Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship

目录描述和策展声音的遗产：数字学术的机会

• 批准号: AH/T013036/1
• 负责人: James Baker
• 金额: $ 10.27万
• 依托单位: University of Sussex
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FT013036%2F1
• 关键词: Legacies; Catalogue; Descriptions; Curatorial; Voice

"Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship" will develop a platform for a transformational impact in digital scholarship within cultural institutions by opening up new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Extensive digital and digitised sets of curatorial descriptions from legacy catalogues are increasingly available and we seek to realise their potential as valuable resources for cross-disciplinary research into curatorial practice, and for enhancing access to and analysis of collections at scale.Catalogues are fundamental to cultural institutions: they represent their objects, provide the basis of searches for their objects, and communicate knowledge about their objects into the future. Catalogues are also fundamental to the history of cultural institutions, as artefacts of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century professionalisation that have evolved from physical objects such as printed books to digital databases, online discovery services, and linked open data. Catalogues, then, create a lasting legacy. The digitisation of collections has furthered that legacy with the use of descriptions from legacy print catalogues as a starting point for indexing digitised material. Thus we see that the writers of catalogue descriptions are powerful interlocutors not only between objects and viewers, but also between the past and now. And when legacy catalogues are reused as the basis for contemporary descriptions of collection items, a powerful and often difficult to detect "curatorial voice" remains. This voice is a product of the historical and social contexts in which the descriptions were written. This has serious consequences for the trust which users can have in federated catalogues, particularly when parts of those catalogues are steeped in unacknowledged or unidentifiable past voices and colonial gathering. There is therefore an urgent need to elucidate and foreground curatorial "voices", and to do this at scale. Curators and researchers alike require methods that can comprehensively articulate the choices, preferences, and omissions made by curators in what are often large bodies of text produced during decades of work.This project will foreground some of the fundamental ways in which cultural institutions represent their objects and create a pathway to transform the reuse of legacy catalogues for access, scholarship, and research. Our pilot research will investigate the temporal and spatial legacy of a landmark catalogue: the 1.1 million word British Museum 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires', which is the basis of related catalogue data at the Lewis Walpole Library and the British Library. We will demonstrate how methods combining corpus linguistic and archival research can be used to produce an empirical account of curatorial "voice" across a large catalogue. We ask questions about the enduring legacies of curatorial labour, methods for defining and highlighting curatorial voice, the role of digital scholarship in responding to the ways in which legacy descriptions work against contemporary ambitions of cultural institutions, and how to develop sectoral capability in digital scholarship. We will co-produce training materials and reports, deliver proofs-of-concept for changing how legacy descriptions are presented to diverse publics, and release transparent code, data, and methods to enable the reuse of our methods.The project team comprises researchers, curators and technologists from University of Sussex, Yale Digital Humanities Lab, the Lewis Walpole Library and the British Library. The partnerships between the team members, and the wider community, will be developed through pilot research, workshops, and research residencies.

“目录描述和策展声音的遗产：数字学术的机会”将开发一个平台，通过为藏品目录的计算、批判和策展分析开辟新的重要方向，对文化机构内的数字学术产生变革性影响。遗产目录中的大量数字化和数字化策展描述集越来越多，我们力求发挥其作为跨学科研究策展实践的宝贵资源的潜力，并增强对大规模藏品的访问和分析。目录是文化的基础机构：它们代表其对象，提供搜索其对象的基础，并将有关其对象的知识传递到未来。目录也是文化机构历史的基础，作为 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初专业化的产物，它已经从印刷书籍等物理对象发展到数字数据库、在线发现服务和链接的开放数据。因此，目录创造了持久的遗产。馆藏的数字化通过使用传统印刷目录中的描述作为索引数字化材料的起点，进一步发展了这一传统。因此，我们看到目录描述的作者不仅是物体和观众之间的有力对话者，而且也是过去和现在之间的有力对话者。当遗留目录被重新用作当代藏品描述的基础时，强大且通常难以察觉的“策展声音”仍然存在。这种声音是描述所写的历史和社会背景的产物。这对用户对联合目录的信任产生了严重后果，特别是当这些目录的某些部分沉浸在未经承认或无法识别的过去声音和殖民聚集中时。因此，迫切需要阐明和突出策展的“声音”，并大规模地做到这一点。策展人和研究人员都需要能够全面阐明策展人在数十年工作中产生的大量文本中所做的选择、偏好和遗漏的方法。该项目将突出文化机构代表其对象的一些基本方式并创建一条途径来改变旧目录的重用，以用于访问、学术和研究。我们的试点研究将调查具有里程碑意义的目录的时间和空间遗产：110万字的大英博物馆“政治和个人讽刺目录”，它是刘易斯·沃波尔图书馆和大英图书馆相关目录数据的基础。我们将展示如何使用语料库语言学和档案研究相结合的方法来对大型目录中的策展“声音”进行实证解释。我们提出了以下问题：策展劳动的持久遗产、定义和突出策展声音的方法、数字学术在应对遗产描述与文化机构当代雄心相悖的方式方面的作用，以及如何发展数字学术的部门能力。我们将共同制作培训材料和报告，提供概念验证以改变向不同公众呈现遗留描述的方式，并发布透明的代码、数据和方法以实现我们的方法的重用。该项目团队包括研究人员、来自苏塞克斯大学、耶鲁大学数字人文实验室、刘易斯·沃波尔图书馆和大英图书馆的策展人和技术专家。团队成员和更广泛的社区之间的合作伙伴关系将通过试点研究、研讨会和研究驻地来发展。

项目成果

Presenting Legacy Descriptions

呈现遗留描述

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: JW Baker

Reading simCataloguer

阅读模拟目录

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: JW Baker

Presenting Legacy Descriptions - a provocation

呈现遗产描述——一种挑衅

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Baker JW

Computational Analysis of Catalogue Data

目录数据的计算分析

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Baker JW

Detecting and Characterising Transmission from Legacy Collection Catalogues

检测和表征遗留集合目录的传输

• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Digital Humanities Quarterly
• 影响因子: 0.4
• 作者: Baker J