Uncategorized

At the College Art Association’s annual conference in Chicago, the WPI hosted a panel titled “Pen to Paper in the Digital Age: Artist’s Correspondence and Writings from the Nineteenth Century.” Inspired by the upcoming publication of Ted Reff’s 3-volume book, The Letters of Edgar Degas, the panelists Petra Chu, Elpida Vouitsis, Leo Jansen and Chu shared art historical insights gained from the close study of artists’ letters. The room was filled beyond capacity, and so we are grateful to be able to share this fascinating panel with a wider audience online

The WPI is proud to have published Ted Reff’s magisterial study, which is available for pre-order through Penn State University Press and will be available in bookstores in May 2020

http://www.psupress.org/catalogs/PDFs/SS20.pdf

On March 5, 2020, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute hosted a day-long conference on art digitization and database management for professionals in the field. Comprised of three panels, the conference brought together experts from institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, IIIF Consortium, the British Library, and more.

To read more about the conference, please click here to read our full breakdown of the day. Otherwise, please find complete footage of the event below filmed by Martin Loper.

Please Note: Because our staff is working remotely, we are currently unable to upload our panel discussions due to the large file-size. If you would like access to these videos, please email info@wpi.art and we will provide you a streamable link.

Please Note: Because our staff is working remotely, we are currently unable to upload our panel discussions due to the large file-size. If you would like access to these videos, please email info@wpi.art and we will provide you a streamable link.

For over five decades, members of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) have assembled annually to discuss how technology impacts the work of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums–otherwise known as GLAM Institutions. Comprised of more than 600 institutions, the MCN promotes a collaborative spirit as the best approach towards achieving a broad range of digital initiatives, from building visitor engagement apps to publishing exhibition catalogues online to experimenting with artificial intelligence. I attended the 2019 conference in San Diego in early November to investigate where the conference’s conversation may overlap with the goals of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. 

Metadata cleanup

One such topic was the consolidation and improvement of Metadata. To those who work with museum collection management systems, “metadata cleanup” is a very familiar topic. Why? Because the history of collecting metadata is extremely messy. Over the past few decades, many institutions have migrated their data numerous times as they upgraded databases; staff members came and went; researchers did not enter data according to agreed-upon standards; and CMS tools didn’t have sophisticated fields to capture information on a granular level. This means that lots of the data museums rely upon today is inconsistent, has lost its original context, and is difficult to navigate.

Increasingly, however, staff and visitors both want to conduct complex questions about museums’ collections. For example, you might want to know how many artworks in the collection were made by women, or whether a certain painting was shown in an exhibition in Tokyo in the 1980s, or if a museum has 19th-century photographs of Grecian ruins. In an era of search engines, asking these questions may seem like an easy task. Unfortunately, museums can only answer questions about the data they have in their CMS, and even then, only if it is structured correctly in the proper field. 

In response to these demands, many institutions–including the WPI–are working to make their data searchable and machine-readable. On a practical level, this means consolidating duplicate material and using standardized names for institutions, people, and concepts (such as the Getty ULAN and ATT). On a political level, as museums commit themselves to social justice issues, curators, registrars, and metadata specialists are increasingly invested in creating metadata schema that address historical lacunae. For example, Chad Weinard from the Williams College Museum of Art pointed out that when the Guerrilla Girls were conducting their research, museums had never before been asked to supply the gender breakdown of the artists in their collection. 

Now, this data is considered critical to understanding a collection, and many museums seek to rectify other absences in the data. For example, Jeremy Munro, from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, explained that museums ask the artists of new acquisitions to share their gender identity on intake forms. In turn, CMS tools can document a broader range of identities beyond the binary of “male” and “female.” As our understanding of diverse arts and artists becomes more sophisticated, museum data specialists have to think how to document this information in nuanced and complex ways. For example, Munro questioned how we should document the gender of artists who are no longer alive and cannot advocate for themselves, who belonged to a culture that embraced multiple genders, had been historically mis-gendered, or whose identity was never recorded at all. These issues demonstrate not only the challenges of improving metadata, but the historical significance of metadata stewardship.

