoJSON dataset of 50+ locations that other researchers can integrate into their own projects, blog posts documenting the development process, and an image gallery with reusable metadata.
Looking Ahead
Beginning this CHI Fellowship work in January feels both exciting and daunting. Immediate next steps include finalizing my data collection template, continuing archival research, and building the GitHub repository structure. The technical challenges ahead are the temporal visualization, sidebar integration, and historical map georeferencing, all of which will push me to learn new skills while drawing on CHI’s community of practice.
I invite readers to follow along with the project blog as development progresses. Suggestions for sources or potential partnerships are welcome, as this project benefits from collaborative knowledge. The public launch in May will mark not an ending but a beginning, as I hope Threading Histories becomes a living resource that communities and scholars continue to build upon.
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