Data as Medium
“Data” brings to mind the cold, hard, analytical, frozen, pristine, objective, authoritative, black-and-white, set-in-stone, cut-and-dried, just the facts, precise, machine-readable truth. “Data” is a lie.
“The algorithms did it.”
(So say those questioned for biased or insecure output.) Those instructions — the recipes that take data and spin it and process it — those too are perceived to be infallible, objective, impartial. No matter that they were crafted by people, excitable or tired people, brilliant and lazy people, biased people, and often only certain people, for certain reasons.
Take photography as a medium.
It too trades in an aura of truth. What could be more true than photons of light captured within a camera?! (The acheiropoieta, made without human hands…) And yet, the framing, the cropping, the selection of this instant and not that, this subject but not that one, the constraints of camera mechanism and lens, the editing or not, processing, exporting or printing…the cascade of human choices made in service of an image belie the photograph’s objective truth.
Photographers are artists.
Photography is an art. It’s a creative medium, a storytelling medium, constrained by tools, marked by the physical world, manipulated by people.
Data is hand-crafted.
It’s contingent, textured, framed, selected, opinionated, shaped by tools, and time-filled.
Consider museum collection data.
Perhaps it all started as handwritten notes in a leather-bound ledger. Annotations adorn the margins over time, perhaps a different hand appears as years pass, along with a numbering system.
When it gets unwieldy (or when a registrar first tries to organize the scribblings of the founding curator/director?) the entries are copied onto index cards, sorted, organized, scrubbed free of mysterious notes, inside jokes, dubious locations. (Nevermind that a collections intern was a medievalist in undergrad; Renaissance works get short shrift, out of spite.)
Index cards, copied in triplicate for indices, then perhaps, with trepidation, transcribed into a computer, one-by-one, square pegs mapped into the round holes of proprietary software (a database).
Staff come and go, collections grow, records added and edited. Museums meet, discuss, deliberate, debate standards for shared vocabularies, subjects, names (little comes of it). Mainframes give way to PC’s, computer networking, THE INTERNET, perhaps a passing fancy.
Once a panacea, the proprietary software loses favor, vendors migrate data to a new proprietary system, fields remapped; some hierarchies are flattened (sorry), sacrificed for exciting new modules. (Still just a database.)
Years pass, new directors, new grants, now collection data is a tool for the world, not just the curators; it can come from anywhere (anyone?) and go anywhere. Needs change, systems change, and it won’t be the last time.
Imagine collection data as concrete poetry, not prose.
A collective conceptual art project, an institutional exquisite corpse, passed down from person to person (to people), with contributions made over time, performed in perpetuity. An index marked, scarred, scraped and shaped by institutional histories, politics, fashion, fortune and personalities.
The “Probably Connecticut?” in the object record marks potential, not failure.
It’s a message in a bottle from a museum worker years ago to a future self, or to a compatriot with time for research. For today, as the 76 unexpected new acquisitions must be accessioned before the fiscal year ends, and it’s late, “Probably Connecticut?” is more than enough. There’s no field in the database for surety (“probably”), no way to cite sources (“intuition”), or track changes, and no better character than “?” to say “follow up later.” It’s enough that someone in the beautiful future can search for “Connecticut” or “?”, find the object, add their part, pass the baton. We’re in this for the long term. Forever.
Collection data is a hidden labor, of love.
The never-ending work of maintaining gets lost; “innovation” captures all the attention. And yet, “agile” methodologies using “iterative” approaches, “continuous development” and “perpetual beta”, catchphrases for the innovation-obsessed technology world, resonate more in the work of museum maintainers, those who find creative approaches to enhance and improve collection data over years, amid constraints.
Museums care for their collection objects forever.
This is a herculean task and one that museums do well. Collection data fields attest to the mission of physical care: dimensions (object, frame, case, crate), description, condition, location, insurance value…but there’s more.
Museums are more than keepers and conservers, cabinets of curiosity.
Collection objects connect people across time. What separates the Picasso from the flea market find is the context, the stories, the connections, the impacts associated with an object accumulated over years. Even while resting in storage, a digitized object can be useful, inspire, circulate in culture, motivate new stories. This is the life of an object, and museums must take pains to preserve that life alongside the object itself. Such is the opportunity for collection data.
What if we kept and conserved the lives of objects?
If we knew that a curator added an object to a list for the beginnings of an exhibition idea about car crashes, even if hastily prepared for a bi-weekly curatorial meeting, let’s take note in collection data. An object used in a Friday night wine-and-dine members tour on seduction? Ditto. What happens when everyday museum work adds to collection knowledge? What if we opened our collections to others to use for their own purposes (a neuroscience professor?), and gathered the new connections they make, the context they generate? What if we take note when objects flutter through social media and digital networks? (Many curatorial files, filled with glancing mentions, have grown dusty since THE INTERNET.)
Take collection data as a whole.
A collection can itself be an object of research and inquiry, tracing the story of an institution and a culture. The whole of the dataset is important, not only the part that’s clean, or complete, or presentable, not highlights or greatest hits. The collection data will never be complete, never perfect, never finished or publishable. By sharing it all, a museum shares its story, what it has, what it doesn’t yet have, what is incomplete, or wrong, and invites participation, welcomes collaboration, shared research, shared responsibility, shared authority, and signals that there is more to explore, more to learn, and the door is open.
When an object is deaccessioned, or unlocated, its accession number remains, never used again, like a jersey number retired, a ghost in the collection data.
Art won’t be reduced to data, the life of art through culture even less so. Collections data stretches, strains and questions the notions of taxonomy, categorization, containers, databases, objectivity, data. Cultural data tests digital culture.
Collections as data, objects as data, images as data, data as data (ripe for analysis). As an expression of things, experiences, relationships, people, epiphanies, and their gathering, keeping, caring and telling.
Data as medium.
Originally published in Thoughtforms, 01 — November 2018, by Micah Walter Studio. Reproduced by kind permission—many thanks.
