Marais Digital Curation Mini Project
For this exhibition, I curated an exhibition of portraits.
Approach Step 1: Translate the text from French to English.
Step 2: Search for the word “portrait” with in the picture description. Findings: Only filtered 24 picture results.
Step 3: Looked for commonality in other fields amongst the 24 portrait photos. Findings: The “Subject: Topics: Vie Quotidienne” field contained “clothing” in most of the portrait photos.
Step 4: Search for the remaining data (not included in the filtered portrait data) for the word “clothing” in the “Subject: Topics: Vie Quotidienne” field. Findings: 27 more photos appeared. Cleaned this new data set for pictures that weren’t portraits. Remaining number of photos: 31.
Goals I chose to look at portraits because portraits are a rarity. During the 16-19th centuries, portraits were mainly reserved for those people of high importance, wealth, power, and virtue. I wanted to display the most powerful people and the state of celebrity culture at the time through portraits. Portraits are the easiest way to display a certain societal significance.
Story My goal is conveyed through this exhibit because the images that I was able to gather included Kings, Emperors, Religious Figures, Warriors, etc. It tells the stories of some of the most influential period during that time period.
How to expand the project to be more useful for a public audience: I would like to connect the stories of those people to the actual Marais neighbrhood and understand the connection (if there were deeper connections/relations that existed).