VMW

As I mentioned in a previous post, my next step in Itinera is to input my Elgin Marbles-related information into the database.  So far, I'm actually pretty efficient at this part.

In Itinera, I'm submitting info for agents (people), tours (their lives), and tour stops (places they visited).  Right now, the main people whom I'm dealing with are Thomas Bruce (Lord Elgin), Mary Nisbet (his wife) and Giovanni Battista Lusieri (artist comissioned to draw the Marbles).  There are a couple more people involved, but those are some of the more central actors.  After I'm finished with the people and their lives, I'll be able to input information about the Marbles themselves.

Everything in Itinera is connected - it is a digital web of art historical information.  Everything has to be precisely submitted step-by-step, and I frequently have to go back into the database to make sure that all the information is recorded correctly.  It's tedious and a little bit frustrating, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

However, I am a little concerned about the timing.  My FE-R presentation is in about four weeks, and I'm worried that we'll run into more problems as we try to submit the Marbles (which will be called 'objects' in Itinera).  I'm almost finished with inputting all the agents, tours and tour stops, so luckily, completing that won't take too much time out of next week.  Then I can spend the rest of the day entirely devoted to putting the Marbles in Itinera.  Jen and I have gone through my spreadsheet and identified about 20 sculptures or fragments of the Elgin Marbles that are ready to be put into the database.  Then it's just a matter of if Itinera will organize them correctly.

At the same time, that still means that there are over 100 fragments in the British Museum alone that I won't get a chance to put in Itinera before the semester is over.  I know that this database is a work in progress and we will be adding info to it for quite some time, but I wish that I had more time in the Visual Media Lab to finish up this project before the semester ends at the end of April.

This week, just about all of the known Elgin Marbles have been submitted into a spreadsheet as preparation for Itinera.  However, we're having a couple problems with actually inputting the Marbles, and there are some issues with organizing other museums that are not the British Museum:

1) We need to get permission from the British Museum to use their cataloged photographs of the Elgin Marbles.  This museum has the largest portion of the Elgin collection, and they also have the most accurate and thorough metadata for our purposes with Itinera.  Until then, we'll be finding images on the internet that we can use without having to ask for permission.

2) We're still figuring out how we are exactly going to input the Marbles into Itinera.  We need to figure out how we're going to organize the metopes, the friezes and any other larger portions of the Marbles within the database.  Some portions of the Marbles, like the west pediment figures, are individual, so those will be easier to input into Itinera.  But the British Museum and the Acropolis Museum have different ways of categorizing the Marbles, so it will be more difficult to submit them both into Itinera since they use different units to divide up the Marbles.  There's more information about the Marbles at the British Museum or the Louvre than at the Acropolis Museum or any of the other museums that have Marble fragments, so organizing the Marbles at these other museums presents more of a challenge.

Starting after spring break (3/18), I'll begin submitting information from my spreadsheet into Itinera.  I'll start with the people whom I've researched (Lord Elgin, Mary Nisbet, etc.) and work my way through some of the individual figures and fragments from the west pediment.  At the very least, there will be lots of traveling going on around the Marbles, at least through Turkey, England and a little bit of Russia.  Let's hope I'm better at programming the second time around.

For the time being, I know where the Elgin Marbles have been and how they traveled around Europe for all research purposes.  This information is sitting in a spreadsheet in my Google Drive, organized by sculpture number, location, donor, etc.  All this information, that is, for the 120 Elgin fragments in the British Musuem.

For the past two weeks, I've been organizing the metadata of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.  This is a long and tedious process because it requires me to comb through museum catalogs to find information and pictures (when possible) for these artifacts.  Now that I've finished categorizing the pieces at the British Museum, I have to do the same thing for the Marble fragments in France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Russia and Greece.  Oh my!

After organizing the Elgin Marbles' metadata, I will input this information into Itinera itself.  

Most of the Elgin Marbles are in the British Museum, but a large portion of the Marbles are still in Athens, Greece.  The Musée du Louvre and the Vatican Museums house Marble fragments, and there are many Marbles at the National Museum in Copenhagen and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, according to my research.  Still, a lot of the Marbles live in the University Museum in Würzburg and the Glyptothek in Munich.  Earlier in December and January, the British Museum also lent a statue that was believed to be a representation of Ilissos to the St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum in Russia.  So, the Elgin Marbles are pretty spread out throughout Europe.

Recording the metadata for the Elgin Marbles is tedious and rote - it takes hours to find the metadata and file it away for future use.  The goal is to have all this information prepped and ready so that it can go into Itinera by the end of the semester.  Seeing as it's taken me two weeks to file just the information for the British Museum, this is a lofty goal, but it is a goal nevertheless.

However, like I mentioned before, a great deal of the Marbles are at the British Museum, so then here are fewer fragments in these other museums.  Theoretically, it should be much quicker to organize the rest of this information, so let's see how this goes.

Trying to explain what humanists do and how they take an interest in their object(s) of study...

Humanists study humans in all of our variety. The art that we create, the writings we leave, the receipts we generate, the programs we write, the games we generate, the music we compose, the poetry we craft, the buildings we design, the policies we implement, the dances and plays and movies we produce—all such activities are the stuff of the humanities, and humanists often study them through the only means left to us: their records, data, traces, leavings. Sometimes we study this material closely, one piece at a time, sometimes we study it in the aggregate, finding large-scale patterns and shapes, but at all times we study and describe what it means to be human.

Humanities scholarship has always been deeply invested in, and tied to, its research data. Indeed, the totality of the source material studied by humanists is amongst the bulkiest, least thoroughly-investigated, most valuable data that humankind possesses. It fills millions of cubic feet of space in the archives, museums, libraries, attics, and crypts of the world. It now also fills terabytes and petabytes of storage space on computers scattered across the globe—sometimes in places inaccessible even to their creators. The material that the humanities takes as its primary sources comprises the totality of the enduring records of human existence.

Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many disciplines of humanist inquiry are acknowledging and confronting the vast amount of source material not yet tackled by our predecessors. It is almost as if it had not previously been possible for us to fathom what it would mean to grasp at the totality of the information stored in all the various sites of human recordkeeping. While it is doubtful that any humanist assumes that we can read it all or know it all about ourselves—generations of past humanists have already made it clear that this is not a fruitful line of attack—digital technologies have offered us the power to transform our approaches to this immense amount of material, allowing us to make thinkable many issues and questions that we had not dared approach previously.

What is more, the very means by which all scholarship is being produced is undergoing radical transformation. Before the global reach of the Internet, before the assumption of instantaneous communication and collaboration across the planet could be made, humanities research had the habit of being a solitary activity—the researcher against his/her currently available sources. At the present historical moment, however, collaborative research, often enabled by technology, has not only become possible, it is showing its advantages. For one thing, it allows the disciplines of the humanities to interact and reinforce one another, as different perspectives are often present to challenge and transform assumptions that do not always hold true. For another, working together, we can see more than we could individually. Indeed, final research products are also taking on new forms—such as interactive digital projects or publicly-available web sites—that not only allow researchers to investigate new methods for visualizing and presenting their studies, but also allow them to reach audiences and publics that proved more difficult to address when academic print publishing was the de facto norm.

           This semester, I’ve taken a more active role in the research of Decomposing Bodies headed by Project Lead, Alison Langmead, and Project Manager, Aisling Quigley of the Visual Media Workshop. One of my tasks is to transcribe Bertillon prisoner identification cards of the Ohio Penitentiary, a collection comprised of around 40,000 cards created throughout the late nineteenth to early twentieth century; a pre-computer database of criminals.

           At the start, my progress was slow. My eyes were still getting accustomed to reading the rushed scribbles of numbers and my fingers were still working on developing the quickest and most accurate way of inputting the information into the database. I was only focused on efficiency; the montage of the indifferent young or aggressive old held their place only as unfamiliar faces in a century old crowd.

           By the next day, I had a swift system going.  With my right hand splayed across the number pad and my left draped atop the space, tab and ctrl+c, I was able to swiftly complete the transcription of each card in under a minute without having to look down.

           There seemed to be something cruel, though, in devoting such short lengths of time to each card. These cards were created to define the men depicted on them. For some, it was most likely the only ever recorded photo or official document of himself, the only mark proving his existence in history. (yes, I realize I have a tendency of romanticizing the smallest of things, bear with me). Although these cards are in no way accurate representations of the people they were meant to capture and though I am not glorifying the crimes the men may have committed, zipping through the documents felt akin to disrespecting their existence, downgrading each status from “individual” to “card” to strictly “numbers”.

           I’ve since made a conscious effort to devote more time to each individual card. This effort was also motivated by my want to understand the work I was doing, my thought process being that I should have knowledge of the subjects being described on the cards and be on the lookout for interesting outliers. Of course, if you asked me whether or not I recognized a man, I would still find it extremely difficult to remember him in the crowd of thousands, but I feel it’s granted me a more personal connection and appreciation for this research project.

            Focusing on the cards themselves, it’s interesting what information was prioritized. The front face of the cards are fully dedicated to numerical facts, listing first the Bertillon measurements, followed by codes of the eye-class, age, forehead size, profile dimensions, etc. Any personal facts such as the name or occupation are included on the back, as if unimportant second thoughts. With the goal of efficiency in sorting in mind, this admittedly makes the most sense; one could easily falsify statements about his name or his permanent residence, while restructuring facial features may prove to be a more ambitious task. However, the decision of ordering the data in this way further encourages a disconnect between the man on the card and the user. The man becomes reduced to his list of numbers (hence, decomposing bodies <into a set of data>), and while they may be digits specific to himself, it is nevertheless a cold description that doesn’t hold the same personal weight as one’s name might. Decades later, it makes it easy to dismiss the fact that these are cards of previously existing humans, to regard them as statements of data rather than cards of heavy biographical weight. (maybe that was the intention?)

            Most of the questions that rose in my mind through the transcriptions were ones regarding the process of obtaining these numbers and photographs. Were the photographs taken before, during, or after the measurement appointments? Some cards include second or even third re-measurements, what situations prompted those, the leaving or re-entering into the system? Were the prisoners and officers inclined to exchange words? How long did each appointment take? The routine probably required a decent amount of time, and was also a somewhat intimate process, seeing that the measurements needed are of small areas such as ear or finger lengths and observations of bodily scars. The most pressing, though, is how this technical system has evolved and inspired other such programs over time.

            People like knowing who other people are. This is especially prominent now, with our population increasing into the billions. How far might this practice of identification pervade into the daily lives of the public? As of now we have the standard issued drivers licenses, passports, fingerprints, what have you, but in the last few years, more advanced systems have begun to arise, namely facial recognition. This developing program uses a similar set of measurements as the Bertillon system to identify people, which may grant higher safeties but at what cost? As was read in Jen Donnelly’s research through her post discussing the application of the Bertillon system to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, there was a sense of breached privacy and humiliation involved in the use of one’s physical measurements, though it was in part due to the connotations of Bertillon measurements at the time. Even still, with the advancements of these systems of identification, the definition and importance of privacy begins to shift.  

            In the course of the next couple months, I plan on exploring these questions and topics further, namely focusing on the argument of how biometrics may or may not cause change in the social structures standing today and what benefits or repercussions this new sort of identification may bring.