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

《目录描述和馆藏之声的遗产：数字学术的机遇》将通过为馆藏目录的计算性、批判性和策展性分析开辟新的重要方向，为文化机构内的数字学术带来变革性的影响开发一个平台。来自传统目录的大量数字化和数字化的馆藏描述越来越多，我们试图实现它们作为跨学科研究馆藏实践的宝贵资源的潜力，以及加强对大规模藏品的获取和分析。目录是文化机构的基础：它们代表它们的文物，为搜索它们的文物提供基础，并向未来传播关于它们的文物的知识。目录也是文化机构历史的基础，是十九世纪末和二十世纪初专业化的产物，从印刷书籍等实物演变为数字数据库、在线发现服务和链接的开放数据。因此，目录创造了一种持久的遗产。收藏品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，进一步促进了这一遗产。由此可见，目录描述的作者不仅是对象和观众之间的有力对话者，而且是过去和现在之间的对话者。当遗产目录被重新用作当代收藏品描述的基础时，一种强大的、往往很难检测到的“策展声音”仍然存在。这种声音是写这些描述的历史和社会背景下的产物。这严重影响了用户对联合目录的信任，特别是当这些目录的一部分沉浸在未被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“声音”，并在规模上做到这一点。策展人和研究人员都需要能够全面阐述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。这个项目将突出文化机构代表其对象的一些基本方式，并创造一条途径，以改变遗产目录的再利用，用于获取、学术和研究。我们的初步研究将调查一个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》，这是刘易斯·沃尔波尔图书馆和大英图书馆相关目录数据的基础。我们将演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”进行经验性的描述。我们提出的问题包括：馆长劳动的不朽遗产，界定和突出馆长声音的方法，数字学术在回应遗产描述与文化机构当代雄心背道而驰方面的作用，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，以改变向不同公众展示遗产描述的方式，并发布透明的代码、数据和方法，以使我们的方法能够重复使用。项目团队由来自苏塞克斯大学、耶鲁数字人文实验室、刘易斯·沃尔波尔图书馆和大英图书馆的研究人员、策展人和技术专家组成。团队成员和更广泛的社区之间的伙伴关系将通过试点研究、研讨会和研究派驻来发展。

"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.