DH Projects

I really enjoy reading this article. It touches upon many crucial questions I experienced when I browsed a museum webpage. While I wanted to learn more about the exbihits, the collections, I don’t know where to start or what keywords to enter in the search box. So I gave up very often. Just as Mitchell suggested, Search is ungenerous or inhospitable, in that it demands visitors who are unfamiliar with a collection to make the first move and enter a query.

I used to consider curated highlights or exhibitions, or the “most popular” holdings could be a good representation of a collection. Yet, Mitchell raised a interesting counterargument that while the list conveys the scope and diversity of a collection, it fails to represent the whole picture. The rich and exploratory features are missing.

MoMa Collection does a great job on showing first (not ask) and providing a rich overview of the collection. It shows 86.234 out of 98.076 works online. Yet, it fails to provide good samples. As the work is organized by author’s name, visitors need to scroll a whole page of David Horvitz’s work before browsing works from other artists. There is no other salient information that encourages visitors to further explore on the home page. When visitors click one particular work, they can see detailed information about the work, the author’s other work, and many other relevant information. So that the high-quality primary content is reached. In general, I think MoMA collection creates a rich interface to represent large, diverse collections, yet the display is not compact and browsable enough.

Reviewing the Harvard Art Museums website with Whitelaw’s principles

1. Show first, don’t ask. The site successfully displays rich contents of art collections at Harvard Museum to support the audience’s understanding of the collection. The size of the images is just right to me that I could grasp the content of collections while still being able to browse through multiple items simultaneously. The ordering of the items is also dynamically related to each other, so the collections can be displayed compactly while not losing their original proportions.

2. Provide rich overviews. Not sure if the overview principle means a summary of all the collections? But the website does have a function bar on top for users to view its rich collections according to different categories such as work type, technique/medium, period, place, and culture. These categories are very effective not only for the general public to understand and learn but also for scholars to search for a specific group of art collections.

3. provide samples. Collections of different types and periods are displayed on the first page to provide rich contextual cues and invite exploration. I assume this is done through an algorithm to generate a diversity of collections for users to browse so that audience can get a sense of what artworks there are in the museum.

4. Provide context. This is done very professionally for the Harvard Art Museum. When the user clicks an item, all related information is displayed: identification and creation, physical description, acquisition and rights, and subjects and contexts. Users could also click the link about the author to see other works and better understand the relationship and structure of the artists’ work.

5.Share high-quality primary content. When the user clicks the item, there is the option to enlarge the image as well as download/order it. Under the acquisition and rights section, it also indicates,’To request a higher resolution file of this image; please submit an online request.’ which allows the general public and scholars to get high-resolution images for free.

Other principles: Allow users to curate their own collections by adding and organizing artworks. Provide Citation, IIIF, and sharable link formats for users to cite, embed images, and share collections in all sorts of ways.

MoMA - The Collection

1. Show first, don’t ask It does show a lot of works, but automatically arranges them by author, so that users can only see a lot of David Horvitz’s work when they enter the site, and the filtering options are very unfriendly to newcomers.
2. Provide rich overviews When clicking into the page of a single work, there is only some basic information, such as size, material, etc. There is almost no content, meaning, or introduction of the work, not to mention the related theory and field of introduction.
3. Provide samples There is no information about samples and no contextual clues to encourage people to explore.
4. Provide context There is almost no context, so people are confused after reading and do not understand any background information or story about the work.
5. Share high quality primary content. No high definition scans, no editable attachments, etc. Some works have only a blurred screenshot of the webpage, so it is impossible to read the information on it.

The reading Towards Generous Interfaces for Archival Collections gives us five design principles. When browsing the MoMA Collection website, it shows that this website has met four out of five principles suggested by Mitchell Whitelaw. The homepage meets the demand of showing first and allows users to search by a query. The display of the collections lets users feel their generosity, and it also gives us the number of selected and total works. Users can filter the collections by category and time. And it also allows for a recent acquisition. Besides, users can also know if the work is on view in the museum or not, which offers the users another chance to see the work in person. When clicking on specific work, users can quickly check the detailed information regarding author, dimensions, medium, object number, series the work belongs to, and department. Furthermore, users will also learn if the work is part of a series, if the author has any other works collected here, and the number of works in the same department. However, there is one problem I met when browsing the pictures, which fails to obey the rules of sharing high-quality primary content. The website allows me to view the image in full-screen size, but it can not be further zoomed in to see the details. Those who want to see the details cannot accomplish that, and reading the texts in the pictures is too hard.

Trove is a crowd-sourced archive primarily built around digitized Australian newspaper sources. Developed and maintained by the National Library of Australia, the collection is searchable and continually growing thanks to an active community of contribtutors.

Perseus is an online library containing a vast trove of texts from the ancient Greco-Roman world and beyond. A project of Tufts University since the mid-1980s, Perseus has evolved into a web-based collection reaching from the classics into many other parts of the humanities, augmented by advanced research tools. You can browse and search the Perseus collections here.

The Old Bailey collection is “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” You can view it online here.

These three DH projects were completed by student teams for 2014’s iteration of CMS.633.

Around the World

Around the World—created by Parul Batra, Christian Landeros and Bethany LaPenta—uses an array of realtime analysis tools to construct an augmented record of contemporary news media across the globe. Read the group’s design brief here.

Art Annotator

For their final project, Megan Gebhard, Eric Fisher Jepsen and Evan Moore conceived and prototyped a platform for adding a community layer to art museum experiences. Their project uses annotation technology to expand the modes of interaction available to art historians and other viewers. Read their design brief here.

Arttract

Ari Vogel, Dohyun Bae and Nick Nigam also turned their attention toward augmenting the art museum experience: their project allows users to cement what might otherwise be fleeting encounters with art by drawing these viewings into a process of documentation and curation. Read their final design brief here.

The Venice Atlas is a multifaceted historical document of the city developed collaboratively by students in a digital humanities course. The atlas uses tools including timelines, mapping, and 3D modelling to present aspects of Venice history ranging from geographical evolution to musical traditions.

The Republic of Letters was an international correspondence network including many of the Enlightenment’s major intellectual figures. The Stanford Humanities Center compiled data from this huge set of exchanges and, through an extensive series of case studies, crafted interactive visualizations to illuminate the movements and relationships behind them. View more about the project at republicofletters.stanford.edu.

Provoke is a collection of projects which use sound in pushing the boundaries of scholarly presentation. In addition to the sonic documentation of their research areas, the authors of these projects also —as the name “Provoke” suggests—challenge existing modes of research and presentation, uniting the forwarding-thinking agendas of the digital humanities and of sound studies. Read more about the collection at soundboxproject.com/about.html.

The Comédie-Française Registers Project collects and makes available to scholars more than a century’s worth of historical data from the archives of a royal theater in Paris. CFRP is led by Jeff Ravel of MIT’s history department and has been a long running project of HyperStudio. Right now, the contents of registers spanning from 1740 to 1793 are accessible through a faceted browser, which quickly filters and aggregates data across multiple categories and also links to scans of the original documents themselves. You can explore the data at app.cfregisters.org/registers.