• Sarah Ketchley

University of Washington

Keywords: research resources, digital tools, student collaboration

Abstract:

The end of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw great archaeological activity in Egypt, a period that came to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology. The unpublished diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews, who traveled the Nile with the millionaire lawyer turned archaeologist, Theodore M. Davis for over two decades between 1889 and 1914, are an important yet underutilized resource for the history of this time. Mrs. Andrews was present when Davis discovered eighteen of the forty-two tombs now known in the Valley of the Kings. and her writing provides a detailed record of excavation often lacking in contemporary publications.  Our research corpus has expanded to include a wide range of unpublished correspondence, historical ephemera and historical newspapers, which give an overview of the social, geographical and political history of Egypt at the time within the broader context of history of archaeology and Egyptology, gender studies and the social, cultural and political history of the Victorian era. 

Our Project is developing a ‘Who Was Where When’ database, in an effort to provide a range of contextual data for research and analysis. A founding member of the University of Washington’s Newbook Digital Texts, we have offered internships to over 180 undergraduate and graduate students in digital humanities. Students work alongside faculty to transcribe, encode, conduct historical research and develop digital tools for textual markup, visualisation and analysis. This paper will discuss the range and significance of the primary source material, highlighting the digital tools built by students, and the lessons learned about workflow management and project sustainability. Student development work includes a ‘Historical Markup Tool’ to automate the process of encoding documents in XML-TEI, capturing named entities including locations and people, and an interactive D3 visualisation built on a contemporary map, linking locations, dates, encoded primary sources and a range of historical biographies from our Omeka database.

• Dawn Kanter

Open University

Keywords:
Modelling, database methodology, social art history

Abstract: 

My research approaches twentieth-century portraiture through the experience of the portrait-sitting: a transaction between artist, sitter and sometimes patron from which portraits are (typically) produced. Participants’ accounts of portrait-sittings are important to art history as they offer (subjective) insights into portraiture as a social practice, which entails negotiations of the gaze, subjectivity and agency, and often an exchange of money. Precedents for studying this material include The Open University’s Reading and Listening Experience Databases, which use linked data methods to collate individuals’ experiential feedback of reading and listening respectively. They promote a new approach to research, grounded in personal experiences (Brown et al. 2015). This paper will discuss how a comparable methodology might be used to understand and represent the multi-faceted portrait-sitting, and re-evaluate experiential accounts as important art-historical data (that is nevertheless part of a wider cultural history). More specifically, and based on my research to date, it discusses modelling as a way of identifying and formally representing the constitutive elements of sitting experiences. By working empirically and iteratively from 50-100 accounts of sittings for portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, 1900-1960, I am modelling the portrait-sitting experience (an unprecedented archival object) from the ‘bottom up’. The particularity of the data to this period and the Gallery (and their attendant understandings of the portrait and the individual in society) is more important than the size of the population, as my aim is not to describe a ‘universal sitting experience’ but produce a historically-grounded model that balances usability with the rich complexity of this subjective material. I will argue that this methodology supports an approach to portraiture from the 'social art history', inasmuch as a database of portrait-sitting accounts can be used to both describe the contingency of portrait production on historically-specific social and cultural factors, and capture idiosyncrasies.

• Lorna Hughes ,
• Diane Scott ,
• Ewan Hannaford

University of Glasgow

An ever-growing variety of accessible tools and resources is available for digitizing archival materials, utilised by institutional repositories and community groups. This enables data to be curated in a distributed, decentralised fashion by a wide range of community groups and stakeholders. The increasing democratization is welcome and allows for a greater diversity of resources and perspectives to be represented in the DH landscape. However, due to the highly varied approaches and formats being employed by different groups it nevertheless poses new challenges for the interoperability, interconnectedness, and sustainability of such data. 

The Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) project is seeking to address these issues by developing new tools and archival methods for the integration and linking of community-generated digital content (CGDC) via a process of iterative design and co-production with community archives. Also central to the project is the creation of a post-custodial model that will enable community groups to collect, create, and manage their own digital collections in a manner that maximizes their reach, utility, and value. 

Drawing on case studies from our network of existing community archives, our talk will first outline the current trends and challenges relating to community-generated digital content. We will then discuss the post-custodial model being developed by OHOS in response, demonstrating how we address existing limitations while working to empower community groups to generate, manage, and engage with their own data in flexible and creative ways. Consequently, our talk will showcase a newly emerging, evidence-based best practice for the collaborative creation and curation of community-focused Digital Humanities data.