Beyond the Women's Building

Women Architects and World Fairs

Category: ARTH 851 Fall 2026 (Page 1 of 4)

The overlooked creative practices of metadata tracking, annotation sharing, and boundary setting

October 5, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Matthew J. Westerby opens his article “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” with the story of how downstream uses of the British Library’s IIIF images and manifests lost their own access when the Library was the subject of a cyberattack. This domino effect showed a “change in the relationship between institutions and users of online collections in which separate layers exist to serve images and also to present the digital surrogate of a real-world object like a book.”1 Similar complex layers of delivery and downstream/upstream usage have been on the minds of video game scholars for a long time. There is always a layering between the game’s software and the hardware or the display, as well as between the game as code and the physical object that carries that code, such as a cartridge. Especially with online-all-the-time consoles, a game can be pulled or updated or changed at any time without user consent or warning. These delivery layers are perhaps more apparent to the average gamer than the average user of an IIIF image art surrogate because they have demonstrably affected how games are released and experienced. It is now common (though not acceptable) practice for a game to release in a broken state with day-one patches to download. Patching post-launch was a near impossibility before internet-connected gaming, so the uneven quality of games at release has been felt by all video gamers.

This is not the only place where Westerby’s suggestions and insights for art history run parallel to emerging practice in game studies. Annotating video games is one way game studies is looking to share knowledge weither via annotating games themselves, annotating screen captures of video games, or through examining existing annotation practices like wikis and let’s plays that are a part of the larger life of “networked hyperlinked videogames”.2 For the practice part of this post, I used Panopto to experiment with annotating a brief screen capture of me playing The Blood of Dawnwalker.3

Annotated video incoming, technical issues, check back by Tues 10/5

One of the reasons wikis are such a robust source of information for video games is that they are such complex artworks that one person could never annotate a full game by themselves. It also adds to the robustness of scholarship when sharing is part of the process, not just the outcome. The Zelda object-focused digital humanities project4 that I mentioned in my post about Collection Builder was one project that used this style of sharing. My portion was about multiplicity and repetition of objects in the Zelda series, focusing on small keys, but I was doing it alongside Sydney Bauer whose object was a single American painting, Hannah Iovanna who was examining the still life paintings of a single artist, and Addie Magyar who worked with me on the Zelda portion and also acted as coordinator (Magyar was actually who noticed that small keys are the only constant in all the games). Being able to do those separate case studies with the same methodology while in communication during the process made the projects much richer and more enjoyable. Our discussions and brainstorming sessions brought up the question that I swear one day I will write about: why is there always a wheel of cheese with one little slice out in every video game? I sometimes wish I had picked the history of the wheel of cheese with one little slice out as my art history thesis: a study of why it is the most filling and delightful of foods across time and medium.

Annotating interoperable images is a mode of scholarly communication that is fundamentally different from the traditional sharing of only finished writing in journals and academic press books but no less a creative or scholarly act.5 When there’s a wider variety of acceptable ways to communicate information, writing a book or a journal article becomes a choice, not an obligation. The quality of all scholarly communication increases as forms increase because the output mode is not just one default option regardless of the needs of the argument or the data. This also allows for more modes of scholarship that cannot be studied or communicated as well via paper alone, like GIS mapping projects from my previous post. I was unfamiliar with the idea of thick data or data pollution6 as terms when I wrote the mapping post, but they are great terms for the concept I was exploring at the end of that post: messy data that balances the line between being so messy it’s no longer a useful tool but isn’t so clean that it carries unquestioned authority with data pollution also covering the source of data like AI or how data is used.

Westerby’s choice to end the article with how you can’t control other people’s usage of your images or metadata if you share them, and how the fear of misuse should be a known risk but not a reason to abandon openness was nuanced and powerful.7 There will always be people who take good things and warp them. Making decisions based around absolute prevention of misuse is an impossibility and an unnecessary burden. It is better to work from being risk-aware, with practices like the usage tags that Westerby suggests.8 It reminded me specifically of the Wretched & Alone SRD,9 a system written by Matt Sanders for making solo journaling games in the style of Chris Bisette’s game The Wretched.10 The Limitations section of the SRD includes “Finally, nazis, homophobes, transphobes, and other bigots are expressly forbidden from making new content using the Wretched and Alone system. If you have to ask whether this includes you, it does.”11 Are parasites going to ignore the usage terms? Likely. Still, by making clear the usage and specifically taking a stance on who is forbidden to use the material, bigots cannot hide behind not knowing or accidental infringement. It makes the deliberate nature of the theft apparent.

