Laura Bang! (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
barefootsong) wrote2010-02-21 08:48 pm
barefootsong) wrote2010-02-21 08:48 pm
Entry tags:
Endangered manuscripts, a small and baffling exhibit, cultural authority, and intellectual property
Two lectures this week! One at Dumbarton Oaks about a manuscript digitization project and one just down the road at Georgetown University about cultural authority and intellectual property in the digital humanities.
On Tuesday, Columba Stewart gave a talk at [Dumbarton Oaks] on "Digitizing Remote and Endangered Eastern Christian Manuscript Collections: The Work of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library." Stewart is a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota and the Executive Director of the [Hill Museum and Manuscript Library] (HMML). Since 1965, the University has been trying to preserve endangered manuscripts by capturing them on microfilm. In 2003, they switched to digital photography. In all, they have captured over 110,000 manuscripts. Although they have projects in Europe and India, their current main area of focus is the Middle East. One of the best things about this project, to me, is that they train local people to do the work. HMML provides funding and equipment, and typically sends at least one local staff person to a reputable European institution for preservation training. HMML then receives digital copies of the manuscripts and the local institution has digital copies as well, but they also keep the physical copies and the rights to publication. I like that the focus of this project is not only on preserving these historically important manuscripts, but also on teaching the local institutions how to care for their collections to the best of their abilities. It's important to preserve the manuscripts, but it's also important to preserve the culture and, as Stewart pointed out, some of these cultures still use original manuscripts in their day-to-day lives. This talk provided a really interesting perspective on cultural authority, which coincidentally tied in with the talk I went to the next day.
But first, a photography exhibit. On the way over to the lecture at Georgetown University on Wednesday, a colleague and I stopped in at a photography exhibit on campus. The exhibit was called "The Creative Photograph in Archaeology"—it is a travelling exhibit curated by Costis Antoniadis, a professor of photography in Athens, and organized in collaboration with the Benaki Museum in Athens. My colleague is an archaeologist, so she had been wanting to see the exhibit and we took the opportunity of being on campus for the lecture to stop in. It turned out to be a very small exhibit, which we found to be utterly baffling in its design. There were about forty photographs mounted on the walls, in no discernible order. There were no labels whatsoever, just tiny numbers next to each photograph—but the numbers had no meaning that we could see. An exhibit catalogue contained thumbnails and descriptions of the images, but we had to flip back and forth through the entire catalogue to match the images with their descriptions. The photographs on the wall were not grouped in any fashion that we could see—not by photographer, site, or date. Many of the photographs were from the early twentieth century, but they had obviously been Photoshopped because they were of the same quality of the more recent photographs. The photographs were beautiful, but it was a very odd exhibit and we left still asking ourselves about the design (or lack thereof).
Thankfully, the lecture was much better, despite some technical difficulties at the beginning. The talk was titled "Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities" and there were two speakers: Tim Powell, who directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Bethany Nowviskie, who directs the University of Virginia Library's efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute.
Powell mostly discussed his work on the [Gibagadinamaagoom] website for Ojibwe cultural heritage. He works very closely with the Ojibwe communities and he very clearly respected them and their traditions while talking about them. The digital media is a close approximation of their oral traditions and because these projects are being done with the goal of giving the knowledge back to the Ojibwe communities for their own teaching and learning, the Ojibwe trust them and are willing to participate. One problem with the website that was brought up during the Q&A session is the information that is included or not. There is no "proper" scholarly or archival information attached to the content on the website. That information may not matter to the Ojibwe communities, but there are others for whom that information is valuable. The metadata is available on the American Philosophical Society website, but there is no link to that from the content, so there is no way for a casual viewer who wanted more information to know that.
Nowviskie discussed several different scholarly projects she has been a part of, including the [Rossetti Archive] and [Neatline], as well as other projects of the [NINES]. She gave an overview of the projects and some of the design and planning that went into them, as well as discussing the interactivity of these projects. These projects provide ways for scholars to interact with each other's research and develop and grow their own research. I am very intrigued by this idea of "transformative scholarship"—it's a really hard perspective to sell in academia, particularly in the humanities where monographs still rule, but it can be so rewarding. That's one of the things I find so cool about the digital humanities movements. I'm reminded of a video I saw recently: [All Creative Work Is Derivative].
