At last week’s DH: The Next Generation symposium at Simmons College, a group from Harvard’s metaLAB presented on Data Artifacts. The research initiative:
seeks to understand the collections data of libraries and other institutions as cultural objects—as artifacts, things assembled by human hands and minds, with stories to tell and values to express. In particular, we’re looking for phenomena that are frequently treated as problems—errors in cataloging data caused by typographical, vernacular, disciplinary, and technological clashes—and seeing them as interpretable, story-full phenomena that lend insight into the cultural roles of libraries and their collections in different times and places.
Participants in the session also contributed to a tumblr dubbed, “Library Observatory.”
This post was produced through a cooperation between Heidi Madden and Kristen Totleben (Editors-at-Large for the week), Roxanne Shirazi (Editor for the week), and Zach Coble and Sarah Potvin (site editors).