Collection Development, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities – serie

The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate and when the current literature addresses both fields, it does so strictly within technical reports and guidelines, concentrating on procedures and optimal workflow, standards, and technical metadata. In particular, more often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product, leading to misunderstanding and clashes of interests.Surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the challenging conservation-digitization balance and fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book aims at demonstrating that a dialogue between apparently contrasting fields not only is possible, but it is in fact desirable and fruitful. Only through the synergetic collaboration of all people involved in the digitization process, conservators included, can cultural digital objects that represent more fully the original objects and their materiality be generated, encouraging and enabling new research and widening the horizons of scholarship.

Millions of items are held in museum collections around the world but many museums have very few visitors to their stored collections. These stored objects are certainly not neglected by their professional custodians, and they are loved with a great intensity by some curators and enthusiasts. However, for all but a tiny proportion of the population they have little or no personal meaning. This book goes beyond strategic discussions of access to stores, information enhancement, or collections rationalization and focuses on the emotional potential of these objects.The authors explore how “care” for objects has varied over time and consider who cares for objects that are generally considered to be unsuitable for display and why they care. They also consider how inter-generational and inter-disciplinary dialogue can enhance or engender engagement with "unloved" collections and offer strategies and reflection on interpreting stored collections. This book will be essential reading for scholars, students, and professionals in museums, especially those concerned with curation and collections.

Debates about migration and heritage largely discuss how newcomers integrate into the host societies, and how they manage (or not) to embrace local and national heritage as part of their new cultural landscape. But relatively little attention hasbeen paid to how the host society is changing culturally because its new citizens have collective memories constructed upon different geographies/events, and emotional attachments to non-European forms of cultural heritages.This short book explores how new cultural identities in transformation are challenging the notions and the significance of heritage today in Europe. It asks the questions: How far are contemporary Authorized Heritage Discourses in Europe changing due to migration and globalization? Could heritage sites and museums be a meeting point for socio-cultural dialogue between locals and newcomers? Could heritage become a source of creative platforms for other heritage discourses, better "tuned" with today’s European multicultural profile?

Since the 1970s, the craft brewing industry has grown in popularity. However, with the introduction of the Internet and the consequent globalization of cultures and economies, craft beer marketing has increasingly evoked the medieval past in order to appeal to our collective sense of a lost community, and even a lost purity. This book discusses the desire for the local, the non-corporate, and the pre-modern in the discourse of craft brewing, which has become a form of ideological resistance to corporate capitalism, forming a strong counter-cultural narrative. However, such discourses also reinforce colonial histories of purity and conquest while effacing indigenous voices, and there are troubling intersections between the desire for a medieval past and the desire to preserve the imaginary “whiteness” of that past. Such considerations are particularly relevant now, during a time in which white nationalist groups (many of which turn to a medieval past for inspiration) are increasing in influence and visibility. Moving from beer in the Middle Ages to beer in 2019, this book deploys analysis of literary and historical texts, advertisements, labels, and interviews with craft brewers and writers to argue that craft beer is much more than a delicious drink and a social connector; its marketing, its appeal, and its ubiquitous presence in middle class North America reveals a powerful cultural desire for the past in a world that privileges the present.

Recent decades have witnessed concerns over representation, inclusion, and social justice move from the margins to the centre of museum practice. While a growing number of institutions seek to reflect the diversity of their communities in exhibition-making, gaps remain in understanding applied approaches and practices. This book presents the inclusion of new voices and perspectives into the museum via "inclusive curating," a facilitated process empowering a wide demographic of people to become curators. Grounded in a case study, this book offers guidance in putting inclusive curating into action alongside a range of practical resources and key debates. Curating is often considered an exclusive job for a privileged few. But, by breaking it down using methods demonstrated throughout this book, not only does curating become more usable for more people, it also contributes to understanding the process and practices by which our cultural spaces can become democratized.

