RECOMMENDED: The Digital Opaque: Refusing Biomedical Object

Librarians, archivists, and knowledge workers must continually grapple with ethical ways of working with unethical collections. Sean Purcell, Kalani Craig, and Michelle Dalmau offer one possible digital humanities intervention in their recently published article, “The Digital Opaque: Refusing Biomedical Object” in In The Library With The Lead Pipe. “The Digital Opaque” reflects on their experiences working with biomedical archival collections that were acquired through extractive, exploitative, and dehumanizing means. Their “intervention, the Opaque Publisher (OP), introduces a theoretical framework that lets professionals whose work engages with stolen material choose which sections of material in their collections need to be redacted.”

As they summarize in their article abstract:

This essay examines the extractive practices employed in biomedical research to reconsider how librarians, archivists, and knowledge professionals engage with the unethical materials found in their collections. We anchor this work in refusal—a practice upheld by Indigenous researchers that denies or limits scholarly access to personal, communal or sacred knowledges. We refuse to see human remains in the biomedical archive as research objects. Presenting refusal as an ethical and methodological intervention that responds to the often stolen biomatter and biometrics in medical collections, this essay creates frameworks for scholars working with archival or historical materials that were obtained through violent, deceitful, or otherwise unethical means.

In acknowledging that we cannot simply throw out archival objects derived through unethical practices, Purcell, Craig, and Dalmau “argue for librarians, archivists, and knowledge workers to refuse the object. While biomedical researchers saw the materials that populated their journals, textbooks, and archives as objects, we advocate for an approach that reestablishes the human base upon which these disciplines are built. Refusing the object is a countermethod to the reductive, dehistoricizing, and decontextualizing processes that harm humans caught in biomedicine’s dragnet.” They offer a speculative and reparative approach to biomedical archival objects—an approach that can be applied to a wide array of archival material.

The article recounts how they collaborated to develop an ethical website for Purcell’s dissertation, The Tuberculosis Specimen, that would resist turning former patients into objects and allow readers to choose their level of redaction for both text and images. The authors reflect on the process of undertaking ethics audits prior to publication, which provide an opportunity to slow down and consider the value of individual archival objects.

Their article is the first in a two-part series about their work. The second article, anticipated in February 2026, “will describe and detail the specific technological and methodological approaches we developed while creating the Opaque Publisher (OP)… Together these essays will show how ethical frameworks and methodologies can be produced through a design-based approach to research.”

“The Digital Opaque” offers a model for how digital humanities library folks can use digital interventions to engage with problematic archival materials in ways that minimize harm to others and reassert the humanity of the people whose lives and lived experiences are captured in/by those materials. The article provides a model for how other DH folks can use the open-source Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) described in this piece.