My work at the Whitney was largely self-directed. I would meet with Farris Wahbeh, the Director of the Whitney\u2019s Research Resources Department, at the Whitney\u2019s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library once a week to discuss the status of the project, but otherwise worked independently on a different floor of the museum. I also met with Pratt Professors Cristina Pattuelli and Matt Miller a few times every semester to discuss the more technical side of my work.<\/p>\n
I had no regularly assigned duties at the Whitney, so my day-to-day work primarily consisted of independent research and experimentation. I worked at a computer terminal near the Whitney\u2019s Collection Documentation and Registrarial offices, where I had access to TMS, the museum\u2019s object database. I used a Google Doc to keep a weekly journal of my project work, which also served as a scratchpad and a place to record my observations throughout the day.<\/p>\n
The direction of my project work at the Whitney was also largely self-determined, although it was influenced by the work of Joshua Dull, Pratt\u2019s previous LOD Fellow. Joshua had limited the focus of his project work to the Whitney\u2019s Founding Collection, the first 1,000 objects purchased by the museum under its first director, Juliana Force. At Farris\u2019 suggestion, I also used the Founding Collection as a sample dataset for my project work. During his time at the Whitney, Joshua experimented with creating URIs, or Unique Resource Identifiers, for the artists and objects in the Founding Collection. As one possible future direction for Whitney Linked Data project work, Joshua had suggested exploring other types of data contained in TMS, in particular information like object provenance and exhibition history. My research into how other art museums have represented provenance when publishing their collections as linked data led me to explore the CIDOC Conceptual Reference model, which ended up becoming the central focus of my work.<\/p>\n
At Professor Pattuelli’s recommendation, I created this concept map to illustrate my proposed structure for publishing the Whitney’s URIs:<\/p>\n