Museum Studies Commons^™

No Canvas, No Rules, Francisca B. Ugalde

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This presentation activity is a creative exploration of the concept of DIS-EASE, as in the absence of ease, uneasiness, or discomfort.

Conceptually, I am exploring DIS-EASE in three ways:

1. As you can see, I am painting directly onto the gallery wall. As the keeper of these galleries, I can assure you that this is a big no-no. I mean how dare anyone disturb these pristine surfaces?! The rationale behind my discomfort is rooted in the idea that the gallery is a sacred space, and that these walls ought to be kept pristine so that the objects displayed against them …

Artificial Intelligence And The Preservation Of Historic Documents, Gaute Barlindhaug

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In recent decades, digitization has been presented as an important strategy both for the preservation of historic documents and for giving increased access for researchers to such materials. In the Norwegian context, this has not only implied the digitization of printed matter but also the digitization of audiovisual material like photography and analog tape recordings. From a technical perspective, there are of cause difficulties in digitizing such a variety of material when considering the diversity of media formats dating back to the nineteenth century. However, from the archival community criticism has been raised not only about the quality of the …

Storage Organization And Analysis Of Artifacts, Rebecca Glatz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

I worked with the Institute for Human Science and Culture at the Drs. Nicholas & Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology and Department of Anthropology at the University of Akron to help create an inventory of the collections that are being stored in the storage of the Cummings Center. After I finished the general inventory, I selected a collection of interest to do further research on an item level. The collection was processed and photographed and this paper is a report of what I learned about the collection and a guide of how to process a collection for …

Take That Covid! Positive Documents Emerging From The Museum Sector, Kiersten F. Latham, Katherine F. Jaede

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Although the field of museology has discussed many concepts found in other positive disciplines, such as flow in positive psychology, the field itself has not yet developed a purposeful framework for positive museology. A long history of research in museum studies and on museal endeavors reveals aspects of a positive approach already exist but have yet to be woven together into a synthetic whole. In 2020-2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, museums themselves showed their positive strengths and virtues through documents such as social media and field-wide communication, revealing their capacity for a positive approach. This paper uses a developing framework …

Two-Headed Calves, Unicorn Horns, And Trephined Skulls: An Essay About Beautiful Museum Monsters, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This essay is part personal exploration, part scholarly study, as I use my own material and experience to seek out the answers to questions that began from personal encounters with monsters in museums.

Documentary Provenance And Digitized Collections: Concepts And Problems, Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Provenance research in digitized memory institution collections is mainly devoted to documenting and mapping the trajectories of the physical source documents across time, place and contexts, primarily by developing metadata standards and data models. The provenance of the digital reproduction and its relation to one or several physical source documents is however not being subjected to much inquiry. A possible explanation for this is the face-value approach with which we tend to regard digital reproductions. Looking more closely at such reproductions and their complex digitization process suggests a far from straightforward and linear provenance relation, and begs the question of …

The Wonders Of The Augsburg Cabinet: Three Ways Of Experiencing A Document, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since even before Frohmann (2009) proposed his document analysis on the meaning of cabinets of curiosity, I have been fascinated with them. Their emergence in the 15th century (MacGregor, 2007) is also the tantalizing beginnings of the birth of the modern museum. In museum studies, we often ask what the meaning of the museum is today (Latham & Simmons, 2014); I believe that part of the answer to this question is in these curious compartmentalized pieces of furniture that held the wonders of the world and helped users make meaning a very long time ago.

One can see examples of …

Image And Range-Based 3d Acquisition And Modeling Of Popular Musical Instruments, Giacomo Patrucco, Filiberto Chiabrando, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article aims to illustrate the importance of the contribution of 3D survey and modeling techniques in the framework of movable heritage and museum collection documentation and cataloguing. The work reported in this study focuses on digitalization and 3D modeling of some popular music instruments (belonging to the collection of Museo del Paesaggio Sonoro in Italy) in the framework of the SAMIC project (Sound Archives & Musical Instruments Collection). Different sensors and strategies have been applied during this research in order to obtain high-resolution digital replicas of the objects (a LiDAR system and a photogrammetric approach have been …

The Spider: Anaylsis Of An Automaton, Susannah N. Munson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

[Editors' note: This paper is the 2017 winner of the Student Paper Award in Document(ation) Studies, http://documentacademy.org/award. Susannah Munson wrote the paper as a Kent State University, School of Information, Museum Studies student.]

The physical objects that surround us document vast amounts of information about themselves, their histories, and their roles in broader social and cultural contexts. To reveal this sometimes hidden information, we examine these objects through analytical frameworks that go beyond descriptive accounts to explore how an object existed and was culturally understood throughout its history. Document phenomenology (Gorichanaz and Latham, 2016), conceived in two Acts, …

Curiosity, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

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The Curious Case Of Floating Fixity (And Its Relationship To Authenticity), Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper is part reflection and part analysis. I use a personal document experience to illustrate the use of the holistic analysis framework of Document Phenomenology (Gorichanaz & Latham, 2016) to explore the notion of floating fixity and its relationship to authenticity.