This type of work is important to the WPI – especially if we strive to diversify our roster of artists. (You’ll have to wait until 2020 to learn about our new developments on that front!) 

Metadata activism is exemplified by the work of our archivists, who are preparing a selection of our collection for public display in January. By identifying and tagging individuals–especially if in the past they might have only been known as a “Mrs.”–we are connecting them to a broader digital and scholarly arena, where they can be discovered, and where they can give a more robust impression of the time period.

Open Access data & its applications

Once relatively clean and structured, many museums have started to make their collection data available as downloadable datasets. As someone who has little experience working with digital raw data, my first question was why one want access to all this information? It can seem overwhelming.

It turns out that there are lots of ways to use this data if you have a little imagination!

The cataloguing and archiving tool (CAT) that the WPI is developing is built to publish digital catalogue raisonnés and archival material. (More information on CAT here) Navigation of our data will be primarily through our publications and our search platform; users will be able to ask complex queries about the artists we focus on, as well as the associated archives, provenance, publications, and exhibitions. However, in the future, we hope that our data will not only be accessible in the ways we foresee. As artworks by particular artists are vetted, we hope to make our cataloguing data and images available open access (the latter of course dependent on copyright). By sharing clean data, we hope to contribute to valuable and diverse datasets, thus facilitating both niche research projects and wider initiatives in the digital humanities. 

On September 19, 2019, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute–in partnership with the Freie Universität Berlin, the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam–sponsored a symposium on the current state of art historical archives in Europe. Reviving the Archive: Material Records in the Digital Age brought together a diverse group of art historians, scholars, archivists, and curators for a day of panels and talks to address the demand for greater accessibility to archival materials. The surfeit of historically-valuable archival material which remains isolated and under restricted access is striking. The impetus for change is even more urgent in light of the increasing scrutiny on the provenance of individual works of art; facilitating access to information needs to be prioritized amongst the stewards of archival materials.

Inconceivable even a decade ago, today the art historical community can systematize and crosslink data worldwide; this milestone allows greater accessibility to indispensable materials for researchers in any location. And yet, barriers for many individuals and institutions remain when initiating their own digitization processes with in-house material. Funding the digitization process itself, a hosting platform, and other hidden costs hinder many archives, especially those held privately. Furthermore, younger archives confront the sensitivity and privacy of their contents, which can often disclose information about contemporaries. The sheer volume of resources held in repositories can also dissuade and prevent progress in the digitization and dissemination of information. There are, however, institutions who are successfully navigating these hurdles, increasing access to their archival holdings through digitization and public usability.

Presentations by the speakers and panelists at Reviving the Archive explored the professional experiences, development, and involvement with unique programs that activate archives, including large-scale digitization initiatives like Tate’s Archives & Access program made possible through a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, research collectives such as ZADIK and the University of Cologne, who work closely together on archival-based research projects, and digital database projects like DoME (Database of Modern Exhibitions) from a team at the University of Vienna. Through the exciting and novel ways these individuals and institutions are tackling the challenges of archival accessibility, we begin to see the possibilities for large-scale information sharing platforms and programs.

The last session of the day demonstrated groundbreaking technological developments, which will advance accessibility and connectivity for digital archives. Systems of automatic document analysis and text mining systems, such as hand-writing recognition and topic recognition programs enhance capacities for the standardization of data, searchability and link-ability amongst various archival repositories, and the expedited processing of large volumes of archival material.

We hope this event will be the first of many from the WPI as we continue to explore the possibilities of digital art history with our colleagues around the world. Many of us are working towards a common goal of access; the continued discussion with and support of individual digitization projects will enable connective advancements we are only beginning to imagine today. Check back to our news page about upcoming talks and presentations!

For those who couldn’t attend the symposium, we have included links to a video of the presentations below: