Mollie Echeverría

Read Time:2 Minute, 39 Second

Possible Directions for the Project

As far as the direction of the project, after reading Joshua’s documentation of his work this past year, I’m thinking I might like to focus on enriching data on collection objects or creating relationships between them, unless you think it would be better to continue Joshua’s focus on the museum’s artists. Given the limited scope of the project to 1931-48, I assume this would mean objects either created or acquired during this time?

I recently read an article on projects created by SVA’s MFA in Visual Narrative program based on mapping collections at the Metropolitan Museum (http://hyperallergic.com/314638/interactive-maps-of-the-metropolitan-museum-offer-fresh-views-of-its-permanent-collections/). Students created interactive maps in part based on relationships between objects in the collection; for instance, indigo objects, or sculptures depicting the female form. I’m thinking it might be interesting to similarly map or create some kind of interactive interface connecting objects in the Whitney collection based on shared traits or themes. This might be done through information collected from field in TMS like Medium, or enrichment from some outside source.

Joshua mentioned expanding on projects by the Smithsonian American Art Museum or the Yale Center for British Art as a possible future direction for the project. The Smithsonian website discusses their use of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model ontology to map relationships between objects in their collection (http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/lod/about/). In reading about CIDOC CRM, I came across a project called ResearchSpace being developed by the British Museum (http://www.researchspace.org/). Their Semantic Search component integrates data from Wikidata to allow users to search for objects based on the relationships of entities to one another. Joshua mentions using data from Wikidata and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus to enrich the data he pulled from TMS, and I wonder how this enriched data could potentially be used to create links between objects.

Joshua also mentions provenance and/or exhibition data as another possible area for further work. Another project direction I’m considering would involve linking or mapping objects to other institutions where they were previously shown. I did a lot of research on object provenance during my former job working at an art gallery, and I wonder if and how it might be possible to make this process easier and more intuitive for the museum’s researchers. It might also be interesting to enrich the museum’s data on the exhibition history of its artists using data from outside sources. Or, alternately, to add places where artists worked or exhibited to Joshua’s existing map of places of birth and death.