  1. Matthew J. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image,” Open Library of Humanities 10, no. 2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.17217.↩︎

  2. Austin Anderson, “Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Videogame,” Electronic Book Review, ahead of print, September 28, 2025, https://doi.org/10.64773/1f7a-df6c.↩︎

  3. “The Blood of Dawnwalker – A Dark Fantasy Narrative Sandbox RPG,” The Blood of Dawnwalker – A Dark Fantasy Narrative Sandbox RPG, accessed October 5, 2026, https://dawnwalkergame.com/us/en/home.↩︎

  4. “Scaling Stories,” Scaling Stories, accessed October 5, 2026, https://sydbauer.wixsite.com/scaling-stories/interactive-feature.↩︎

  5. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎

  6. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎

  7. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎

  8. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎

  9. Matt Sanders, “Wretched & Alone System Reference Document V1.1,” SRD, with Chris Bissette, Sealed Library, 2020, https://sealedlibrary.itch.io/wretched-alone-srd.↩︎

  10. “The Wretched by Chris Bissette,” Itch.io, accessed October 5, 2026, https://loottheroom.itch.io/wretched.↩︎

  11. Sanders, “Wretched & Alone System Reference Document V1.1.”↩︎

The dangers of cartography: I made a map and now I have to plan a trip to get a Braxxie lantern

October 5, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Behold the Cryptid Art map!

The inspiration for my Cryptid Art map was growing up hearing tales of the Mothman and the Braxton County Monster (also called the Flatwoods Monster or Braxxie to her friends). The Mothman has risen in fame in the last decade, and yet most people I talk to who know the Mothman is from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, only know that as a general factoid or from the video game Fallout 76. Most have no idea the Mothman has any connection to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse, which is a shame.

It may seem strange to connect a massive infrastructural disaster that ended in the deaths of 46 people and the creation of the National Bridge Inspection Standards to the celebration of a cryptid. But the lore of both is deeply intertwined. The Mothman was seen perched on the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, and so has taken on the status of an omen or, more charitably, the idea that he was “trying to warn us.” The tragedy was also caused by systemic infrastructure failure, a reason not to trust what the government tells you, a common theme in West Virginia stories. The danger of trusting the faceless people in power is echoed in the phrase that I heard most during the Mothman Festival hayrides and have a pin repeating: “Don’t fear the Mothman. Fear the Men in Black.” The Mothman behaved like an animal, and so could hurt someone, but never with malice. The Men in Black who came after from the government were the ones who threatened people. Admittedly, it’s a paranoid viewpoint. But given West Virginia’s history, from the Mine Wars to vote buying, and most recently the opioid crisis, I don’t think it’s a misplaced view.

I used Google My Maps1 for the Cryptid Art map, but I also explored Knight Lab’s StoryMapJS.2 I chose My Maps because it focuses it’s display on place, while StoryMapJS prioritizes content. Many of the artworks and related sites have very little information available, so a small description and image work well. For pins with more information available, it is nice to be able to focus on the most unusual or helpful source, like using the Braxxie lantern documentary for the Exxon station where they are sold. StoryMapJS is better for focusing on the object first and the location second, particularly in how it pulls up a large secondary window for the embedded material for each pin. When I was thinking of projects that might work with it, I was thinking of comparatively looking at falconry gloves within different archives and museum collections: where they were found, where they were made, where they were used, and where the material was sourced. This is also reflected in how StoryMapJS uses fixed icons that are tied to the type of material embedded and also the ability to control the order that pins are navigated through.