Museums have long been viewed as exclusive, excluding, and as antiseptic to intimacy. In the past few decades, however, humanized experiences—cultivated by curators, educators, artists, activists, and marketers alike—have emerged as the reason for being for these cornerstones of community. Such experiences are often possible only in museum settings, where cultural exploration, probing conversation, and safe risk-taking can occur in spaces now becoming sacred through inclusiveness.This book brings together an interdisciplinary collection of essays examining the kinds of human experiences and interactions that have converted the once-sterile museum into a space of enlivenment and enrichment, as well as physical and emotional well-being. The essays focus for the first time on the uniquely human and humanizing experiences to be found in the collections, programs, exhibitions, and spaces of today’s museums.

In the last decade, the terms “digital scholarship” and “digital humanities” have become commonplace in academia, spurring the creation of fellowships, research centres, and scholarly journals. What, however, does this “digital turn” mean for how you do scholarship as a medievalist? While many of us would never describe ourselves as “DH people,” computer-based tools and resources are central to the work we do every day in offices, libraries, and classrooms. This volume highlights the exciting ways digital methods are expanding and re-defining how we understand, represent, and teach the Middle Ages, and provides a new model for how this work is catalogued and reused within the scholarly community. The work of its contributors offers valuable insights into how “the digital” continues to shape the questions medievalists ask and the ways they answer them, but also into how those questions and answers can lead to new tools, approaches, and points of reference within the field of digital humanities itself.

Since the 1970s, the craft brewing industry has grown in popularity. However, with the introduction of the Internet and the consequent globalization of cultures and economies, craft beer marketing has increasingly evoked the medieval past in order to appeal to our collective sense of a lost community, and even a lost purity. This book discusses the desire for the local, the non-corporate, and the pre-modern in the discourse of craft brewing, which has become a form of ideological resistance to corporate capitalism, forming a strong counter-cultural narrative. However, such discourses also reinforce colonial histories of purity and conquest while effacing indigenous voices, and there are troubling intersections between the desire for a medieval past and the desire to preserve the imaginary “whiteness” of that past. Such considerations are particularly relevant now, during a time in which white nationalist groups (many of which turn to a medieval past for inspiration) are increasing in influence and visibility. Moving from beer in the Middle Ages to beer in 2019, this book deploys analysis of literary and historical texts, advertisements, labels, and interviews with craft brewers and writers to argue that craft beer is much more than a delicious drink and a social connector; its marketing, its appeal, and its ubiquitous presence in middle class North America reveals a powerful cultural desire for the past in a world that privileges the present.

Byzantine art is normally explained as devotional, historical, highly intellectualized, but this book argues for an experiential necessity for a fuller, deeper, more ethical approach to this art. Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, this monograph challenges us to search for novel ways to explore and interrogate the art of this distant culture. They marshal diverse disciplines—modern art, environmental theory, anthropology—to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While completely foreign to our world, that animism still holds important lessons for approaches to our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays—some new and some previously published—and new explanations therefore open up that will interest historians of art, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.This book is available as Open Access.

The study of medieval and early modern geographic space, literary cartography, and spatial thinking at a time of rapid digitization in the Humanities offers new ways to investigate spatial knowledge and world perceptions in pre-modern societies. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, open source databases, and interactive resources utilizing a rich variety of source materials—place names, early modern cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, Viking Age and medieval runic inscriptions—provides opportunities to re-think traditional lines of research on spatiality and worldviews, encourage innovation in methodology, and engage critically with digital outcomes.In this book, Nordic scholars of philology, onomastics, history, geography, literary studies, and digital humanities examine multiple aspects of ten large- and small-scale digital spatial infrastructures from the early stages of development to the practical applications of digital tools for studying spatial thinking and knowledge in pre-modern sources and societies.

Recent decades have witnessed concerns over representation, inclusion, and social justice move from the margins to the centre of museum practice. While a growing number of institutions seek to reflect the diversity of their communities in exhibition-making, gaps remain in understanding applied approaches and practices. This book presents the inclusion of new voices and perspectives into the museum via "inclusive curating," a facilitated process empowering a wide demographic of people to become curators. Grounded in a case study, this book offers guidance in putting inclusive curating into action alongside a range of practical resources and key debates. Curating is often considered an exclusive job for a privileged few. But, by breaking it down using methods demonstrated throughout this book, not only does curating become more usable for more people, it also contributes to understanding the process and practices by which our cultural spaces can become democratized.

