Follow on to "From Lima to Canton and Beyond: An AI-aided heritage materials research platform for studying globalisation through art"

This is a follow on proposal to the ongoing project "From Lima to Canton and Beyond: An AI-aided heritage materials research platform for studying globalisation through art", which set out to investigate the large group of ethnographic and selected scientific watercolours (e.g. maps and botanical drawings), made for export to Europe or North America by local artists in north-western Latin America and Asia from 1780 to 1850. Inspired by the Enlightenment, these works were the result of the European colonial powers such as Britain and Spain, collecting information from around the world via local officials in their colonies, but are now widely dispersed in public collections in the UK and US. The aim was to solidify our understanding of the large corpus (several thousands) of ethnographic works, on the one hand, and maps and botanical drawings on the other, by linking scientific analysis of artist materials such as pigments and paper to parallel research in art history, social and economic history, biography, and artistic analysis (connoisseurship) - establishing datasets combining analytic physical description with documentation of places of manufacture, names and locations of collectors, provenance (collection histories) of objects, and groupings of works by attributions to different artistic hands. Among the secondary objectives is to understand the global cultural and economic connections from Latin America to Asia and Europe.

In the current project we visited a diverse range of cultural organisations from university libraries and museums, national libraries and archives, national museums, learned societies. The follow on project is informed by the feedback we received in discussion with the various partners of the project, advisors, consultants and others including those on European and UK research infrastructure projects (IPERION HS, E-RIHS, DigiLab, RICHeS, TANC) or those in receipt of infrastructure investment (AHRC Capco) of the needs as follows:

1) Active dissemination of a well-tested heritage material analysis workflow to the heritage science community to improve efficiency through the AI-assisted tools that ensure thorough but efficient analysis

2) Addition of a digital tool to streamline the workflow from data collection to interpretation and public engagement

3) Addition of Filipino collection that potentially fills the gap between Peruvian watercolours and their Chinese copies on pith from Canton to enhance our understanding of early 19th century global circulation of ethnographic watercolours - studying new collections naturally leads to engagement with new cultural organisations

4) Including the American and Dutch activities during this period using either new data or data collected from past AHRC projects

5) Inclusion of detailed analysis of the paper substrate in addition to spectral analysis of the paper through interaction with paper conservators

6) Dissemination to curators and the general public of the artist materials from different cultures, geographic locations and for different consumers studied in this project, which covers Peru, Colombia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Iran and selected European and American artists who visited these locations and co-created with local artists. Such engagement will showcase the benefits of interdisciplinary research and how scientific analysis of materials brings a different perspective to historical research.