I think there is some baked-in skepticism of the accuracy and completeness of maps that maybe isn’t there for museum exhibitions, and that skepticism is valuable to engage with. Because we’ve probably all had a GPS app try to take us down a closed road or otherwise lead us astray, it’s all the more illuminating to notice how much maps can be used to both enforce and question authority. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel in her chapter for The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, uses the example of how nationalists (including the Nazis) use “artistic geovisualization” to claim spaces, heritages, and artworks as their own and to justify their crimes.3 Joyeux-Prunel continues by explaining how art history is returning to cartography via digital mapping because it allows new questions to emerge “that had been buried for a long time, either because they could be embarrassing (such as the place of origin of a style, too often understood as a ‘center of influence’), or the geopolitics of art, or because they could not be given satisfactory answers[.]”4

An excellent example of case studies that ask all three of those types of questions and investigate them with “Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods” is Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles’ “An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.”5 In my opinion, the case studies have the added benefit of dejustifying Nazi crimes by picking them apart and not allowing them to hide in historical assumption. Mapping the SS camp system and the architecture of the SS camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Knowles and Jaskot used different sources of information and visualization approaches. What they had in common was how GIS was able to shed new insight even in a field as highly studied as the SS camps and raise new questions because it was able to connect information to a spatial context.6

Building my own map, I was surprised by how difficult many of the decisions I needed to make were and how they immediately made me realize I was creating from a position of authority whether I wanted that or not. One of my earliest decisions was whether to pin the Silver Bridge Wall mural. The Mothman and Silver Bridge stories are connected, but they are not the same. Still, the Mothman stripped of the Silver Bridge is stripped of an important part of its history in Point Pleasant. So I included the mural, with a simple description focused on the purpose of the map: “The Mothman was seen on top of the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, leading some to believe he is an omen of doom or was trying to warn the town of the approaching tragedy.”

I plan to continue to work on my Cryptid Art map with the mission that there should be art of cryptids in their hometowns (as long as those communities want it). So in the future I plan to add cryptid origin points even where there isn’t art yet. I may also add local artists who make cryptid art. Lately, instead of worrying whether something fits a set of rules or parameters, I’ve been asking whether it’s kinder to include it than to leave it off. Being messier but kinder in action is perhaps how we keep tools with an inherent authority, like cartography, from having so much power to warp or control. The future of transparency in digital tools may be to strip back the veneer of clean data and UIs without losing the purpose of the tool, embracing messiness and a degree of friction so that questions naturally arise about where the information comes from and who decided its presentation.

  1. “My Maps,” accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.google.com/maps/about/mymaps/.↩︎

  2. “StoryMapJS,” StoryMapJS, accessed October 5, 2026, https://storymap.knightlab.com.↩︎

  3. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. Kathryn Brown, Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2022), 88–89.↩︎

  4. Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” 89.↩︎

  5. “An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.getty.edu/news/dah_jaskot_knowles/.↩︎

  6. “An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.”↩︎

Annotations and Transcripts: The Significance and Utility of Thick Data

October 4, 2026 / / 0 Comments

            Oral histories and videos are sources that can be especially useful for art history. Oral histories are an important source for collecting stories from people who have first-hand experience, and videos may be the medium of an artwork or a method of its documentation. Oral histories are great primary sources that often capture different information from written sources. It seems that oral histories require the researcher to consider more thoughtfully who the interviewee is, who the interviewer is, and what questions are being asked compared to written and spatial or map sources. This week, we reviewed how to practically refine oral transcripts and annotate videos to make these sources more accessible for research.

Matthew J. Westerby proposes in “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” that scholars should create their own metadata from publicly available images and sources. Westerby explains that IIIF annotations, the International Image Interoperability Framework, are useful for standardizing formats of images and videos for accessible sharing, but they may not suit the needs of the scholar using them. To solve this problem, he suggests “annotating upstream,” or, in other words, the scholar adds his or her own annotations in addition to the data received by the institution providing the image. This “knowledge-de-centralization” mitigates institutional bias and allows for individual scholars to personalize the media to their own needs. Making these annotations publicly available can create media with what Westerby defines as “thick data,” or digital images with a lot of description added by multiple people on top of the IIIF provided by the institution. Rather than accepting the “downstream” annotations, the scholar can enhance the context surrounding an image.

In the workshop session of class, we practiced annotating videos. The annotations for images that Westerby describes in his article can also extend to videos. In class, we used a clip from The Cotton Club, the 1984 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, to practice writing annotations.1 These annotations focused exclusively on the set design and cinematography of the scene. Another scholar may be interested in a different aspect of the film, like the music or dialog. Annotations created by different people for different purposes would create the “thick data” that Westerby describes. Public annotations on digital content create a new area for scholarship generation and analysis.

