Showcase example

[ajs6f]

As per discussion on this call we are going to assemble a "showcase" example for use on a call with curators and collections managers.

[edgartdata]

Damien Hirst's In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) consists of 8 paintings, household paint on canvas with butterflies; 4 boxes; 1 table, formica top on steel base; and 4 glass ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1669159

It does not look like a particular order must be respected for the paintings? The Tate Modern had a different sequence for the paintings in 2012: http://www.damienhirst.com/in-and-out-of-love-butterfly

Regardless, it might be useful to document the particulars of each new installation for the piece.

Oh, and it is itself only half of the original overall installation (see curator's comment in https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1669159).

Bonus question: would we want to model the piece down to the individual cigarette butts?

[ajs6f]

@workergnome @SamiNorling @beaudet @danieltbrennan (not sure of Kevin Page's Github ID)

This is an issue to which we can attach our ideas or items for use in a showcase example. I'm hoping y'all have ideas about what would be interesting/exciting to curatorial staff, because I live in a central office here at SI, not any of the museums that might be expected to hold good examples, and I am no domain expert!

[ajs6f]

Wow, @edgartdata, that was fast, thank you!

[ajs6f]

@edgartdata, from conversation this morning, I was thinking that we want an example that shows connection across institutions (federation, as @workergnome put it). I honestly don't know enough about Damien Hirst (or contemporary art, generally) to know whether we'll have a good chance at finding those connections. What do you think?

[SamiNorling]

I agree that focusing in on the parts of the Linked Art model that offer the most interesting opportunities for highlighting links between institutions' collections, creators, exhibitions, etc. would serve us the best in demonstrating the utility and value of linked data for art collections. Though we discussed it in detail today, I don't know if complicated partitioned artworks would fit this bill.

What first comes to my mind as something that could be explored (and that I know our collections managers and curators would be intrigued by) are:

• Common collectors/donors across institutions, so modeling a few objects that share a common provenance point of some kind;
• Exhibitions (though development of this part of the model won't take place for a while) - which pieces have traveled where and when to be exhibited; trends of artists represented in exhibitions across multiple institutions' exhibition history;
• Relationships between artists as a way to evaluate and interpret works - reconciliation with ULAN in modeling creators would make this possible, since ULAN documents relationships between individuals/organizations (e.g., student of) - this could open up an opportunity to get a curator involved, who could speak to a specific individual, school, or artist group and their web of influence

Those three ideas are the first that come to mind, but there's many more opportunities for exploration across collections that the Linked Art model will open up in the future...

[edgartdata]

I would think that the issues raised by contemporary art installations with many parts would be both relevant to several institutions and bears some similarities to more traditional use cases, such as the panels and predella of a triptych being detached and/or dispersed across several locations at one museum or across several institutions.
But I will keep thinking of other use cases.

[ajs6f]

@edgartdata They very well may be; I'm coming to think that we eventually want a suite of nice examples for various audiences/purposes.

@SamiNorling I agree that those commonalities would make for good cross-institution linking. With respect to your third idea (and pardoning my ignorance of the domain), do you know of institutions that have accomplished reconciliation against ULAN, or is that something we could just do "manually" for an example?

[SamiNorling]

@edgartdata Your mention of detached and dispersed groups of items is definitely a good lead - hadn't thought of that aspect of partitioned pieces.

It brings to mind the separation of the frescoes from the Hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga. We have two of the frescoes in our collection, and I know of other frescoes that are in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, The Met, BMFA, and Museo del Prado.

[SamiNorling]

@ajs6f The partners of the American Art Collaborative had some ULAN reconciliation completed, and we still have that data linking our artist identifiers with ULAN identifiers, where available. Multiple AAC partners either already had identifiers in their CMS or added them once they had the data back. We also document this in our CMS to some extent, though I'm hoping to do a lot more. I use OpenRefine in my bulk reconciliation efforts.

For this demonstration, I think we could definitely handle small scale reconciliation if it's not already completed. The local example I have used for the benefits of linked data and taking the time to reconcile with external authorities is William Merritt Chase, who was the teacher of Georgia O'Keeffe - both artists that are represented in our collection, but that relationship is not catalogued in our CMS (and really, it wouldn't be practical for us to catalogue that detailed of information at any sort of scale). So reconciling with ULAN across all of our creators, and publishing that data as linked data then adds our collections to the full web of relationships that ULAN captures. That example has gotten a positive response internally as an argument for linked data and/or reconciliation work, depending on what I'm advocating for at the time.

[danieltbrennan]

Still thinking about this a bit but I really like that frescoes example @SamiNorling. In that vein we have a substantial number of objects (mosaics, fragments, etc) that were excavated from Antioch and then dispersed to different institutions.

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/29551
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioch_mosaics

Potentially an interesting case since (at least for ours, but I would imagine for the other institutions as well) their history and movements are pretty well-documented.

[ajs6f]

@danieltbrennan Do you think we could ask those institutions to collaborate with us, or were you thinking that we would ourselves use whatever information we could get from each and build up a Linked.Art description ourselves?

[danieltbrennan]

@ajs6f good question, I was more thinking the latter - that's a lot to ask from institutions that may not have the bandwidth for it (although some may be game).

Something I'd float as reasonable only because I know through past experience/projects that never came to fruition that there is pretty ample documentation around that set of works.

[ajs6f]

@danieltbrennan That makes sense. I would be interested in working on that. We could try coming up with a skeletal set of interlinked descriptions then enrich if we decide it's a good road to go down.

@SamiNorling Do you think that either the frescoes from the Hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga or @danieltbrennan 's Antioch examples would give us an opportunity to show the "ULAN effect" wherein reconciling some metadata and connecting it to some "external" graph offers actual new knowledge?

[azaroth42]

Here our Antioch mosaic:
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/6539/unknown-maker-mosaic-floor-with-animals-7-roman-about-ad-400/

:)

[ajs6f]

Excellent, so the Antioch example might already have two Linked.Art institutions! I'll offer this idea for review on the next call, but I already think the Antioch example is promising.

@edgartdata would you be interested in working up the Damien Hirst example with me?