Beautiful Data II Resulting Projects

Participant Projects

04 Contextual Engagement: Telling the Rich Stories Inside King Tutankhamen’s Tomb 06 Copy That 08 Touch and Collect 10 The Qualitative/Quantitative Duality: A Humanities Provocation 12 Code from Corbu 14 Camera Lucida 16 Linked Open Data: Putting it to Use 18 Playing the Race Card 20 OMG Cats 22 What do you want?

24 Let me think about this for a couple of seconds.

Participant Projects

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Contextual Engagement: Telling the Rich Stories Inside King This project, proposed for the Grand Egyptian Museum (slated to open in 2018), sketches the description and enactment of invisible, lost spatial relations among funerary objects in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, bringing to life for visitors the fullest possible account of context, materiality, and contested meanings in the New Kingdom, the Edwardian era of the tomb’s “discovery,” and contemporary Egypt.

Nagm El-Deen Morshed

Copy That Protecting the public domain is important, but so is generating revenue. Striving to balance these goals, cultural institutions claim rights over digital reproductions of public domain objects in their collection through terms and conditions. Sorting through these usage rights is an issue that troubles not only the general public, but also researchers, instructors, and peer cultural institutions.

This website promotes transparency and copyright literacy by translating conditions of access to public domain items, images, and data.

Andrea Wallace

C O P Y

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Touch and Collect: A User Experience This project investigates the design of a new museum experience called “Touch and Collect.� A short video clip will show a visitor collecting and manipulating tactile beads that replicate the materials used in each artwork.

The visitor returns the beads to the Lightbox Gallery collection point, and discovers that he can interrogate the museum database using the beads as query lines.

Francesca Bacci

The Qualitative/Quantitative Duality: A Humanities Provocation Our project webpage presents experimental visualizations to suggest the the interleaved, fractal-like nature of quantitative assumptions and arguments built into seeminglyqualitative humanities research. Through two case studies, we argue that the boundary between qualitative and quantitative research is no boundary at all, but rather a duality like that of light as both wave and particle.

Matthew Lincoln + Nuria RodrĂ­guez Ortega

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Code from Corbu Code from Corbu is a site-responsive installation in which six very different collections, or datasets, collide in the concrete space of the Carpenter Center. Four architectural points— corner, back, curve, and veil—are syntactically assigned as conjunctions to elicit an array of text, audio, video and still image fragments drawn from each collection.

Each conjunction is assigned an internal algorithm based on the temporal and sensorial experience of working through this collision in Corbu’s space.

The proposed algorithms are randomized to allow for an almost infinite play of layering, contradiction, opacity, scale, and surface.

The intended viewer will pass through ‘trigger points’ in the building to initiate the display of visual conjunctions. We wish to restage the surprise, delight, and stickiness of finding resonances between datasets and the sensorial condition of the Carpenter Building, a place of concrete.

Jackie Antig, Robin Clark, Bethany Johns, JaredMcCormick, Ainslee Meredith, Megan Studer

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Camera Lucida Our project explores the deployment of a custom projection apparatus and unique engagement prompts that encourage visitors to reflect upon and respond to works of art and architecture through playful and communal interactions.

Inverting tropes associated with camera obscura and augmented reality, we developed a series of symbolic and verbal prompts to encourage viewers to “annotate� art objects using transparent sheets and a traditional overhead projector for the interface. In turn, these transparencies can serve as a form of non-traditional user-generated data that is independent of predetermined answers to survey-style questions.

In the end, our project not only challenges the notion that augmented reality is most effective when experienced in (relative) isolation and digital interaction, but also encourages alternative modes of participation with museums.

Gabby Resch, Jon Frey, Jill Sterrett, Anna Santi

Putting it to Use Making Linked Open Data SPARQL #SPARQLfail

Using Linked Open Data for art historical research has the potential to open up new lines of enquiry and engagement. Unfortunately the application LOD in research requires a level of technical knowledge that makes it unviable for most researchers.This project looked into available Linked Open Data end points and the issues of creating search queries and representing the data. Finally, it proposes an accessible entry point for researchers considering using LOD in their research.

Rachel Faust, Elizabeth Neely, David Smith

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Playing the Race Card: Museums & the Metadata of Race A Provocation

The Harvard Art Museums reveals little about race in its metadata, in its galleries (labels, objects, artists) and other spaces (cafe, gift shop, bathrooms) despite the fact that it’s ubiquitous in the museums.

This provocation asks visitors to create that metadata by exploring and exposing the absences and excesses of race within the museums.

I have developed a set of racial cards and tags that users will assign within and at the perimeter of the museum. Users will essentially play the race card-flipping that concept from a negative, accusatory practice into a productive, performative one.

Marya McQuirter

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OMG Cats What isolated and wonderfully weird groups of tags and phrases exist?

What subgroups are there?

How to appreciate these in a form that retains the truthfulness of the medium while allows subjectivity in their interpretation?

And what do those pictures look like?

Owen Mundy

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What do you want?

“Data” and “Computer” are slippery concepts, which yield varying meanings depending on the perspectives taken on them. Some of those perspectives arise in the museum (a concept with its own slipperiness, to be sure).

Anne Luther

Let me think about this for a couple of seconds.

One screen in the Lightbox gallery will show image data from the Harvard Art Museums’ collection, transformed in a way that is not directly accessible for a human onlooker.

The other screen (the projections), which

Nikita Braguinski

is facing this presentation, will contain a visual and acoustic comment on it, placing the human visitor at the center of this unusual communication process.