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：数字奖学金的机会”将通过为馆藏目录的计算，批判和策展分析开辟新的重要方向，为文化机构内的数字奖学金的转型影响开发一个平台。来自传统目录的大量数字化和数字化的策展描述集越来越多，我们寻求实现它们作为跨学科研究策展实践的宝贵资源的潜力，并加强对大规模藏品的访问和分析。目录是文化机构的基础：它们代表它们的对象，提供搜索它们的对象的基础，并且将关于它们的对象的知识传递到未来。目录也是文化机构历史的基础，作为世纪末和二十世纪初专业化的人工制品，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，目录创造了一个持久的遗产。藏品的数字化进一步发展了这一传统，使用传统印刷品目录的描述作为索引数字化材料的起点。因此，我们看到，目录描写的作者不仅是对象和观众之间的有力对话者，而且也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，一种强大而往往难以察觉的“策展声音”仍然存在。这种声音是历史和社会背景的产物，在这种背景下，这些描述被写了出来。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被承认或无法识别的过去声音和殖民集会中时。因此，迫切需要阐明和突出策展的“声音”，并在规模上这样做。策展人和研究人员都需要一种方法，可以全面地阐明策展人在数十年的工作中产生的大量文本中所做的选择，偏好和遗漏。这个项目将突出文化机构代表其对象的一些基本方式，并创造一种途径来改变遗产目录的再利用，以供访问，学术和研究。我们的试点研究将调查的时间和空间遗产的一个里程碑式的目录：110万字的大英博物馆的“目录的政治和个人讽刺”，这是在刘易斯沃波尔图书馆和大英图书馆的相关目录数据的基础。我们将展示如何结合语料库语言学和档案研究的方法，可以用来产生一个经验的策展“声音”在一个大的目录。我们询问有关策展工作的持久遗产，定义和突出策展声音的方法，数字奖学金在应对遗产描述与文化机构当代抱负的方式中的作用，以及如何发展数字奖学金的部门能力。我们将共同制作培训材料和报告，提供概念验证，以改变遗产描述如何呈现给不同的公众，并发布透明的代码，数据和方法，以实现我们的方法的重用。项目团队包括来自苏塞克斯大学，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研究人员，策展人和技术专家。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

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

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