Kat Cardullo

What makes a successful digital collection?

admin

While I had some cursory knowledge about digital collections and exhibits, it was great to take this week’s topic as an opportunity to really dig into what goes into making them work well. In her article “Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art Survey Class: Creating an Omeka Exhibition Around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall,” Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank very clearly lays out her thought processes for why Omeka is such a great tool for teaching her undergraduate students how to think on a deeper level about both the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the ways in which its presentation affects its meaning. The codex’s nonlinear and non-textual narrative is uniquely suited to the benefits a digital exhibit can offer; it is a highly visual and modular presentation method. Pieces are easily rearranged, recontextualized, annotated, described, and compared. Working in Omeka right off the bat, while sometimes challenging for her students, also acts as a digital veil-lifting of sorts; as beginner students of art history, it is likely that many of these students have done most of their artwork viewing digitally. By having students investigate and explore metadata on their own, it immediately becomes apparent that everything they had seen about artworks online previously has been highly constructed, and suddenly every decision made from the classification of the object down to the digitized image itself becomes apparent. I had never thought about using this process as a pedagogical tool, but Kilroy-Ewbank makes an excellent case for using this type of digital curation to teach both textual and metatextual readings of artwork.

We also took a look at the William Blake Archive, which is a digital collection of both the poetry and visual art of William Blake maintained by the UNC Chapel Hill Libraries and ITS. The site contains both a searchable/browsable collection of his works as well as curated exhibitions with interpretive commentary from scholars. This archive is laid out very thoughtfully, and I particularly enjoyed looking at the documentation for the project! I had never seen a project lay out their past and present standards so clearly before, which is a shame because transparency is something that many archives are trying to improve. Not only does transparency help other institutions and collections know what you have (and its quality) so that your collection can be advertised via word of mouth, it helps build trust from your users when they can see how you decide what should be included in the collection and who took part in that decision-making. I also thought that the interface was well-chosen since it allows the user to toggle between written and visual information via a “gallery” and “reading” mode. When viewing a piece, the list of related pieces (with thumbnails) in that same series is also available below the main image viewer.

The William Blake Archive in “Reading” mode.

And, to make comparison even easier, the site has a lightbox feature! After hearing about how the lightbox of slides is a dying method of building theses in art history, I appreciated that the developers of this site still saw its value. Of course, it’s not a perfect site by any means (some of the dropdown menus could be better streamlined, etc), but as far as a custom-built interface for a narrowly-focused collection goes, this was a good one. I feel like I’m always saying that whenever anything isn’t tailor-made to a collection, no matter whether it’s something technical like a collection interface or something more bureaucratic like policy, it definitely shows. And while I’m not a scholar of William Blake, I can easily see how this resource would be a staple reference to return to. 

After looking more deeply at what makes a good digital tool, we also started out on our first project: to make our own mini-exhibit in CollectionBuilder. I had heard of CollectionBuilder before, and it was actually a system we had considered using in my practicum project (organizing, cataloging, and partially scanning hundreds and hundreds of slides encompassing 50+ years of work from Chapel Hill-born photographer Avery Danziger) but ultimately decided not to use because we didn’t believe it would be sustainable long-term for the artist to run on his own (and he preferred an offline system). I somewhat regret that now after seeing how easy it is to build, and it would have worked great with his goals of being able to view his work by subject, date, and location! I was kind of shocked at how easy it was- all you really have to do is have a GitHub account, make a copy of the template containing the source code and file directory, and link up a google spreadsheet to let that data populate on the site. It’s pretty difficult to mess up, and you don’t need to do a ton of ground-up web design to make it usable- plus it’s even open source! The basic template allows for browsing by a number of different methods (via map, subject, date, and even just in a list), which is a feature I have particularly appreciated on all of the collection interfaces I’ve found to be successful. No gimmicks, just clear, thorough metadata that offers a few predetermined ways of getting a collection overview. So, in a user experience sense, I really like CollectionBuilder.

The timeline from the example site we built in class with a test dataset.

I do, however, see a few drawbacks with it. Firstly is that it is entirely dependent on GitHub, which is a for-profit company now owned by Microsoft. If you know anything about digital preservation, you know that this can put a huge wrench in longevity plans- it’s unclear how long Microsoft will continue to support GitHub or what would happen to it if Microsoft decided to abandon the site. It seems to be safe for the foreseeable future because it is a massively popular code repository (that even a lot of digital preservation tools are hosted on!), but as with anything for-profit, longevity is not guaranteed. Secondly, without coding experience, it can be difficult to change the basic template sites to something custom. From what I understand from looking at the documentation (I am not a code-minded person!), the benefit of using Jekyll as a basis for your site is that it takes a lot of the work out of coding an HTML site from scratch by using layouts and modular blocks. This is both a pro and a con- it’s fool-proof to use, but ultimately you’re kind of limited by what you’re given to work with.

The CollectionBuilder file directory for the template in GitHub. Kind of scary if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

As I work more in CollectionBuilder this week, I’ll be curious to see how my opinion changes!