I also experimented with annotating video—albeit on a much simpler scale. I refined a short clip from the 1964 stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, produced by Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment with the online platform Panopto.2 Panopto allows the user to correct the dialog transcript for captions, post interactive discussion posts, and notes. The discussion posts and notes are timed with specific moments in the video, making these features especially helpful for internal research note-taking or film class discussion questions. I included notes that explained the commercial origins of the story, song, and movie of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer alongside individual frames in this short clip. While I added notes contextualizing the origin and creation of the Rudolph story, in an attempt to reveal the ultimately commercial basis of this classic Christmas tale, another scholar may be interested in the technical processes of stop motion animation. In this way, we would each create different annotations for the same digital object, creating “thick data.”

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rankin/Bass Entertainment Animation (1964)

By pressing the right upwards arrow button, the user can navigate to Panopto, where he or she can view my video annotations.

 Although I do not have videos or oral histories pertaining to my research right now, Panopto will be useful in the future if I need auto generated and editable captions as well as timed video annotations. Interfaces like Panopto are accessible, practically helpful, and fairly intuitive for the scholar to use for producing and refining oral history transcripts and videos. Panopto’s editable captions and notes are especially helpful for the internal research process rather than a public-facing final “project.”

The Institute of Museum and Library Services provides a thorough guide to beginning an oral history project. Linda Shopes’ article “Making Sense of Oral History,” a part of the Institute’s “Oral History in the Digital Age” site, delineates features of oral histories that should be considered by the scholar who is using or creating them. Some of these nuances include recognizing who is being interviewed, who the interviewer is, and what questions are being asked. She also reminds the reader that oral histories are based on people’s own subjective experiences and recollections, so they should not be accepted as fact. She uses several examples throughout this article to illustrate her points. For example, she provides different perspectives on the same experience within one family, and the reader can identify how each interviewee’s answers are formed based on their role within the family (e.g. father, mother, and daughter). She also uses the example of a former enslaved woman interviewed by a young. Black man in comparison to a white, female social worker. In this interview, the reader can see how the interviewee is much more candid with the Black interviewer in comparison to the subdued, practiced answers for the white woman. These considerations outlined by Shopes led me to think about how I should use oral histories in my future research, knowing that they are important but also subjective, living documents.

I think that creating, refining, and using oral histories for research is a promising direction for a more “digital” art history. If oral records exist documenting artists and their art, they will be a relevant and useful primary source to incorporate into research. Annotating images and videos also generate greater scholarship and context for non-experts of the image. This allows scholars to build up institutionally designated IIIF to provide more context or scholarly perspectives on a single image or video. Resources like Panopto can facilitate this scholarly annotating process. Although transcripts or annotations may primarily be used by scholars for their individual, internal research projects, making this additional data available and usable to the public is another method of scholarship-sharing. Whether a scholar’s annotations result in a polished, public-facing digital project or not, the creation of thickly descriptive, publicly accessible metadata still supports future scholarship and creative curiosities.

1The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Orion Pictures, 1984). 2Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, directed by Larry Roemer, produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, aired December 6, 1964 on NBC.

“Upstream Annotations” and Data Standardization: Strengthening the Foundation of IIIF Image Annotations

October 4, 2026 / / 0 Comments
4 October 2026 For this week’s blog post I decided to dig into Matthew J. Westerby’s “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” (2024). Westerby is the Digital Research Officer at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). He works predominately in digital […]

Mapping the Relationship Between Art and Place

September 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Spatial mapping is an old but still useful and relevant tool in art history. This week, after reading about and looking through different art historical mapping projects, we had the chance to experiment with some accessible digital mapping tools ourselves, including Google Maps and JS Story Maps. With advances in technology, digital mapping is an accessible and educationally rewarding tool in the field of art history.

            In Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel’s article “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” she explains that art historians’ interest in the spatial relations of art is not new—in fact, it dates back to the time of Giorgio Vasari.[1] The identification of art with particular places helped to define the cultural identity of countries while also advancing nationalist agendas.[2] In recent decades, spatial mapping has become an analytical tool facilitated by advancing digital technology. Joyeux-Prunel offers a tactical introduction on beginning, organizing, and executing digital mapping projects. Ultimately, Joyeux-Prunel explains that mapping in art history is useful for education and scholarly research.

