Enriching Exhibition Scholarship
Principal investigator
Principal investigator
Overview
Description
Enriching Exhibition Scholarship (EES) was a collaborative, interdisciplinary project that aims to use exhibitions and the sharing of objects as the key to enriching existing art metadata developed by the Linked Art collaboration. This project ran from 2021-2024. This project connected artwork information and encouraged visitors to engage with exhibitions by providing them with shareable content for social media. Yale and the University of Edinburgh were the two lead institutions, with substantial engagement from Oxford University’s e-Research Centre and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology.
Artwork exhibitions bring diverse cultures together, exposing artists, scholars, and the public to new experiences. Exhibitions are difficult to study because we lack holistic, structured data about co-exhibited objects and the participation of visitors. EES gathered information about exhibitions from the range of approaches used to engage audiences about art exhibits, including exhibit labels; catalogue essays; critics’ reviews; media coverage; and social media posts by visitors. The research makes art exhibitions and objects easier to study, solving a previous lack of comprehensive and structured data about co-exhibited objects, and how visitors to exhibitions participated and engaged with the work.
This digital project, used advanced computational techniques to capture all sorts of exhibition data and allow museums to make it easily accessible and shareable to scholars and the public. EES brought together an international team of researchers in the fields of linked open data, exhibitions, art history, and AI, from the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum and Yale University. This project provided an exciting opportunity to explore new approaches to enhance the museum’s collections data using digital technologies and techniques to connect with other institutions and related exhibition information.
The project team members collected the data and reconciled it with the differing data-management systems that cultural institutions use so that scholars and the public can access it seamlessly across those systems and institutions. The database includes where items have been displayed before; which items were exhibited together; items that have been loaned and shared between collections and galleries; and details of how the audience responded to them.
The project established the tools needed to ensure the digital records of those objects are connected across organizational boundaries, bringing added value for researchers and patrons. Museums can incorporate this new metadata into their collection management systems and maintain datasets that can be shared with scholars. For instance, exhibition data could appear with the other metadata in a painting’s collection record in a museum’s online database.
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/W00559X/] and the National Endowment for Humanities [HND-284978-22] through the New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions strand.
Project Outputs
Natural language processing tools are used to extract events, objects, and people from textual descriptions of exhibitions. These tools are for this project but can apply to other collecting institutions looking to improve their exhibition data, and further research into related areas where there is a lack of structured data that could be generated from full text. Link to Github for Tools and Code
This work was presented at the Digital Humanities Conference in 2023 (DH2023). The conference paper is available here.
There were three workshops conducted as part of this project. See below for the slides from this workshops:
- The third workshop, Enriching Exhibitions Scholarship Symposium was held at the University of Oxford on the 7th Feb 2024. The sides are available.
- The second workshop and advisory board meeting was held in Yale University on the 16th May 2023. The slides are available.
- The first workshop was held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2022. The slides are available.
Enriching Exhibition Stories: Adding Voices to Quire
Enriching Exhibition Stories: Adding Voices to Quire (project reference AH/Y006011/1) is a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, the Ashmolean Museum, and Yale University.
The project uses the open-source Quire software, developed by Getty, which creates rich documents, including exhibition catalogues, but which are easy to author, build, deploy and maintain, even by smaller institutions and individuals. Enriching Exhibition Stories adds capabilities to Quire so that it works with Linked Art -- the structured data used in the EES research project -- and through it enable new forms of Digital Stories.
Project Team
Aruna Devi Bhaugeerutty (Co-Investigator)
Head of Digital Collections, The Ashmolean Museum
Tyler Bonnet (Post-Doctoral Researcher)
Research Fellow, Neuropolitics Research Lab, University of Edinburgh
NLP, Computational Politics, International Relations
Kelly Davis (Data Engineer)
Cultural Heritage Data Engineer, Yale University
Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass (Co-Investigator)
Head Collections Information and Access, Yale Center for British Art
Clare Llewellyn (AHRC Principal Investigator)
Lecturer in Governance, Technology, and Data, University of Edinburgh
Dr Clare Llewellyn studies the development and definition of cross-disciplinary methodological and ethical techniques and standards. She has extensive experience in working in a collaborative trans-disciplinary environment and has produced co-authored papers with academics from informatics, politics, social work, history, botany, criminology, linguistics, information studies and library science. More recently, she has specialised in collaborating with social scientists and is embedded in the trans-disciplinary NRLabs.
Kevin Page (Co-Investigator)
Associate Faculty and Senior Researcher, Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Dr Kevin Page studies cultural and societal informatics through interdisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities. He has contributed to the Linked Art community since 2018, including leadership of the AHRC Linked Art and Linked Art II projects. His research also extends to computational methods for the organisation and analysis of music and musical information, with a particular interest in their application to digital musicology. He teaches across both these topics though Oxford's MSc in Digital Scholarship.
Robert Sanderson (Chair of the Advisory Board)
Dr Robert Sanderson is the Director for Cultural Heritage Metadata projects, in the office of the Vice Provost. Rob has played leadership roles in several key initiatives around linked data and cultural heritage, including editor and chair for standards such as IIIF, JSON-LD, Web Annotations, and most recently Linked Art, an application profile focused on usability and ease of implementation for cultural heritage linked data. He is a semantic data and systems architect, previously an information science researcher and medieval historian.
Andrew Shapland (Co-Investigator)
Sir Arthur Evans Curator of Bronze Age and Classical Greece, The Ashmolean Museum
Kayla Shipp (NEH Principal Investigator)
Dr Kayla Shipp is the Program Manager for the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, where she initiates and supports the development of collaborative digital cultural heritage projects. Her research explores the poetics of code from the nineteenth century to the present and focuses on the intersection of material culture and technology.
Past Events
KNOSSOS, MYTH & REALITY
Ashmolean Museum – 10 Feb to 30 Jul 2023
The exhibition features pieces from the museum’s Sir Arthur Evans Archive and over 100 objects that have never before left Crete.
Participate
Engage with a live exhibition
Participate at Ashmolean Museum’s Exhibition LABYRINTH: Knossos, Myth & Reality 10 Feb – 30 Jul 2023 by engaging over social media with the use of advertised hashtags. This will provide the project with relevant and informative data for an investigation of reactions to a live exhibition.
Related Links
Research themes
- Cultural Heritage
- Culture
- Data & Digital
- Digital sociology
- Methods