Digital Curation
Approach
Since the annotations were not particularly good, I ended up going through the collection of photos and tagging the ones related to music and instruments. Since this didn’t reach the 30-photo minimum, I also added other kinds of entertainment such as tennis and other games.
Challenges: As for uploading to Omeka, this was quite frustrating. The site was pretty unintuitive, and the import functionality didn’t even let me bulk-upload the images (so I had to do that individually). This probably isn’t the forum for it, but I feel like this curation project would be much easier on a modern website-building platform such as SquareSpace or even an alternative exhibit as an instagram profile, or something like that (though you don’t get the same form of metadata). I’d also like to second all of Parker’s points from his post.
Goals
- Show the close relationship between entertainment and war in 16th-century France.
- Experiment with Omeka for digital curation
- Make visitors think about modern relationships between entertainment and war.
Story and Findings
Although they arose at different times throughout history, war and entertainment often mimicked each other, and both procedures informed each other. In particular, these pieces of art show art as a symbol of status–representing wealth and power, and war as a reality for the masses. The particularly interesting pieces show the two integrated with each other: War heroes’ glory exaggerated by musicians, and musicians accompanying processions. In this online exhibit, I particularly find myself wondering how the two concepts relate in my life, where the tables have turned: entertainment belongs to everyone, and war is a more distanced concept.