Why did you chose this subject matter and the objects for your project?
For the past year, one of the focuses of the Semantic Lab at Pratt has been The Mary Berenson Project. Information about the history of that project can be found on the "Project Background" page of this Omeka S site. The requirement to create an Omeka S site for Pratt Institute School of Information's Museum and Information Management course provided a perfect opportunity to create a public-facing online space where some of the data extracted from Mary's diaries could be visualized and expressed.
Initially, the site was meant to only include murals that Mary saw, but gathering enough information to catalog many of these murals would have required extensive research that was outside the scope of this class project. It was then decided to expand the selected items to include both murals and paintings. While Mary mentions 48 works of visual art in the 1903-1904 diary, she only physically saw 39 of those works in person (as opposed to just a work of art). Of those 39 artworks she saw, the Semantic Lab was only able to identify the exact names of 35 works. In order to further narrow the selection of items, artworks were chosen where the associated quotes from the diary were particularly intruiging or informative. In order to make the "Mary Approves!", "Mary Dislikes", and "No Opinion" tags useful, it was necessary to include enough items so that at least two items would fall under each tag.
Where you found your images and data?
Images and data for this Omeka S site came from multiple online websites: the Digital Commonwealth, Massachusetts Collection Online; Boston Public Library Flickr; Museum Fine Arts, Boston; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Harvard Art Museums; Cleveland Museum of Art; and Library of Congress. One item - the Seven Ages of Women mural - was not findable online in the same capacity. For this item, the image came through direct correspondence with the Twentieth Century Club of Buffalo, and the cataloging information was compiled from the history page of the Twentieth Century Club's website, as well as from the Mary Ann Calo's 1996 article "Bernard Berenson and America". For all items, the direct link to the sources can be found in the "Source" field.
Explain what fields/elements used in your resource template and why you chose them.
The "Elements • Descriptions • Data Types" section of the "Cataloging What Mary Saw" page of this site identifies the elements used in the resources template and why they were chosen for this project.
Explain how you crafted the naming convention for the identifier.
The identifiers are based on the existing interal Semantic Lab at Pratt data and are made up of three components: the year of the diary, the entity (which refers to the chronological entity number assigned by the Semantic Lab during last year's entity extraction), and the entity component (if there is more than one part of a work of art per entity number), all separated by periods. For example, the identifier for "Anarchy" is 1903-1904.3305.2. 1903-04 refers to the fact that this instance of this entity was taken from Mary's 1903-04 diary. "3305" is the number of this entity, per the Semantic Lab at Pratt's internal records, and "2" refers to the fact that this particular work is the second component of this entity. The associated quote for this entity reads "I went over the Congressional Library with Mr. Parsons, keeper of the prints. What awful “mural decorations”, positively Elihu Vedder stood out as an artist among them." The "awful "mural decorations" constitutes the 1st component for this entity - expressed in this Omeka S site through the "Oral Tradition" item with the identifer "1903-04.3305.1" - and "Elihu Vedder stood out as an artist among them" constitues the 2nd component for this entity - expressed by the "Anarchy" item with the identifier "1903-04.3305.2". While this numbering system may not be entirely intuitive from an outside perspective, this sequential numbering system respects the entity extraction process and therefore provides the Semantic Lab to a way to quickly locate the entity within the internal data set.
Identify what fields you assigned a standardized controlled vocabulary, which vocabulary did you choose and why. Please do the same for any custom vocabularies you create/use.
The "Elements • Descriptions • Data Types" section of the "Cataloging What Mary Saw" page of this site identifies which fields were assigned a standardized controlled vocabulary and why.
ITEM SPOTLIGHT
Describe the object?
"Virgin and Child with an Angel" is a painting that Mary Berenson saw at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on November 14th, 1903.
Where did you get the object and data from?
The image, creator, date, materials, dimensions, provenance statement, and rights statement were retrieved from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website. The commentary about this object from the site was also used to inform the selection of subject headings. Additional information related to Mary's experience vieweing the work came from the Semantic Lab at Pratt internal data from The Mary Berenson Project.
How does the source metadata differ from your metadata? Did you have to map any elements? Did you enrich any of the data? Did you disagree with the way the object was cataloged? If so, why and what did you change?
All information specific to Mary Berenson and her viewing of the work - for example the "When Mary Saw It" and "Quote from Mary's Diary" elements - were not found on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website. The image rights statement (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) was not linked directly to the object page on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website, and required the user to go to a separate "Rights and Reproductions" page. This image rights statement is included directly on the object page. I didn't necessarily disagree with how the image was cataloged on the museum website, I simply chose to include more information than was explicitly stated. The metadata values for the "Depicts", "Subject", and "Format" elements were all added by me.
Describe your perspective on the object. Are you cataloging as a work or as an image?
This object - and all of the works on the "What Mary Saw" page - are cataloged as works. The two photographs of Mary Berenson found on the "About Mary Berenson" page are also cataloged as works.
In some instances, the location where Mary viewed these works in 1903 and 1904 are not the same locations as where the works are currently held. In order to more completely describe the context in which Mary viewed these works, it would be beneficial to include a "Where Mary Saw It" field to the resource template. The most precise location known would be used for this viewing location. For some objects, the city is the most precise location known. For some objects, this will be a string rather than a URI, as the information might be the collection of a person she is visiting, which wouldn't necessarily have a Name Authority File record. Once these "Where Mary Saw It" fields are completed, the "map" block of Omeka S could be used to create a visualization of where Mary saw these various works of art.
In an effort to start creating a graph of the social landscape of Mary, it might also be fortuitous to add a field for who Mary saw a particular work with. The best data format for this field would be a URI, but LC Name Authority File records might not be available for every person. For this reason, the data type would be left unspecified. This way, an LC Name Authority File URI could be used, or a person could be created on Wikidata, or a string could also used for this section.
This project only looks at twelve works of visual art Mary saw in the course of her 1903-1904 trip to america. This Omeka S site could be expanded to include all of the works she saw in that diary, or it could be expanded to include other things she saw or experienced - music, theater, events, etc. Taking an even bigger step back, this same sort of cataloging could be conducted for any number of entity types Mary experienced or mentioned throughout all of her diaries, not just the 1903-1904 diary. Additionally, moving away from things to people, this sort of an Omeka S site could be used to more fully express Mary's interactions with people, and could be used as a public-facing way to collocate all of the times a particular person is mentioned in the diary.