Earlier in the semester, we read “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods” by Paul Jaskot, who argued that digital tools for macroanalysis would become the norm for art history research in twenty-first century.[3] In this article, he used the example of a digital mapping project of a German design firm that allowed him to extract an unusual pattern in the firm’s construction habits. He used this example to illustrate his point that macroanalysis with the aid of digital tools can highlight patterns that a human may not be able to recognize by just reading.

The Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles article from this week, “Architecture and Maps, Databases and Archives: An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” highlight how a mapping project may help advance scholarly research.[4] Rather than the end goal being an interactive, educational digital humanities project for the public, this project served to help Jaskot and Knowles understand the construction and building habits of the Nazis running Auschwitz for a written research paper. By mapping and tracking the construction of the buildings, Jaskot and Knowles revealed a pattern of architectural instability and dynamism rather than the stable, unchanging, presence that the Nazis wanted to communicate.

While Jaskot and Knowles’ digital mapping project was not permanently available to the public, other digital mapping projects like Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France, Boyeux-Prunel’s Artl@s Geomap of Paris salons, and the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones. My personal favorite is Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France because of its immense scope, images, and user features. Mapping Gothic France pinpoints where a multitude of Gothic cathedrals are located throughout Europe, not limited to just France. When a use selects a single cathedral, they are offered an interactive floorplan in which arrows provide images of the church from different viewpoints. The panorama is also very detailed and helpful for both the casual browser and the interested scholar. The depth of Mapping Gothic France can be attributed to the years dedicated to this project and advanced funding through a grant.

Although more limited in scope compared to Mapping Gothic France, the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones offers an interactive, archival-based account of the buildings on campus throughout university history. Combining both map and timeline features, Campus Cornerstones allows users to see where old buildings used to be located and what stands in their place now. From this project, users can understand the architectural history of the University of Iowa and how it evolved over time.

I tried my own hand at basic digital mapping in throughout this week, as well. I came into class this week with some experience in both Google Maps custom maps and JS Story Maps. In Google Maps, I had identified where monumental sculptures were located in a 1974 public sculpture exhibition, Monumenta, throughout the city of Newport in Rhode Island. I had used JS Story Maps for an Italian project during my undergraduate degree to map out a theoretical road trip across Italy. In class this week, I began playing with a few maps, like a Google Map identifying places that I visited often when I studied abroad in Rome and a JS Story Map identifying a few centers of Pennsylvania German folk art. Through this experimentation, I appreciated how the intuitiveness of these interfaces. These low-stakes tests also prepared me for a project more related to a different research project that I am working on.

I decided to make a map of twenty objects in Google Maps that Owen Jones identifies in his 1856 book The Grammar of Ornament. This map does not include all the illustrations in the book, but I attempted to choose one illustration that had the clearest location from each chapter. I excluded any illustrations from his chapter on designs from nature and instead opted to select two illustrations of column capitals from the Egypt chapter. I realized soon after I began inputting the location information in the map that some location’s names had not remained the same. For example, the “Memnonium” that Jones refers to in Egypt, is now referred to as the “Ramesseum” to refer to an ancient tomb. There were also a few items from India and Persia that Jones accessed from libraries and museums in England rather than their place of origin. He also uses racist and culturally reductive language, using the term “savage” to refer to indigenous tribes across continents. Because he used this term to name a chapter, I included it in the description for that illustration, but I made a note in the map description warning any potential viewers about the presence of this racist, antiquated language.

Owen Jones’ “The Grammar of Ornament”

After reading the articles about metadata last week and my own experimentation with mapping this week, I realize that there is also a healthy amount of ambiguity that scholars must contend with. I think that approaching uncertainty with transparency about unknown or ambiguous information is the best way to present information without construing data. Mapping is still a useful and relevant tool in art history to extract patterns from large amounts of data and allow users to understand a bigger picture of the relationship of art with place and time.

[1] Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” In The Routledge Companion, ed. Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 88-108.; Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 88.

[2] Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 89.

[3] Paul B. Jaskot, “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019): 21-33.

[4] Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles, “Architecture and Maps, Databases, and Archives; An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” The Iris (February 15, 2017).

Linking humans and data

September 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Working on the Artist Book Critical Index (ABCI), I’ve already gotten to work with data I really enjoy: linked data, the semantic web, distributed knowledge graphs. I enjoy ontology and vocabulary creation and being part of building semantic frameworks that other organizations can then pick up and use.

