The Elements of Drawing: Enhancement and Dissemination for Impact

The great Victorian art critic and social reformer John Ruskin was the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, from 1869 until 1878 and again from 1883 until 1885. During that time, he assembled a collection of drawings, prints, and photographs to use in the drawing courses which he taught undergraduates and other interested students. After Ruskin's resignation of the Professorship, the collection was gradually rearranged and broken up, passing to the Ashmolean Museum in 1949.

In 2004, the Ashmolean placed these collections, together with Ruskin's catalogues of the collections, online at http://ruskin.ashmolean.org. For the first time since 1885, visitors to the website could see a significant collection of drawings and prints by 19th-century British artists and old masters, assembled by one of the most influential critics of the age as a direct illustration of his theories, in its original arrangements and sequences, constituting a carefully-constructed series of drawing courses for undergraduates and amateurs.

In this project, we will ensure the website's future by re-formatting the underlying data and delivery system so that they can be easily maintained in the long term as part of the Ashmolean Museum's core activities. We will investigate users' needs and make sure that the website continues to meet them, enhancing the site with tools which allow users to see high-resolution images, and assemble and comment upon their own routes through the collection, then save and share them with other users. The site will become a much more effective research and teaching tool for anyone working on Ruskin; 19th-century art, education, and collecting; and Victorian studies.

As well as upgrading the website, we will add material produced for the general public, artists, and schoolchildren and further education students of art and design: newly-commissioned artworks and creative writing, a practical drawing course on Ruskinian principles, and a series of introductions to Ruskin's ideas and the collection itself, from leaders in the relevant fields. These will include two online learning resources focussed at the art and design curriculum at GCSE and post-16 level, comprising teachers' notes, activity sheets, and interactives. In developing some of these additions to the site, we will feed into the development of a 14-19 Specialist Diploma in Drawing at the University of the Arts, London, and the Ruskin Foundation's social engagement activities based on their Ruskin comics.

To increase the project's impact, we will publicise the collection and the website digitally, letting users share pages from the site on social networking and bookmarking sites such as Facebook and Delicious, sharing our data through projects such as Culture Grid, and publishing landscapes from the collection within Google Maps and Google Earth. We will also participate in the 2010 Big Draw campaign, and create a small exhibition based on the collection in conjunction with the Ashmolean's 2010 Pre-Raphaelites exhibition, linking these activities to the project and so bringing it to the general public's attention. We will also send and e-mail flyers and posters advertising the rebuilt site to people and organisations with a particular interest in Ruskin. The greater the interest in the site, the easier it will be to keep it vibrant for future users, whether they be researchers, schoolchildren, artists, or the general public.

We will bring all the project participants together in a symposium, to reflect upon how they have interpreted Ruskin in the 21st century and his relevance today; at the same time, we will use workshops to introduce the online learning resources to teachers. We will add podcasts from the symposium to Oxford's iTunes U site.

Policy-makers (curriculum development): by investigating use of the collection as a tool for teaching drawing, the project will have a direct impact into the development of a 14-19 Specialist Diploma in Drawing at the Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts, directed by co-investigator Prof. Farthing.

Schools: by creating two online learning resources based upon the website, we will directly engage teachers and encourage them to use the collection in their teaching. We will ensure that they benefit by consulting local teachers as part of the development process, and incorporating workshops on using the resources into the project symposium; we will also send out posters advertising the site to our own lists of secondary schools, those of the Ruskin Foundation and the Association of Art Historians.

Creative arts: by commissioning new work from contemporary artists and a writer in residence, we will provide works which provide a stimulus for artists' and writers' own creative responses to Ruskin and the teaching collection. We will ensure that they benefit by disseminating the new works in the specialist and national press, and making them a key focus of the project symposium.

Museums: research for the Ruskin and Italy pathway will feed into a small exhibition on the same subject, to be held at the Ashmolean Museum; this will attract additional visitors and publicity, supplementing the 2010 exhibition 'The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy'. The project website will provide an additional attraction on the museum's website, leading users to browse other parts of the site; and the project will increase the richness of the museum's integrated online collections. The project will allow the museum to prototype and evaluate features for its new website. 'Buy this picture' links will increase revenue from picture sales.

Social engagement: by incorporating a pathway on How To See into the website, we will continue the extensive work done on engaging school-children and prisoners with Ruskin's ideas on proper seeing as a key to true understanding and morality, carried out by the Ruskin Foundation over the last couple of years. We will liaise with the Ruskin Foundation over dissemination of the website to ensure we reach a responsive audience.

The Ruskin community: Ruskin has a committed following, embodied in organisations such as his own foundation, the Guild of St George; the Ruskin Society; and the Ruskin Foundation. We will increase the ease with which they access and disseminate one of Ruskin's major projects, and provide them with further contemporary reflections on his importance today. We will ensure the site's impact on the community by advertising the site and the project symposium to members of these organisations and their mailing lists, and to the Ruskin Research centre's list. Delivering the symposium as a series of podcasts will increase its dissemination and ensure its continued impact.

The wider public: by adding functionality, we will make the Elements of Drawing website more attractive to all users. By including elements which introduce the site's content to a general audience (the introductory pathway, the How To See pathway), we will provide additional hooks to bring the general public into the site, so that they enjoy and learn from the collection. The commissioned writing will provide a route into the collection for audiences whose interest is primarily literary; the artistic interventions will attract the strong audience for contemporary art. Prof. Farthing's online drawing course will be available for free use by amateur artists. We will also use the publicity generated by the commissioned artworks and writing, the 2010 Big Draw event, and the project and Pre-Raphaelites exhibitions, to draw the public's attention to the site.