Enriching Exhibition Stories: Adding Voices to Quire
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Engineering Science
Abstract
Traditional exhibition catalogues are extremely informative documents, but may be daunting, perhaps even intimidating, both to those who write them and those who read them. Enriching Exhibition Stories will help museums more easily create supplemental digital forms of exhibition narrative which speak to, and can be voiced by, a wider and more diverse range of perspectives than those who usually engage with exhibitions.
This new project builds upon a successful international collaboration between leading researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK and Yale University in the US, alongside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Yale Center for British Art. It will draw upon insights from the same team during their research for the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project, which linked and contextualised objects as they move between institutions through exhibitions, combining structured museum collections data with 'rich text' such as newspaper articles and social media.
The project uses the open source Quire software, developed by Getty, which creates rich documents, including exhibition catalogues, but which are easy to author, build, deploy and maintain, even by smaller institutions and individuals. Enriching Exhibition Stories adds capabilities to Quire so that it will work with Linked Art -- the structured data used in the earlier research project -- and through it enable new forms of Digital Stories.
Enriching Exhibition Stories will work in partnership with museums to ensure our work is embedded in professional best practice as well as software, both through an ongoing dialogue to define requirements, and through two trials of the enhanced-Quire software.
In the first trial we will work with the curator of the recent 'Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality' exhibition at the Ashmolean, to create a Digital Story connecting items from the exhibition through social media commentary.
In our second trial students at the Rumble Museum, Cheney School, will create Digital Stories which reflect their own personal interpretations of exhibition material and context.
Our experience from both these trials will be coalesced in a 'train the trainers' session for museum professionals at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and in dissemination to museum conferences in the UK and US.
All project software, procedures, and documentation, will be made freely available for museums to adopt and adapt at any point in the future.
This new project builds upon a successful international collaboration between leading researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK and Yale University in the US, alongside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Yale Center for British Art. It will draw upon insights from the same team during their research for the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project, which linked and contextualised objects as they move between institutions through exhibitions, combining structured museum collections data with 'rich text' such as newspaper articles and social media.
The project uses the open source Quire software, developed by Getty, which creates rich documents, including exhibition catalogues, but which are easy to author, build, deploy and maintain, even by smaller institutions and individuals. Enriching Exhibition Stories adds capabilities to Quire so that it will work with Linked Art -- the structured data used in the earlier research project -- and through it enable new forms of Digital Stories.
Enriching Exhibition Stories will work in partnership with museums to ensure our work is embedded in professional best practice as well as software, both through an ongoing dialogue to define requirements, and through two trials of the enhanced-Quire software.
In the first trial we will work with the curator of the recent 'Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality' exhibition at the Ashmolean, to create a Digital Story connecting items from the exhibition through social media commentary.
In our second trial students at the Rumble Museum, Cheney School, will create Digital Stories which reflect their own personal interpretations of exhibition material and context.
Our experience from both these trials will be coalesced in a 'train the trainers' session for museum professionals at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and in dissemination to museum conferences in the UK and US.
All project software, procedures, and documentation, will be made freely available for museums to adopt and adapt at any point in the future.
| Title | Exemplar Quire Project Based on the Labyrinth: Knossos Myth & Reality Exhibition |
| Description | An exemplar of Quire use for museum, demonstrating the reuse of materials created for the 2023 exhibition at the Ashmolean within new Quire-generated learning resources for the permanent Aegean World gallery. |
| Type Of Art | Artefact (including digital) |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Impact | The examplar evidenced the suitability of Quire for use in creating learning resources, leading to further evaluation towards future adoption by the museum. |
| URL | https://linked.art/community/projects/ees2/docs/labyrinth/ |
| Description | Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) demonstrated the value of technology -- including the Quire software and the project-developed extension to ingest Linked Art data -- for the expansion of outreach and engagement of new communities with museum collections. |
| Exploitation Route | The EES2 project's Linked Art extension to the Quire software is freely available to be used and adopted by museums and galleries. We hope that this functionality will, in time, be incorporated into the main Quire codebase. Training materials for museums professionals to use the software are freely available. We have shown how computing and history topics can be connected within education curricula. The learning materials developed for schools outreach are also freely available for re-use and extension. We hope that these can be incorporated into ongoing outreach plans at the Ashmolean and other museums. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://linked.art/community/projects/ees2/ |
