Critical Cataloging Conversations in Teaching, Research, and Practice
This session seeks to explore the ways in which increased access to digitized materials coincides with increasingly urgent conversations about social justice, cultural humility, and ethical stewardship. What are the ethical implications inherent in metadata, cataloging, classification standards, practice, and infrastructure in archives, libraries, museums, and visual resources collections? How have the fields of art history, museum practice, and studio practice as well as associated current curricula in these fields and in library science responded to the necessity for critical cataloging when describing visual art? The speakers explore ways to mitigate hierarchies of oppression in descriptive metadata through a variety of perspectives on critical and radical cataloging, including: assessments of these fields of study; curricular opportunities in the arts and library science; special topics of outsider art, race, gender, and sexuality; and adapting to non-Western knowledge systems. The goal is to raise awareness about critical cataloging issues, to incorporate marginalized communities’ language in order to give voice to the historically underrepresented, and to discuss successful learning opportunities, projects, and workflows for change.
Co-Moderators:
Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting
Bridget Madden, Associate Director, Visual Resources Center, Department of Art Hisotry, University of Chicago
Describing Art on the Street: The Graffiti Art Community Voice
Ann M. Graf, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, Simmons University
In the field of information science, we strive to provide access to information through the most efficient means possible. This is often done through the use of controlled vocabularies for description of subjects, and, in the case of art objects, for the identification of styles, processes, materials, and types. My research has examined the sufficiency of controlled vocabularies such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for description of graffiti art processes and products. This research is evolving as the AAT is responding to warrant for a broader set of terms to represent outsider art communities such as the graffiti art community. The methods used to study terminological warrant by examining the language of the graffiti art community are helpful to give voice to artists who work outside the traditional art institution, allowing the way that they talk about their work and how they describe it to become part of the common discourse. It is hoped that this research will inspire others who design and supplement controlled vocabularies for use in the arts to give priority in descriptive practice to those who have been historically underrepresented or made invisible by default use of terminology that does not speak to their experiences.
Queer Work | Queer Archives
Jenn Sichel, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Louisville
Miriam Kienle, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Kentucky
How do we teach students to conduct queer research in the field of art history? In this presentation we explore methods to bridge the gap between reading queer theory and doing queer research in archives, databases, and collections. We will elucidate several practical and practice-based questions: How do search terms function in queer research? And how might they falter, as gender expression and sexaully orientation are frequently not indexed? How do we come to rely on anecdotal knowledge and gossip when conducting queer research? And what are the possibilities and limitations of this kind of knowledge? How can we account for absences, when queer content is missing or destroyed? How can we equip our students to address such questions in their research? We conclude the presentation by reflecting on how these practical concerns become fertile ground for scholarly interventions in the field of queer art history.
Pattern and Representation: Critical Cataloging for a New Perspective on Campus History
Megan Macken, Assistant Department Head, Digital Resources and Discovery Services, Oklahoma State
Prior to the fall of 2020, the historic record of art exhibitions held at Oklahoma State University (OSU) was available only in incomplete, unprocessed archival materials. Students in Louise Siddons’ fall 2020 History of American Art course conducted research in the digitized student newspaper archive to begin documenting OSU art exhibitions since 1960. The resulting database was shared with the public with the intention of building on the project in future courses. Throughout the project both students and faculty engaged in critical cataloging.
Using the exhibition dataset they had created, students completed two analytical assignments: a traditional art history essay in which they considered one exhibition closely, and a critical reflection prompting them to consider their new understanding of the university’s history based on the aggregation of exhibitions. As gaps and surprises in representation appeared, students developed a more nuanced picture of institutional culture in the latter half of the 20th century.
After the course concluded, art history and library faculty standardized the student-generated data in preparation for sharing on other platforms such as Wikidata. Some artists who have exhibited at OSU also have interviews in the OSU oral history collections, and intersections between these projects and the questions raised by surfacing this metadata were explored. In the process issues emerged around artists’ preferred ways of identifying themselves as well as the difficulties of achieving a balance between increased representation of artists on the margins and respect for the privacy of living artists.
