Vlachidis, Andreas; Valeonti, Foteini; Macdonald, Isobel; Nyhan, Julianne; (2024) The Collection Unit as the Integral Component in Development of a Data Atlas of Complex Cultural Heritage Landscapes. Presented at: 5th CAA-GR Conference 2024, Serres, Greece.

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Abstract

In what form were museum and cultural heritage collections first acquired? How have museum and cultural heritage collections changed over time? And in what way has their cumulative evolution led to their growth over time? These questions sit at the heart of collections history and collections as data research and are likewise core concerns of much social and material culture research. More recently, research is moving beyond the accumulation of collections, seeking a deeper examination of the dynamic movement of objects between individual and institutional agents and actors. This can cast new light on the fluidity of collections, and the intrinsic role that circulation played in their formation and mobilisation (Driver et al., 2021, 3), both in analogue and digital contexts. Researchers attempting to trace the movement of objects and collections between and within cultural heritage institutions are faced with complex data environments. Challenges relate to the intricacies of scope, size, availability, coverage, legacy attributes, and manifestation of collections, that often persist both within and between institutions. Such attributes cannot be adequately addressed by conceptual data models and metadata mappings that merely address a lower level of data interoperability, supporting aggregation and unification objectives (Dragoni et.al 2017). In response, we introduce the “Data Atlas”. This is both a comprehensive metaphor that provides a collective perspective on cultural heritage collections, and an instrument that offers a means to map the intricacies of the complex landscapes of historical resources that have resulted from the long- term curation, circulation, and accumulation of collections dispersed across and within, various institutions and systems of varying accessibility status (Vlachidis et. al forthcoming) . Central to this metaphor is the Collection Unit which originates from the Natural History Museum’s ‘Join the dots’ collections assessment exercise where collections are arranged into discrete units that reflect how curators organise, index and work with their collections (Miller 2020). We define a ‘Collection Unit’ as a physical or digital born entity treated as a coherent item of a curatorial or collection activity which is not abstract but possess attributes unique to its form such as size, physical location, level of digitization, transcription type, availability, and access. Our definition is elastic so as to allow use of the Collection Unit as a building block to create a visual representation of the historical and contemporary collections of the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). The Sloane collection is now dispersed across different information systems and infrastructures. Assembled from the 1680s onwards, and in part financed by profits from the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement, Sloane’s vast collection of natural history, pharmaceutical specimens, books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, coins, and antiquities from across the world was made as Britain became a global trading and imperial power. Leveraging from a static 2D tabular representation of the Data Atlas we propose the development of an interactive version of the Data Atlas to facilitate a dynamic representation of a dispersed collection, allowing for a comprehensive, interlinked and layered view of Collection Units. The Atlas is part of the UKRI-funded Towards a National Collection Discovery programme, the ‘Sloane Lab: looking back to build future shared collections’ works at the intersection of the history of digital humanities and the history of collections (Nyhan et al. 2023).

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