| Description | The Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) project has extended the open source Quire software developed by Getty. Quire creates rich documents, including exhibition catalogues, which are easy to author, build, deploy and maintain, even by smaller institutions and individuals. Enriching Exhibition Stories has added the capability for Quire to ingest Linked Art -- the metadata profile and API developed by the eponymous CIDOC working group -- making it quicker and easier to populate Quire narratives with object records and associated images. These new capabilities were used to create a digital story written by the curator of the Ashmolean Museum's 2023 Labyrinth exhibition. This Labyrinth example was used as a catalyst to refine technical capabilities of the software ahead of wider use, as well as reflecting upon narratives of myth and reality rehearsed during outreach for the exhibition. The second phase of the project trialled our extended Quire software in a classroom setting at a local secondary school. Students were taught the benefits of structured data for relating objects from both the Ashmolean and in-school Rumble Museum, realised through their personal interpretations of exhibition materials and context. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2024 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Collaboration with Cheney School |
| Organisation | Cheney School |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) team ran a trial alongside staff and students from Cheney School in Oxford. The project team created a programme of materials and activities to support students' creation of digital stories drawn from their reflections about museum objects both in the Ashmolean Museum's collections and those of the school's own Rumble Museum. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Cheney School extensively collaborated with the EES2 team: providing expert advice and guidance which informed the creation of materials and activities; staffing and supporting (parental permission, school & travel logistics etc.) a school trip to the Ashmolean Museum as part of the activity programme; similarly a workshop with the Rumble Museum; staffing and supporting the computing workshop which was the culmination of the programme; and providing feedback to the project team. |
| Impact | The teaching and supporting materials for the programme are fully documented and available for reuse or extension. |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Description | Collaboration with Getty |
| Organisation | J. Paul Getty Museum |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | The Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) project team at the University of Oxford collaborated with the J. Paul Getty Trust who developed the Quire open source software. The project team extended Quire with functionality to ingest information provided as Linked Art. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Quire software team at the J. Paul Getty Trust worked with the EES2 team to guide and support our Linked Art extension of their software, through extensive online meetings and other correspondence. The Getty also hosted a project workshop, connecting the EES2 team with users and developers of the Quire software. |
| Impact | The Linked Art extension to the Quire software is available under an open source license, alongside extensive documentation. |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Title | Quire Linked Art Extension |
| Description | The Quire Linked Art Extension enables the retrieval and ingestion of Linked Art data and IIIF images via Quire's command-line interface, seamlessly merging them into a Quire project. It interacts with Linked Art records through their URIs, streamlining processes that previously required manual data entry. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The Quire Linked Art Extension was trialled in the Enriching Exhibition Stories project (EES2) at the Ashmolean Museum and in outreach with Cheney School; shared with museum professionals at a train-the-trainer workshop, and with the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation conference (CIDOC 2024). |
| URL | https://linked.art/community/projects/ees2/docs/quire/ |
| Description | Enriching Exhibition Stories presentation to the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation (CIDOC 2024) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Outputs from the Enriching Exhibition Stories project (EES2) were presented to the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation conference (CIDOC 2024), specifically the Linked Art extension to the Quire software developed by the project, and its trial use with Ashmolean Museum materials and for school outreach activities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/lectures-symposiums/cidoc2024 |
| Description | Getty Quire and Linked Art workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | In June 2024, Enriching Exhibition Stories held a Quire use case workshop with our partners at Getty alongside associated activities at the Getty Villa and IIIF conference. Hosted by our project partners at Getty, the workshop brought together the full project team from the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Yale University, and the Getty Quire development team. The voice of current and potential Quire users was represented by colleagues from the Ashmolean Museum, Getty Villa, the Quire community manager, and invited experts from the Wildenstein Plattner Institute and Design for Context. The workshop prioritised exploration of use cases beyond those currently encountered in the Quire community, and which can give voice to those who might not usually interact with museum data. After characterising which new functionalities would be necessary to support each scenario, a long-list of 17 specific use cases was consolidated and prioritised down to three. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://linked.art/community/projects/ees2/news/quire_workshop/ |
| Description | Linked Art BOF at IIIF Conference 2024 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Members of the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship team co-organised the 'Birds of a feather' session 'Connecting IIIF and Semantic Cultural Heritage Metadata for Discovery' describing and debating Linked Art and its application to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) industry standard body's annual conference. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://iiif.io/event/2024/los-angeles/ |
| Description | Linked Art Editorial Board |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 25 international cultural institutions and Universities are represented on the Linked Art Editorial Board, working to standardise the Linked Art profile for sharing Linked Open Data describing Art. The Editorial Board meets fortnightly by teleconference, and biannually at face-to-face meetings. A first version of the profile is expected to be completed by Spring 2021. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024,2025 |
| URL | https://linked.art/ |
| Description | Linked Art workshop at the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation (CIDOC 2024) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Members of the Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) team were co-organisers of a workshop on Linked Art at the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation conference (CIDOC 2024). The workshop stepped through the Linked Art standard including examples from existing implementations and conceptual modelling exercises. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/lectures-symposiums/cidoc2024 |
| Description | Presentation to Ashmolean Audiences and Content directorate |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Dissemination of results of the project to colleagues in the museum. There was interest in the way in which social media could be used to gather exhibition data, which is something the relevant team will now consider for future Ashmolean exhibitions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Schools outreach programme with Cheney School and the Ashmolean Museum |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) team ran a trial alongside staff and students from Cheney School in Oxford, with the aim was of developing a programme of materials and activities to support students' creation of digital stories drawn from their reflections about museum objects both in the Ashmolean Museum's collections and those of the school's own Rumble Museum. Following several months of collaboration and preparation, a programme was organised consisting of three interlinked activities. The first activity was a visit to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Students studying history or computing were offered the opportunity to attend, from which 24 students from Cheney School were selected, most of whom had never visited the museum. This intersection of subjects was chosen by the school to mix students whose choice of computing might usually distance them from engaging with historical sources; and vice versa. During the visit the class was split in two, with each half alternating between an object handling session led by a museum curator; and a gallery hunt led by a member of the audiences and engagement team. In both of these activities students completed structured worksheets to collect observations about the objects they saw; and were prompted to reflect upon and record their own interpretations. These observations and interpretations were kept to be used as part of subsequent activities. The second activity was a Rumble Museum Workshop at Cheney School, led by a history teacher and the director of the Rumble Museum. Students worked in the same pairs as during their Ashmolean visit, and were asked to write up their interpretations from that visit in a word processor (GoogleDoc), using formatting, in preparation for the final History and Computing workshop. Students were then asked to take part in a parallel handling session of objects from the Rumble Museum, completing the same structured documentation as at the Ashmolean. Objects were selected for thematic association with those studied at the Ashmolean to encourage consideration of equivalences between the two museums and their collection, and similarly between the responsibilities and opportunities found in running both museums. The culmination of the programme was a History and Computing Workshop led by two computer science teachers. The workshop aimed to demonstrate a variety of information organisation tools and techniques as the foundation for students' critical evaluation when encoding and sharing (cultural) information. Working in their pairs, the students were asked to contribute to a collective Quire book documenting their observations and interpretations of museum objects, which the school could publish. They achieved this by (i) supplementing Quire object YAML imported from Linked Art with observations from their handling sessions, learning about the relative strengths of JSON-LD and YAML, the information impacts of conversion between them, and situating YAML in curriculum contexts such as key-value pairs and Python dictionaries; (ii) marking-up their interpretations about objects as a Markdown page for the book, situating Markdown in the curriculum context of HTML, using identifiers to add their YAML object data to their Markdown story, and hyperlinking their own object photos into their stories. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://linked.art/community/projects/ees2/docs/outreach/ |
| Description | Talk at the Getty Villa |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The Enriching Exhibition Scholarship and Enriching Exhibition Stories projects were included in a presentation about the Asholean Knossos exhibition to staff at the Getty Villa |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Train the trainer sessions for museum professionals (and others) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | In August 2024 the Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) team ran a 'train-the-trainer' workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), held at St. Anne's College, to introduce attendees to the Quire digital publishing software and the Linked Art extension to Quire developed by EES2. Earlier in 2024 the project competitively awarded four Enriching Exhibition Stories Bursaries to support the attendance of museum and gallery professionals at DHOxSS. Alongside our bursary holders, the workshop was attended by 23 other DHOxSS delegates. The workshop was held across two separate sessions within the DHOxSS programme, with Quire installation support offered to attendees in between. In the first session attendees were introduced to Getty's Quire software for digital publication, and then the EES2 extension written. Attendees were shown a worked example of using the extension, then an example of Quire transforming materials created from a 2023 exhibition at the Ashmolean into learning resources for the permanent Aegean World gallery. In the second session attendees worked through hands-on exercises to create digital outputs using Quire and the Linked Art extension, which they had installed on their laptops. All tutorial material and worksheets are available for reference and modification on the EES2 training website. Bursary holders were among those reporting written feedback after the event: https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/article/dhoxss-2024-applied-data-analysis https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/article/digital-humanities-at-oxford-summer-school-2024-a-week-of-innovation-0 https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/article/dhoxss-2024-humanities-data-bursary |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/digitalscholarship/documents/media/full_... |