Angela Dressen’s “Cultural Heritage Data for Research – An Introduction” covers semantic web work in the art history space with clear appreciation and understanding, but in the Linked Art section, it also presents the idea that with proper tools, you then don’t need data scientists in the museum space.1 The idea that if the structure’s in place and it’s easy enough to use, museums don’t need data professionals in permanent positions is part of why digital humanities projects fall short or become obsolete. When data projects are approached as short-term, quick-burst projects, they die out quickly. Not because the data isn’t good anymore or the tools are bad, but because there is no one cranking the engine to improve the data and move the project forward. If there’s one thing I’ve learned working on the ABCI, it’s that there has to be human energy for all aspects of the project, including the data handling and project maintenance.

The ABCI started as a Zotero library made by the Sloane Art Library’s now-retired manager, Josh Hockensmith, who is a book artist. He was making an index of reference works connected to artists’ books: where they were cited and on what page an image could be found. Graduate students were then assigned to the project and started expanding beyond UNC’s own collection by adding WorldCat links. It is a really unique, robust data set that could only come from human beings.

One of the key points Broman and Woo make in “Data Organization in Spreadsheets” is that the raw data should live in a different place than where it is analyzed and manipulated.2 This was one of the untidiest aspects of the original Zotero ABCI library. The workflow for photographing artist books was living in the same Zotero, and it was difficult to untangle verified entries from unverified ones, even when they were marked with workflow tags.

We also had to deal with missing data, the equivalent of what Broman and Woo talk about with leaving cells empty.3 The early ABCI entries had full metadata. But as the point became simply tracking citations between books and linking to the catalog entry at UNC or WorldCat.org, entries started having just author and title, with no standardization in capitalization, author name order, or which creators should be listed. And because the citation information had to live in Zotero’s notes field, which is a free-for-all of text, we had to figure out some constraints, along with using Claude Code, to pull the citation data out and attach it to the items it belonged to.

One of my favorite parts of the process has been creating ontologies and vocabularies. It’s modeling how the data should look in triple format, in our case Turtle, with an example, because often when you start doing an example is when you start saying, “Oh no, that data would be great to have, but we don’t have that,” or, “What do we call a construction method?” Luckily, I was able to piggyback off the work of the Book Arts Research Database4 and Opening Artists’ Books5 for reference.

Sometimes a tool becomes unexpectedly good at another job, in this case, metadata checking. One unexpected side effect of the ABCI has been pointing out where our catalog metadata was misentered or left out. More than once, the Sloane Art Librarian, Alice Whiteside, has asked me to use the tool to pull books with a particular construction method, only to find that a book is missing or mislabeled. If you are working with incorrect data to start with, you’re going to end up with incorrect data.

As for data I would like to work with in the near future, I’ve been fascinated lately by maps of crafters and craft spaces. Especially having read more of Brendan Keogh’s recent work about viewing video game developers as craftspeople, I’d like to make a network map of video game creators and the companies or specific games they’ve connected to. Art history already acknowledges that who an artist is taught by and where they have worked has a large influence on their oeuvre. This type of lineage study is not something I’ve encountered yet in game studies.

My first step for a network map of game artists/craftspeople would be to model one simple connection. I generally do not start in a spreadsheet but think with pen and paper about how the graph might flow and then start throwing it into Turtle triples. I would start with a relatively well-established indie or smaller-team game from a company where English is a primary language. From there, I would pick one creator in an art leadership role, like an art director or character designer, and work through their CV. Once I know what information I’m looking for, I’d break out the spreadsheet to gather everything about one person, translate it over, see how it works, and troubleshoot. Then I’d look to other sources of linked data I could link out to, like Wikidata. From there, whether or how to proceed to a larger scale would really depend on what the data revealed in the small model.

  1. Dressen, A., (2025) “Cultural Heritage Data for Research – An Introduction”, Open Library of Humanities 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.18710↩︎

  2. Broman, Karl W., and Kara H. Woo. 2018. “Data Organization in Spreadsheets.” The American Statistician 72 (1): 2–10. doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989.↩︎

  3. Broman, Karl W., and Kara H. Woo. 2018. “Data Organization in Spreadsheets.” The American Statistician 72 (1): 2–10. doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989.↩︎

  4. https://researchbookart.uicb.uiowa.edu/↩︎

  5. https://oab.lib.utah.edu/↩︎

What are we building towards?