Kilroy-Ewbank, Lauren G. “Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art Survey Class: Creating an Omeka Exhibition around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall: Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art Survey Class: Creating an Omeka Exhibition around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall.” Re-viewing Digital Technologies and Art History, February 21, 2018. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/doing-digital-art-history-in-a-pre-columbian-art-survey-class-creating-an-omeka-exhibition-around-the-mixtec-codex-zouche-nuttall-9ecc5e1c-2062-4cd4-9ede-a7589404cd17/section/2ec0cf43-4333-4c25-aeba-d9aefb521d3b.

admin Avatar

Written by

admin

Read next

3 responses to “What makes a successful digital collection?”

  1. Kathryn Spears Avatar
    Kathryn Spears

    I completely agree with you that the Lightbox feature on the William Blake Archive is an excellent addition to the webpage. I oftentimes find that comparing images online is incredibly difficult because you cannot display more than one image at a time. In the real world (offline that is), a researcher can examine two images side-by-side to look for similarities and differences in composition, coloring, etc. Digital collections tend to make this type of examination difficult, requiring users to download the images (if they even can) and view them side-by-side in another platform.

    Regarding your analysis of CollectionBuilder as a site, your concerns about the longevity of CollectionBuilder are not unfounded. I don’t necessarily see Github going away anytime soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft looks to change its pricing scale in the future. Currently the developer platform is free for personal use (there are limitations on storage and users though personal use shouldn’t exceed those), but that could easily change and scare a lot of casual developers off the platform. As university affiliates, we get access to higher-tier Github Pro, though we will lose access to this upon graduation. In both of these instances, projects run through Github would cease to exist, so your concerns about digital preservation are legitimate.

    Reply
  2. Caroline Fenstermacher Avatar
    Caroline Fenstermacher

    I appreciated your thoughtful analyses of Kilroy-Ewbank’s article, The William Blake Archive and CollectionBuilder. I also noted that longevity and sustainability of digital resources is a challenge.
    One of Kilroy-Ewbank’s objectives with her assigned digital projects, was to allow her students to experience the act of classifying and arranging images digitally in a way that they were exposed to everyday. I agree that this objective may have been just as productive as the stated goal of generating a thoughtful research-based study of a complicated piece of Mesoamerican culture, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. By having students critically consider each image they included in their study, they had the opportunity to engage in digital curation themselves rather than just be exposed through their social media feeds.
    Even though The William Blake Archive is a robust, impressive project, I agree with you that there are areas in which it could be improved. This may have to do with its age (I was impressed that it began all the way in 1996!). Its detailed history and technical summary is also very helpful, and I think it should serve as a model of transparency for other institutions and archives.
    CollectionBuilder also seems like an accessible tool for art historians, artists, and archivists to use. I understand your concern for with GitHub’s longevity, but I am not sure if Microsoft’s ownership of it will drastically affect its continuity compared to another crowd-sourced or non-profit organization. I suppose one can just hope that when technology inevitably advances, that the collections built using this software will be easily transferred and translated to a new software.
    Thinking about your experience with CollectionBuilder, the metadata word cloud function would have been especially interesting to see in action for the photographs by Avery Danziger. I imagine that for an artist who has created work over the course of a lifetime that it would be helpful to visualize the apparent themes of his or her work through the metadata.
    This week, I hope to engage and experiment more productively with CollectionBuilder. I also think that this is an accessible digital tool that has the potential to be extremely helpful, even those not endowed with intuitive computer skills. I think that Kilroy-Ewbank’s article speaks to the significance of learning how to use these digital tools in a field that has been traditionally avoidant of a heavy reliance on technology beyond digital reading and viewing.

    Reply
  3. Mert Overcash Avatar
    Mert Overcash

    I also notcied how all of this week’s readings emphasized the non-linearity that digital tools can provide and how they make us think about traditional linear presentations.

    I was especially interested to hear that you had thought about using Collection Builder before for an artist but decided it was too complicated, and that this experience in class made you reconsider it because it seemed much simpler. I think your initial assessment that it was too complicated isn’t necessarily incorrect, but maybe there is a hump at the beginning.

    You mentioned it being easy specifically because it lives on GitHub. I think using GitHub is actually one of the bigger hurdles in the process. At least the first time I was presented with it, GitHub seemed like quite a lot. It uses terminology that is unfamiliar if you’re coming from the arts world. It seems very much like a tool meant for more technically minded people and projects than a single photographer may feel comfortable with.

    Still, I don’t think you were incorrect that it could have been the right tool, but I think the real gap to get over is finding a way to explain how GitHub works and which parts a single artist would need to be concerned with and edit themselves. That could be another place where a sort of add-on tool is needed, where someone looks at Collection Builder and asks: can we make the interface for entering metadata more direct and easier for someone who is going to take it over after someone else has set it up for them? I’ve seen similar side projects and add-ons for things like Obsidian, where as long as someone who knows what they’re doing does the setup, managing or adding to it can be simplified dramatically. A simple form to fill out, with pre-filled drop-downs for things like image type, would be a helpful bridge across that initial speed bump, I think.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *