When the famous seventeenth-century gardener John Tradescant named his home, with
its collection of rarities and curiosities, “the Ark,” he was expressing his
desire to compile a microcosm of a wide world of variety beyond common
experience. Such collections represented the sum of early modern European
experience of the world at a time of rapid scientific and geographical expansion
and reflected fundamental epistemological shifts in attitudes toward curiosity,
wonder, and credulity on the cusp of the modern age. The rapidly expanding world
of exploration, colonization, and commerce in the seventeenth century
proliferated with strange and bizarre creatures and artifacts that challenged
the traditional limits of knowledge. To meet the need for a complete and
accessible record of early modern collections, 'The Digital "Ark"' will
accumulate a database of artifacts and natural specimens as represented by
documentary records of early modern collections (inventories, diaries,
correspondence, etc.), contemporary drawings and engravings, as well as digital
images and curatorial records of extant remnants of these collections. It will
be an extensive record of all known collections of rarities and curiosities in
England and Scotland from 1580-1700 for which documentary evidence survives,
comprising up to 10,000 specimens and artifacts. This information, both textual
and visual, will be delivered in an open-access Web-based virtual museum that
will collect and display artifacts and natural specimens drawing from a fully
searchable database that will record and classify these items and their
descriptions in some two dozen fields of information.
This poster will briefly introduce the project and then focus on the challenges
this data poses for a computational process that involves naming data types and
defining relationships between them. The principle challenge comes from two
unique aspects of the project:
- The need to accommodate in the user interface a wide range of source
genres in a rationalized and consistent form, while representing the
distinct epistemological modes of these diverse forms of
representation;
- The need to respect and reflect the way the data was viewed and
understood in this age of transition between humanistic and empirical
ways of knowing as we interpret the data set and design a database
structure to encode, store, and represent this data in all of its
complex relationships.
The poster will have four sections:
- An introduction providing a brief paragraph on the cultural background
illustrated with a bulleted set of statistics and a 17th-century
engraving of a typical cabinet of curiosities.
- A chart depicting the diverse data types that provide the content of
the digital ark, including: letters; travel accounts; diaries,
inventories and catalogues; discursive prose; poetry; contemporary
engravings; drawings and paintings; modern photographs of extant
objects; and secondary scholarly sources) along with the characteristics
of these genres that complicates the process of defining data
structures. Page facsimiles will illustrate these data types.
- A chart depicting the differences between a taxonomic and an
ontological view of data. In brief, the taxonomic approach involves
entry into a new body of data and the naming and categorizing process
that occurs as one interprets and makes sense of this new data, while
the ontological approach involves fixing categories and properties in a
determined order of being. The seventeenth century represented a
significant shift from ontology, where the nature of existence was
received and commonly understood by all, to an age of taxonomy, where
the new and strange demanded an open-ended reconsideration of the world
of existence and a continual configuration of knowledge. In the computer
age, we are experiencing a similar tension in the desire to explore and
discover relationships between data, while at the same time thinking of
data representation in terms of ontologies. This chart will represent
this tension both in the context of the epistemology of the early modern
collections and the context of computer processes that might be employed
to represent them.
- The conclusion will outline two steps that will be taken to address
these needs:
- The use of qualitative tagging as a means to interrogating the
source documents to find what is there, before determining the
tag set that will inform the final data structure, that is, to
infer a taxonomy rather than simply impose an assumed
ontology.
- The use of a combination of the TEI structure to represent
text-based sources with modified object-based ontologies to
represent the objects as depicted in these textual sources and
also as depicted in graphical sources, both contemporary
engravings and drawings, and modern photographs of extant
objects.