This repository hosts data for the project 'Curatorial Voice: legacy descriptions of art objects and their contemporary uses'.
Two published code and data dumps have emerged from this work:
- Baker, James, & Salway, Andrew. (2019). Corpus Linguistic Analysis of the BMSatire Descriptions corpus [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3245017
- Baker, James, & Salway, Andrew. (2019). Creation of the BMSatire Descriptions corpus (Version v1.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3245037
All data are derived from text written by M. Dorothy George and published between 1935 and 1954 as volumes 5 to 11 of the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. This text is published in lightly edited form by the British Museum via ResearchSpace as linked open data at https://public.researchspace.org/sparql. The data, text and images available via this service are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license (Research Space, 2016; accessed 10 September 2018).
We state that our data is derived from / based on text written by M. Dorothy George. We state this for the following reasons:
- M. Dorothy George wrote volumes 5 to 11 of the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum
- After 1988, collection items in the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings began to be catalogued on an internal database. From 2005 onwards, cataloguing was connected to a project to turn these records outward as part of Collections Online, launched in October 2007 (Tanya Szrajber, ‘Public Access to Collection Databases: The British Museum Collections Online (COL): A Case Study’ (Annual Conference of CIDOC, Athens, 2008); Huigen Leeflang, ‘Interview with Antony Griffiths’, Codart, Winter 2009; Antony Griffiths, ‘Collections Online: The Experience of the British Museum’, Master Drawings 48, no. 3 (2010): 356–67.; Antony Griffiths, Print Catalogues and Databases: Past, Present and Future, Association of Print Scholars, 2019).
- In 2008-9 there was a project to scan (using Optical Character Recognition) catalogues like the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires for addition to the database. Scanned text was then cut/paste into relevant fields. In the case of the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, the first paragraph was added to the 'Physical Description' field and - where present - the second paragraph was added to the 'Curatorial Comment' field. Note that Volumes 1-4 were not scanned as at the time OCR could not handle archaic fonts (Conversation with Sheila O'Connell and Sue Walker at the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, 12 February 2019).
- Records were batch edited for Collections Online to aid search, for example exapansions of standard abbreviations used in cataloguing: "l." to "left" or "H.L." to "half-length" (Griffiths, 2010).
- From around 2005 a combination of more user friendly database systems and the knowledge the catalogue data would be online, contributed to a culture of making ad-hoc edits records when errors, inaccuracies, or archaic language was found (Szrajber, 2008). Some records have been changed. For example, 'A man of African descent' is not the phrase George used to describe the man in BM Satires 5030. However, the removal of racial epithets like this one is not consistent across the corpus.
- The aforementioned conversation with Sheila O'Connell and Sue Walker at the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings on 12 February 2019 suggests that there was and is no policy to edit records produced by M. Dorothy George: cataloguers have the agency to change records if they see fit, however there is insufficient resource to systematically edit legacy cataloguing. Even if there were, however, there is also a desire to keep George's work intact. Contradictory information - if any comes forward - is added to records in addition.
- Attendees at the first Curatorial Voice workshop (26-27 February) suggested that we may find highly edited records for post-1820s material, particular though descriptions of prints by George Cruikshank.
- Spot checking of records throughout the project has indicated a close correlation between our data and the original printed catalogues. The editing of the records appears to be statistically insignificant, though we continue to monitor this.