Enriching Exhibition Scholarship (EES) is 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 will connect artwork information and encourage visitors to engage with exhibitions by providing them with shareable content for social media. Yale and the University of Edinburgh are 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 will gather 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 will make 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 is a digital project, which will use advanced computational techniques, such as text mining and machine learning, to capture all sorts of exhibition data and allow museums to make it easily accessible and shareable to scholars and the public. EES brings 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 provides 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 not only will collect the data but will reconcile 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 will include 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 will establish the tools needed to ensure the digital records of those objects are connected across organizational boundaries, bringing added value for researchers and patrons. Museums will be able to 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. And it could provide links to objects from other institutions that were once exhibited alongside the painting.
