Hasil untuk "Museums. Collectors and collecting"

Amandine Decker, Vincent Tourneur, Maxime Amblard et al.

Dialogue is at the core of human behaviour and being able to identify the topic at hand is crucial to take part in conversation. Yet, there are few accounts of the topical organisation in casual dialogue and of how people recognise the current topic in the literature. Moreover, analysing topics in dialogue requires conversations long enough to contain several topics and types of topic shifts. Such data is complicated to collect and annotate. In this paper we present a dialogue collection experiment which aims to build a corpus suitable for topical analysis. We will carry out the collection with a messaging tool we developed.

Hashim Ali, Surya Subramani, Raksha Varahamurthy et al.

Recent advances in speech synthesis have introduced unprecedented challenges in maintaining voice authenticity, particularly concerning public figures who are frequent targets of impersonation attacks. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for collecting, curating, and generating synthetic speech data for political figures and a detailed analysis of challenges encountered. We introduce a systematic approach incorporating an automated pipeline for collecting high-quality bonafide speech samples, featuring transcription-based segmentation that significantly improves synthetic speech quality. We experimented with various synthesis approaches; from single-speaker to zero-shot synthesis, and documented the evolution of our methodology. The resulting dataset comprises bonafide and synthetic speech samples from ten public figures, demonstrating superior quality with a NISQA-TTS naturalness score of 3.69 and the highest human misclassification rate of 61.9\%.

Sabine von Mering, Robert Cubey, D. Endresen et al.

Research expeditions are an important source of specimens in natural history collections. To further open up and increase the accessibility of related collection data, unambiguous naming of such events is required, and stable identifiers for the expeditions are needed. In the absence of a global catalogue for expeditions, we recommend the usage of Wikidata Q identifiers. The sharing of metadata and descriptions will facilitate the linking of material distributed across museums and related research data. It will also help to identify further specimens with missing metadata belonging to the same expeditions. At the 2023 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Tasmania was formed. The TG will create best practice recommendations and guidelines for the modelling and linking of expedition data (see the TG Charter, von Mering et al. 2024b). A GitHub repository*2 will be used to facilitate and document the work progress. A WikiProject*3 was formed to share resources and to interact and collaborate with the wider community of Wikimedians.*1, an informal international working group presented plans on modelling research expeditions in Wikidata and proposed a TDWG Task Group “Modelling Research Expeditions” (von Mering et al. 2023). This was approved earlier this year and an official Task Group (TG), under the Collections Description Interest Group, The open and community-curated knowledge base, Wikidata To increase transparency and improve accessibility, Wikidata items for historical and contemporary expeditions are created and the events linked to entities such as localities, expedition participants, publications of scientific results, and collections holding specimens gathered during the expeditions. Useful statements include information on the location of archival records related to the expeditions such as field or log books, correspondence or estates of participants. All these Linked Open Data (LOD) can then be used by other tools, e.g., for visualisations of itineraries or in knowledge graphs (Fig. 1).*4, provides structured data in a human and machine-readable format, which can be edited by anyone in multiple languages. The TG is currently developing a terminology, a formal set of terms and definitions used to describe such events, and best practice documentation for modelling research expeditions. First achievements include a draft schema of properties used in Wikidata for research expedition data, which is being trialled at natural history institutions (). The implementation of standard persistent identifiers, such as the Wikidata QIDs, for expeditions in different Collection Management Systems is encouraged. A visualization tool is an example of reuse of expedition data and visualisation built in the scope of the TG (Fig. 2; Santos 2023).Leachman and Schrader 2024 The TG is exploring if GRSciColl, GBIF’s Global Registry of Scientific Collections, could be expanded to include the normative identifiers for research expeditions. Bionomia could potentially be expanded to link natural history specimens not only to the world’s collectors but also to expeditions. The whereabouts of expedition participants can be used to validate Bionomia annotations for collectors. Participants in a given research expedition can guide suggestions for Bionomia annotations on specimens linked to the expedition. Thus, such expedition data will also support quality control of collection data. Collaborations exist also with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) via the BHL-Wiki working group. Many reports and scientific results of expeditions are available via this digital library. Researchers and other interested parties from around the world are encouraged to advance documentation of research expeditions by sharing data on collection agents and expeditions related to their institutions (von Mering et al. 2024a). Adding and enriching data about expeditions in Wikidata also contributes to the historical contextualisation of such collecting events.

D. Akimov

The relevance of this article is based on shaping new modern world’s market relations one of which is the art market. The aim of the research is the analysis of the marketing interrelations and tendencies in the market of the 20th-21st centuries together with the previous historical periods. In order to hit the goal of the research, theoretical, empirical and comparative researching methods have been used. It sets theoretical foundations of the visual arts marketing and the ways of their practical application. Already before the modern art market as an element of a total capitalistic market came to exist, the movement of visual art works, in the ancient epoch, included elements of marketing approaches and technologies caused by the then-existing processes of sale and purchase of art works, their exchange and collecting. The article is about the expertise of their quality and originality; definition of the already existing methods of promoting art works in the society. It is worth paying a particular attention to ceramic products like porcelain (china) that, in its turn, occupies an important place among art works, together with paintings and sculptures. In the beginning of the 18th century, the porcelain arrived to Europe from China. Collectors have for three centuries admired porcelain products. It should be admitted, there is a particular category of the Venice Biennale visitors. They are porcelain collectors. The practical value of this research stays in the analysis of the marketing instruments in the modern art market for the benefit of not only modern artists but also of the managers of all levels who work in the field of visual arts, at exhibitions, for companies producing collection ceramics tableware, at auctions and in the world’s museums

Katarzyna Waszczyńska

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Yuxin Lin, Jiaxuan Ma, Sizhe Gu et al.

