Role: Lead Documentarian

Client: metaLAB @ Harvard

Year: 2015

Interactive website design to re-present documentation of a workshop about data into an exploratory experience of major themes

 PROBLEM

With art museums making both their imagery and collections data open and accessible, a question arises: what to do with it all? At the second summer workshop on Beautiful Data, sponsored by the Getty Foundation, and produced by the metaLab at Harvard, participants were introduced to concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital publication, and data-driven, object-oriented teaching.

SOLUTION

The second annual offering of Beautiful Data focused on “difficult collections” poised on the edge of the digital/material divide. We addressed collections of things that resist ready digitization, or exist as ephemeral and hybrid objects and events. We pondered data as a medium for art with its own curatorial and preservation challenges. And we considered ways of working with new-media artists in the context of materials and mixed-media collections.

OUTCOME

As the lead documentarian of Beautiful Data II, I maintained a database of imagery and ephemera from workshop, and I led the team through a co-design process to structure this "problem collection" into a website to make visible the tools we use to display and make sense of digital media.