September 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

For a recent class assignment to make a Collection Builder exhibit, I created an exhibition of the first 10 boss fights from the mainline Legend of Zelda video games, specifically the final blow in each boss fight (https://beeyop.github.io/zelda-death-blow/). What weapon has to be used? Who’s involved in the fight? What part of the timeline, via the Hyrule Historia, does it come from? This was an expansion of a previous project where I looked at repeat objects in the Legend of Zelda series (https://sydbauer.wixsite.com/scaling-stories/zelda ).

I immediately ran into some issues. I couldn’t get the YouTube links to show properly if I wanted to start them at a specific time. I also struggled for a while trying to figure out why a thumbnail wasn’t showing, only to discover that it was an errant capitalization. Frustrations aside, Collection Builder did a really nice job of creating a professional-looking digital exhibition space. For that, I think it fulfills a valuable niche.

I only had one major criticism of the Collection Builder exhibits we examined in class: all the websites felt the same. By the second collection I looked at, that sameness made me gloss over and lose interest in the content. The visual layout was pretty much identical, even with different themes and some custom CSS. I think this is indicative of a larger issue. I believe many cultural institutions view tasks like metadata curation as mechanical, logical chores. In reality, it is a fusion of artistic skills and data skills. If the visuals and experience don’t feel curated to the data, then it is a cute toy, not scholarship or a tool. Some of the exhibits we examined did have a cohesive feel and told a clear story, but I don’t know that they did more than a well-annotated photo gallery.

I think Collection Builder is a gift for smaller museums, organizations, and student projects as a tool for displaying work when you’ve got one, maybe two people working and there isn’t room to expand. In some environments, finding someone with the education and experience in both curatorial work and digital tools would be very hard. Hiring online is an option, but then you run into control issues and management duties. In a single-person or very small team space, hiring out isn’t saving any time or workload the way I think Collection Builder does. I think the well-written and well-organized guide does most of the work of making it a better alternative for that use case. Anytime I wanted to know how to do something with my collection, the guide had an easy-to-understand, easy-to-find, simple process. I have some background in using GitHub and VS Code, but I heard from other people in the class that they also appreciated how well thought out the guide is.

What concerns me is that every time I see a tool like Collection Builder that makes what seems to be a mechanical task, like cataloging, display, or access, easier, I see organizations pushing people to do more with less instead of hiring someone to do these things or paying people appropriately for an increased scope of their job. Budget issues often become the scapegoat, but that is no excuse. Most individuals’ budgets are equally, if not more, stressed than those of any organization they work for. That’s not Collection Builder’s fault by any means, but it is something to note, especially as we decide when to use what tools and what projects to pursue.

In Paige Morgan’s blog post “How to Get Your Digital Humanities Project Off the Ground,”1 Morgan heavily cautions against making a digital humanities project part of your dissertation. The current status of digital humanities projects in academia is reflected in Morgan’s own experience creating projects while working on a separate dissertation. Morgan notes there were times when the dissertation had to take precedence and the projects suffered. That shouldn’t have to be the case, but from what I have experienced and witnessed, not much has changed between when Morgan wrote the blog post in 2014 and today.

While the cautioning is absolutely valid, and a realistic way of looking at the field and the way academia treats digital humanities projects, I think this advice exacerbates the problem. It’s going to take some people who are willing to push back and say, “No, this is a valid form of scholarship,” to really upend the idea that the only valid way to present mastery over information or share scholarship is the often recursive ouroboros of academic paper and book publishing.

With the rapid pace at which people are expected to graduate, to write, to do, we’ve lost a lot of the time to reflect and a lot of the purpose of academic scholarship. Academia must slow the speed and return to a contemplative pace or start accommodating other modes of scholarship as equally valuable and equally valid (preferably both).

  1. Paige Morgan, How to Get a Digital Humanities Project Off the Ground, June 5, 2014, https://www.paigemorgan.net/how-to-get-a-digital-humanities-project-off-the-ground/.↩︎

« Older posts
Privacy Policy

© 2026 Beyond the Women's Building

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