This project developed a platform for a transformational impact in digital scholarship within cultural institutions by opening up new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Extensive digital and digitised sets of curatorial descriptions from legacy catalogues are increasingly available. We sought to realise their potential as valuable resources for cross-disciplinary research into curatorial practice, and for enhancing access to and analysis of collections at scale.
Our pilot research investigated the temporal and spatial legacy of a landmark catalogue: the 1.1 million word British Museum 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires', which is the basis of related catalogue data at the Lewis Walpole Library and the British Library. Alongside this research we:
- Demonstrated how methods combining corpus linguistic and archival research can be used to produce an empirical account of curatorial "voice" across a large catalogue.
- Ask questions about the enduring legacies of curatorial labour, methods for defining and highlighting those legacies, and the role of digital scholarship in responding to the ways in which legacy descriptions work against contemporary ambitions of cultural institutions.
- Developed sectoral capability in digital scholarship through co-produced training materials and reports, proofs-of-concept for changing how legacy descriptions are presented to diverse publics, and releases of transparent code, data, and methods.
Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions was a collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab, the British Library, and Yale University Library. The project run between February 2020 and February 2023.
The project was led by James Baker, Director of Digital Humanities at the School of Humanities, University of Southampton. James has a background in the history of the printed image, archival theory, art history, and computational analysis. He is author of The Business of Satirical Prints in Late-Georgian England (2017), the first monograph on the infrastructure of the satirical print trade circa 1770-1830, and led the British Academy funded Curatorial Voice project.
The project Co-Investigator was Rossitza Atanassova. Rossitza is a Digital Curator (Digitisation) in the British Library's Digital Scholarship Department with expertise in the creation and exploitation of digitised content, and experience working on multi-partner international projects. She has a research background in Classics and several years of experience as rare books librarian working with the Library’s 19th-century British printed collections.
Andrew Salway was a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. Andrew has 20 years’ experience of digital text mining and corpus linguistic methods in humanities research, and of project management. He previously applied corpus linguistic techniques to analyse the informational content of audio description (Salway, 2007) and co-developed a generalized system of image-text relations (Martinec and Salway, 2005).
Cynthia Roman is Curator Prints, Drawings, & Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, a unit of Yale University Library, and a leading expert in long-eighteenth century British visual satire, including the 2016 volume Hogarth’s Legacy.
- Lucy Havens, Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Infographics (2022).
- James Baker, Andrew Salway, and Cynthia Roman, 'Detecting and characterising transmission from legacy collection catalogues', Digital Humanities Quarterly (2022).
- 'Workshop Report. Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions: outputs and next steps' (2021)
- James Baker, ‘Presenting Legacy Descriptions – a provocation‘ (2021)
- James Baker and Andrew Salway, ‘Curatorial labour, voice and legacy: Mary Dorothy George and the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 1930–54’, Historical Research (2020)
- Andrew Salway and James Baker, ‘Investigating Curatorial Voice with Corpus Linguistic Techniques: the case of Dorothy George and applications in museological practice’, Museum & Society (2020)
- James Baker, Rossitza Atanassova, Andrew Salway, Computational Analysis of Catalogue Data (Version v2021.02.05) (2021)
- Worksheet: Reading simCataloguer (2021)
- Worksheet: Presenting Legacy Descriptions (2021)
- Salway, Andrew, & James Baker. (2021). Analysis of transmission from BMSat to LWL (v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5148228
- British Library and Moretto, Nicolas. (2021) Catalogue Records of Photographs (1850-1950) doi.org/10.23636/1345 (CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain)
- Baker, James, & Salway, Andrew. (2019). Creation of the BMSatire Descriptions corpus (Version v1.0). Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3245037 (Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International)
- Baker, James, & Salway, Andrew. (2019). Corpus Linguistic Analysis of the BMSatire Descriptions corpus [Data set]. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3245017 (Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International)
- simCataloguer: A workflow for generating machine-authored text and images from catalogue data.
- simGeorge v0.1: A machine that writes like Mary Dorothy George.
Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions: prioritising agendas and actions (February 2021)
Focusing on the futures for legacy catalogue data, these two workshops set shared agendas and next steps.
See the event page for further details.
Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions: outputs and next steps (27 July 2021)
This half-day workshop disseminated work-in-progress outputs and worked with participants to develop next steps.
See the event page for further details.
Over the course of the project, we had planned to run two capability building workshops and a partnership development workshop. Then Covid-19 hit, and we were forced to change our plans. Contact James for more information.
Computational Analysis of Catalogue Data (16 Dec 2020)
This half-day training event provided instruction in using AntConc and approaches from computational linguistics for the purposes of examining catalogue data to enable important catalogue related work. For a report on the event see the British Library Digital Scholarship Blog.
See the event page for further details.
Computational Analysis of Catalogue Data: ad hoc training (3 & 9 July 2020)
Each standalone session provided instruction in using AntConc and approaches from computational linguistics for the purposes of examining catalogue data to enable important catalogue related work
See the event page for further details.
Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship was funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) "UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions: Partnership Development Grants" scheme. Project Reference AH/T013036/1. Funding value £80,602. The project was live between 10 February 2020 and 17 February 2023.
This project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (exceptions: logos and marked images). Unless otherwise stated, project code is licensed under a GNU General Public License v3.0. As the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum is a dataset published by the British Museum, data and derived data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.