Search for people contributing to events such as exhibitions or book publications. Also identify their connections with other people in specific roles.
Search for events like exhibitions and the publication of books by geographical location on a map.
Search for events based on date.
Browse the subject terms used in the database arranged in a hierarchy.
The Worlding Public Cultures database was created in order to identify locational hubs of activity, hinge figures, artists, milestone moments, and important themes in transnational and transcultural curatorial practice.
As the visual data models demonstrate, the data collected during this project allows us to identify some of the key locations, institutions, curators, artists, dates and themes that were important to the articulation of transnational and transcultural narratives in exhibitions. As the team spanned five locations and over ten languages, the ambition of the project was to create a “worlded” database of transnational and transcultural exhibitions.
In creating and analyzing the database, a second research question developed, which addressed questions of data bias and the politics of data through decolonial data practices. The team attended to questions of knowledge representation bias present in ICOM’s CIDOC-CRM– the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) International Committee of Documentation (CIDOC) Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), which is the ontology used to design the structure or schema of the database. By interrogating the ontology from a decolonial perspective, the project exposes some of the biases and limitations of its classes and properties. In the interface of the database, the team’s critiques of CIDOC-CRM classes and properties is evident when users hover the cursor over specific fields, which then brings up a window with a critical text. These critiques were made available to the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group in discussions held in preparation for issuing a bias statement, and will contribute to the long-term reimagining of CIDOC-CRM.
Despite its attunement to questions of data bias, this database nevertheless exhibited its own biases, linked to the division of labour across the five cities. Due to the fact that the majority of the database entries were created by London, Heidelberg, and Ottawa, the data points skew towards German and Canadian examples of transnational and transcultural exhibitions. Future work on this database will endeavour to address this imbalance.
Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja
Franziska Kaun
Emily Putnam
Ming Tiampo
Janneke Van Hoeve
Thanasis Velios
With Paul Goodwin