Definitely some more interesting things to think about!
On Tuesday, Columba Stewart gave a talk at [Dumbarton Oaks] on "Digitizing Remote and Endangered Eastern Christian Manuscript Collections: The Work of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library." Stewart is a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota and the Executive Director of the [Hill Museum and Manuscript Library] (HMML). Since 1965, the University has been trying to preserve endangered manuscripts by capturing them on microfilm. In 2003, they switched to digital photography. In all, they have captured over 110,000 manuscripts. Although they have projects in Europe and India, their current main area of focus is the Middle East. One of the best things about this project, to me, is that they train local people to do the work. HMML provides funding and equipment, and typically sends at least one local staff person to a reputable European institution for preservation training. HMML then receives digital copies of the manuscripts and the local institution has digital copies as well, but they also keep the physical copies and the rights to publication. I like that the focus of this project is not only on preserving these historically important manuscripts, but also on teaching the local institutions how to care for their collections to the best of their abilities. It's important to preserve the manuscripts, but it's also important to preserve the culture and, as Stewart pointed out, some of these cultures still use original manuscripts in their day-to-day lives. This talk provided a really interesting perspective on cultural authority, which coincidentally tied in with the talk I went to the next day.
But first, a photography exhibit. On the way over to the lecture at Georgetown University on Wednesday, a colleague and I stopped in at a photography exhibit on campus. The exhibit was called "The Creative Photograph in Archaeology"—it is a travelling exhibit curated by Costis Antoniadis, a professor of photography in Athens, and organized in collaboration with the Benaki Museum in Athens. My colleague is an archaeologist, so she had been wanting to see the exhibit and we took the opportunity of being on campus for the lecture to stop in. It turned out to be a very small exhibit, which we found to be utterly baffling in its design. There were about forty photographs mounted on the walls, in no discernible order. There were no labels whatsoever, just tiny numbers next to each photograph—but the numbers had no meaning that we could see. An exhibit catalogue contained thumbnails and descriptions of the images, but we had to flip back and forth through the entire catalogue to match the images with their descriptions. The photographs on the wall were not grouped in any fashion that we could see—not by photographer, site, or date. Many of the photographs were from the early twentieth century, but they had obviously been Photoshopped because they were of the same quality of the more recent photographs. The photographs were beautiful, but it was a very odd exhibit and we left still asking ourselves about the design (or lack thereof).
Thankfully, the lecture was much better, despite some technical difficulties at the beginning. The talk was titled "Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities" and there were two speakers: Tim Powell, who directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Bethany Nowviskie, who directs the University of Virginia Library's efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute.
Powell mostly discussed his work on the [Gibagadinamaagoom] website for Ojibwe cultural heritage. He works very closely with the Ojibwe communities and he very clearly respected them and their traditions while talking about them. The digital media is a close approximation of their oral traditions and because these projects are being done with the goal of giving the knowledge back to the Ojibwe communities for their own teaching and learning, the Ojibwe trust them and are willing to participate. One problem with the website that was brought up during the Q&A session is the information that is included or not. There is no "proper" scholarly or archival information attached to the content on the website. That information may not matter to the Ojibwe communities, but there are others for whom that information is valuable. The metadata is available on the American Philosophical Society website, but there is no link to that from the content, so there is no way for a casual viewer who wanted more information to know that.
Nowviskie discussed several different scholarly projects she has been a part of, including the [Rossetti Archive] and [Neatline], as well as other projects of the [NINES]. She gave an overview of the projects and some of the design and planning that went into them, as well as discussing the interactivity of these projects. These projects provide ways for scholars to interact with each other's research and develop and grow their own research. I am very intrigued by this idea of "transformative scholarship"—it's a really hard perspective to sell in academia, particularly in the humanities where monographs still rule, but it can be so rewarding. That's one of the things I find so cool about the digital humanities movements. I'm reminded of a video I saw recently: [All Creative Work Is Derivative].
Definitely some more interesting things to think about!