While the tale of Roberto Busa and the Index Thomisticus has become an origin myth for Digital Medieval Studies, less attention has been paid to the critical role of the World Wide Web as a platform and impetus for this digital turn. This volume focuses on early Medieval Studies research created with, operating through, and dependent upon the internet itself, profiling ground-breaking projects that define the genres of internet-based scholarship we now take for granted, including sourcebooks, searchable databases, digital editions and corpora, and born-digital medieval scholarship. The collection reveals how internet-based products rely upon and support a more collaborative model of research, teaching, and learning in Medieval Studies than the more individualistic, discrete one that defined earlier work in the field.

The study of medieval and early modern geographic space, literary cartography, and spatial thinking at a time of rapid digitization in the Humanities offers new ways to investigate spatial knowledge and world perceptions in pre-modern societies. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, open source databases, and interactive resources utilizing a rich variety of source materials—place names, early modern cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, Viking Age and medieval runic inscriptions—provides opportunities to re-think traditional lines of research on spatiality and worldviews, encourage innovation in methodology, and engage critically with digital outcomes.In this book, Nordic scholars of philology, onomastics, history, geography, literary studies, and digital humanities examine multiple aspects of ten large- and small-scale digital spatial infrastructures from the early stages of development to the practical applications of digital tools for studying spatial thinking and knowledge in pre-modern sources and societies.

The market for rare books has been characterized as unpredictable, and driven by the whims of a small number of rich individuals. Yet behind the headlines announcing new auction records, a range of sources make it possible to analyze the market as a whole. This book introduces the economics of the trade in manuscripts and rare books during the turbulent period ca. 1890–1939. It demonstrates how surviving sources, even when incomplete and inconsistent, can be used to tackle questions about the operation of the rare book trade, including how books were priced, profit margins, accounting practices, and books as investments, from the perspectives of both dealers and collectors.

This collection brings together current research into the development of the market for pre-modern manuscripts. Between 1890 and 1945 thousands of manuscripts made in Europe before 1600 appeared on the market. Many entered the collections in which they have remained, shaping where and how we encounter the books today. These collections included libraries that bear their founders’ names, as well as national and regional public libraries. The choices of the super-rich shaped their collections and determined what was available to those with fewer resources. In addition, wealthy collectors sponsored scholarship on their manuscripts and participated in exhibitions, raising the profile of some books. This volume examines the collectors, dealers, and scholars who engaged with pre-modern books, and the cultural context of the manuscript trade in this era.

Museums have long been viewed as exclusive, excluding, and as antiseptic to intimacy. In the past few decades, however, humanized experiences—cultivated by curators, educators, artists, activists, and marketers alike—have emerged as the reason for being for these cornerstones of community. Such experiences are often possible only in museum settings, where cultural exploration, probing conversation, and safe risk-taking can occur in spaces now becoming sacred through inclusiveness.This book brings together an interdisciplinary collection of essays examining the kinds of human experiences and interactions that have converted the once-sterile museum into a space of enlivenment and enrichment, as well as physical and emotional well-being. The essays focus for the first time on the uniquely human and humanizing experiences to be found in the collections, programs, exhibitions, and spaces of today’s museums.

The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate and when the current literature addresses both fields, it does so strictly within technical reports and guidelines, concentrating on procedures and optimal workflow, standards, and technical metadata. In particular, more often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product, leading to misunderstanding and clashes of interests.Surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the challenging conservation-digitization balance and fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book aims at demonstrating that a dialogue between apparently contrasting fields not only is possible, but it is in fact desirable and fruitful. Only through the synergetic collaboration of all people involved in the digitization process, conservators included, can cultural digital objects that represent more fully the original objects and their materiality be generated, encouraging and enabling new research and widening the horizons of scholarship.

The market for rare books has been characterized as unpredictable, and driven by the whims of a small number of rich individuals. Yet behind the headlines announcing new auction records, a range of sources make it possible to analyze the market as a whole. This book introduces the economics of the trade in manuscripts and rare books during the turbulent period ca. 1890–1939. It demonstrates how surviving sources, even when incomplete and inconsistent, can be used to tackle questions about the operation of the rare book trade, including how books were priced, profit margins, accounting practices, and books as investments, from the perspectives of both dealers and collectors.

