Florian Kräutli: Using Timelines to Visualize MoDA’s Collections

Museums and archives have long made use of digital databases to catalogue and maintain their collections. One of the earliest digital cataloguing systems, GRIPHOS, was released in 1967 and some museums use it even today.(1)

What has changed since then is the amount of data such digital catalogues can store and the fact that digital datasets can easily be shared online.

Publishing their digital collections on their website has become the norm for cultural institutions. Now many are asking, what more can be done with these vast resources of cultural data? (2)

This research constitutes a part of Florian’s PhD completed in 2016 at the Royal College of Art. It was supervised by Professor Stephen Boyd Davis (formerly of Middlesex University) and jointly funded by the EPSRC (Grant number EPSRC EP/J502169/1) and System Simulation Ltd.

The project builds on Stephen’s ongoing research on historic visual timelines. This includes an earlier visualisation project done in collaboration with MoDA and two students at Middlesex University in 2010.  MA students, Emma Bevan and Aleksei Kudikov designed a prototype timeline interface for MoDA’s collection, thereby discovering and having to face the challenges around the visual representation of cultural artefacts in a temporal dimension

Florian is now a Knowledge Graph Engineer & Digital Humanities Specialist at the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI), University of Zurich

I worked closely with researchers and curators within cultural institutions including Lucy Walker from the Britten Pears Archive in Aldeburgh and David Rooney from the Science Museum in London.  These are people who have in-depth knowledge of cultural collections and are the potential beneficiaries of visualization tools.

Together we discovered what kind of insights we could gain through visualizing their collections in prototype tools.  We also discussed how the tools should be designed in order to answer the research questions that were often triggered by interacting with the visualizations.

As a result, I developed a visualisation tool for the Britten Pears Archive which mapped the sources of Britten’s song lyrics over time.

By visualizing collections data, users are able to ‘see everything’ in a collection. Having an overview is useful for both casual and expert users. Even curators who are very familiar with a collection are not necessarily able to grasp it in its entirety.

Presenting collections data in a visual way also meant we could begin to see how digital collections are not simply representations of physical archives. Initially, when I asked curators what they would like to find out with visualization tools, their questions largely revolved around the artefacts in their collection and would not necessarily require digital tools to be answered. During the research it became evident that digital collections store not only data about artefacts, but contain traces of the history of an institution; they reflect biases, beliefs and shifting focuses in collecting.

Cultural collections used to be seen as neutral representations of the past, but they are actually formed by the people that make and use them. These are issues that curators may be aware of, but until this point they did not have ‘tangible’ or ‘visual’ evidence.

Through appropriately-designed timeline tools, we can begin to make this embedded ‘hidden data’ visible.

The patterns that emerge can tell us about the history of a collection, the influence of individuals, and how different events have shaped the content of archives.

By visualizing digital collections we can not only examine their contents, but – more importantly – see the different ways people have collected and catalogued artefacts over time.

Objects are represented as bubbles in the upper row of this visualization, in which the dates run from 1880 to 1960.

A curved line links each of them to a ‘procedure’, (which can stand for an exhibition, a publication or a research project).

To see how this works, feel free to try the interactive version of the visualisation yourself.

Highlighting an object reveals the corresponding thumbnail image, where available.

Museum objects from MoDA’s collections are represented as bubbles in the upper row, organized by their assigned date of production. The size of each bubble corresponds to how often a particular object appears in ‘procedures’, which are represented by the bubbles in the lower row. Hovering over one bubble highlights the corresponding records in the other timeline. It is also possible to search and filter the content of the visualization.

In the objects timeline, the largest bubble represents a Silver Studio design that has been widely used in exhibitions and publications.

The visualisation showed that this design for the decoration of a wall and door by Arthur Silver, of around 1885, is MoDA’s busiest object.

It has travelled to numerous exhibitions, and has featured in countless publications and exhibition catalogues since the early 1980s.

The largest bubble in the procedures timeline represents work on the biography of a Silver Studio designer called Lewis Jones.  It branches out to numerous objects whose production dates correspond to the time Lewis Jones (1894–1953) worked for the Silver Studio – with one outlier that likely bears an incorrect production date.

Filtering the procedures by their type allows us to get a sense of the different contexts the collection is being used as well as how these are distributed in time.

We can, for example, compare ‘Exhibition’ with ‘Research’ projects. We see that a considerable part of the collection has over time been exhibited and that exhibitions have taken place since the early 1980s.

This is fascinating because it demonstrates very clearly just how many objects from MoDA’s collections have been part of scholarly conversations over the years.