ACTIVATING MUSEUM DATA FOR RESEARCH SCHOLARSHIP AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

From September 30 to October 3 2019, researchers from art history, developers, designers and museum staff of various institutions came together at in the Department of Modern Art History at the Technical University of Berlin to create a datasprint in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford University entitled "Activating Museum Data for Research, Scholarships and Public Engagement". The museum gave all the collected data from the museum's database to the group, which was transcribed since its creation and digitally collected in the museum's database. The diversity of the data, which is mainly due to non-standardized formats became a focus of all groups, as it revealed the history of the digital archive and lead new questions to the collection of the museum.

Museums digitize information about their objects with the diversity that digital data forms and technology can produce: objects are reproduced in high-resolution images, textual information about the life and work of the creator, the collector and the material nature of the objects, as well as metadata about all museum activities such as restoration, transport and storage are collected. Provenance, a detailed history of the object before entering the museum collection is one of the text fields, which is based especially on the research of scholars, curators, archivists and restorers. The diversity of non-standardized data shows a local embedding in the disciplines of individual data stewards. The networked object is shown in the life of the museum database. The participants developed two new software prototypes (see below) that illustrate non-existent information of objects and, using data visualizations, explored the semantic connections of object descriptions with regard to institutional history and presented data-based narratives of collector stories. Access to the entire data of the institution made it possible to ask questions about object histories in their entire collection context and to explore the history of the institution based on object data. The workshop was made possible by the generous support of the Volkswagen Foundation.