This collection brings together current research into the development of the market for pre-modern manuscripts. Between 1890 and 1945 thousands of manuscripts made in Europe before 1600 appeared on the market. Many entered the collections in which they have remained, shaping where and how we encounter the books today. These collections included libraries that bear their founders’ names, as well as national and regional public libraries. The choices of the super-rich shaped their collections and determined what was available to those with fewer resources. In addition, wealthy collectors sponsored scholarship on their manuscripts and participated in exhibitions, raising the profile of some books. This volume examines the collectors, dealers, and scholars who engaged with pre-modern books, and the cultural context of the manuscript trade in this era.

The study of the religious, cultural, and political movements now known as the Crusades is one of the most well-established subfields in Medieval Studies. In the past few decades, scholars of the Crusades increasingly have employed computer-based methods to analyze their sources, organize their research, and disseminate its results to the wider world. Yet while the benefits of this approach have become clear and prompted new discoveries, the well-worn methodologies that long defined Crusade Studies do not always align with them. In this volume, a diverse group of researchers, teachers, and curators chronicle how digital scholarship has allowed them to better understand, explain, and illustrate the complex world of the Crusades as an historical phenomenon as well as a focus of present-day interest and appropriation.

What would an exhibition on medieval disability unrestricted by funding, space, or ownership look like? Kisha Tracy believes such an exhibition would showcase medieval disability without relegating it to the sensational and interpreting individuals only through the lens of the “monstrous” or as “charity cases.” This book proposes an exhibition guide that brings together artifacts from around the globe—artifacts that for a variety of reasons are unlikely ever to be brought together physically—in order to bring to life the heritage of medieval peoples with disabilities, and encourage readers to think critically about our preconceptions about heritage, disability, and the Middle Ages. The book is relevant to those working in and teaching with cultural heritage.

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objectshaving been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and state of preservation and sopose different research questions and challenges for digitization, conservation, and ontological representation of knowledge. Heritage science and specialist digital technologies are presented in a way approachable to non-scientists, while a separate technical section provides details of methods and techniques, alongside examples of notable applications of spatial and spectral documentation of material cultural heritage, with selected literature and identification of future research. This book is an outcome of interdisciplinary research and debates conducted by the participants of the COST Action TD1201, Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage, 2012–16 and is an Open Access publication available under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.

Written by scholars who have lived in Rome and specialize in Roman history, religion, and culture, this book is a cross between a tourist guide, scholarly article, and encyclopedia. It is written for travellers in search of inspiration and information as they tour the streets, churches, museums, and monuments of the Roman past.Combining biographical portraits of some of the Eternal City's most important historical actors in the worlds of art, religion, and politics with a study of the very monuments, works of art, and urban spaces associated with them, People and Places of the Roman Past offers an informative and insightful look at the human and cultural history of one of the great cities of the world.

Written by scholars who have lived in Rome and specialize in Roman history, religion, and culture, this book is a cross between a tourist guide, scholarly article, and encyclopedia. It is written for travellers in search of inspiration and information as they tour the streets, churches, museums, and monuments of the Roman past.Combining biographical portraits of some of the Eternal City's most important historical actors in the worlds of art, religion, and politics with a study of the very monuments, works of art, and urban spaces associated with them, People and Places of the Roman Past offers an informative and insightful look at the human and cultural history of one of the great cities of the world.

Literary archives differ from most other types of archival papers in that their locations are more diverse and difficult to predict. Acquiring institutions for literary papers have historically had very little by way of collecting policies and consequently the collecting of literary papers has often been opportunistic and serendipitous.The essays collected in this book all derive or continue from the recent work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, which takes a comparative, transnational and internationalist approach to studying literary manuscripts, their uses and their significance. The focus on diaspora provides a philosophical framework which gives a highly original set of points of reference for the study of literary archives, including concepts such as the natural home, the appropriate location, exile, dissidence, fugitive existence, cultural hegemony, patrimony, heritage, and economic migration.