Mobile robotics datasets are essential for research on robotics, for example for research on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Therefore the ShanghaiTech Mapping Robot was constructed, that features a multitude high-performance sensors and a 16-node cluster to collect all this data. That robot is based on a Clearpath Husky mobile base with a maximum speed of 1 meter per second. This is fine for indoor datasets, but to collect large-scale outdoor datasets a faster platform is needed. This system paper introduces our high-speed mobile platform for data collection. The mapping robot is secured on the rear-steered flatbed car with maximum field of view. Additionally two encoders collect odometry data from two of the car wheels and an external sensor plate houses a downlooking RGB and event camera. With this setup a dataset of more than 10km in the underground parking garage and the outside of our campus was collected and is published with this paper.

Jensen Gao, Annie Xie, Ted Xiao et al.

Data collection has become an increasingly important problem in robotic manipulation, yet there still lacks much understanding of how to effectively collect data to facilitate broad generalization. Recent works on large-scale robotic data collection typically vary many environmental factors of variation (e.g., object types, table textures) during data collection, to cover a diverse range of scenarios. However, they do not explicitly account for the possible compositional abilities of policies trained on the data. If robot policies can compose environmental factors from their data to succeed when encountering unseen factor combinations, we can exploit this to avoid collecting data for situations that composition would address. To investigate this possibility, we conduct thorough empirical studies both in simulation and on a real robot that compare data collection strategies and assess whether visual imitation learning policies can compose environmental factors. We find that policies do exhibit composition, although leveraging prior robotic datasets is critical for this on a real robot. We use these insights to propose better in-domain data collection strategies that exploit composition, which can induce better generalization than naive approaches for the same amount of effort during data collection. We further demonstrate that a real robot policy trained on data from such a strategy achieves a success rate of 77.5% when transferred to entirely new environments that encompass unseen combinations of environmental factors, whereas policies trained using data collected without accounting for environmental variation fail to transfer effectively, with a success rate of only 2.5%. We provide videos at http://iliad.stanford.edu/robot-data-comp/.

Andrzej Betlej

This article is devoted to Stanisław Olexiński (1865–1941), a person almost completely unknown, but – as it seems – rather important for the history of art and collecting in Lviv (now Ukraine). Olexiński was the administrative secretary of the Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich (Ossoliński National Institute) since 1919, as well as a well-known collector. His collection was focused mainly on publications on the theory and history of art, and he also gathered a sizeable portion of prints and drawings by Polish artists. Partially preserved correspondence and documents related to Olexiński reveal his passion for collecting and his commercial activities in the artistic community. Letters from well-known artists confirm his commitment and testify to his sturdy activity in acquiring works of art, both by purchasing them directly from the artists. Olexiński exchanged works from his collection with, among others, the Ossoliński Institute, also donated some objects to the City Gallery or the Historical Museum in Lviv. Unfortunately, the fate of the collection remains unknown. After Olexiński’s death in 1941, shortly after the German army entered Lviv, his collection may have been dispersed, sold or destroyed. The last piece of information relating to Olexiński is a letter from Andrzej Lubomirski, curator of the Ossoliński Institute, dated August 1941, indicating that the collector was still popular; nevertheless, it is uncertain whether letter reached him or his wife. The paper presented herein is an attempt to restore the memory of someone who played a relatively substantial role in the cultural life of Lviv’s intellectual and artistic elite.

I. Zagorodniuk, E. Ulyura

The history of collections that became part of the academic zoological collection prior to the Second World War and which is now being housed in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), NAS of Ukraine was studied. The specimens in this collection had probably been kept in zoological centres of Kharkiv before. The collected specimens and their label data are considered as an important source for an entire series of reconstructions, such as the history of species, the history of research, the biographies of researchers, and the history of collections and museums. Along with bibliographic search and mentions of finds of species and their collectors, such data are promising for the reconstruction of important pages in the history of scientific research and scientific institutions. All such approaches were used to investigate the history of research related to the names of Mykola Diukov and Viktor Drebentsov (Drebentsiv) — two researchers who were not included in the list of the hundred most famous mammalogists of Ukraine (review of 2022), but turned out to be iconic persons. Their scientific careers turned out to be closely related to the Kharkiv plant protection centres, and both researchers carried out active research and collection work in the Kharkiv region and in a number of southern regions of Ukraine in the 1920s and early 1930s. The destinies of both of researchers took sharp turns during the period of Stalinist repressions in Ukraine (Union for the Freedom of Ukraine trial, Holodomor, political purges, etc.), and both left not only Kharkiv, but also Ukraine: Diukov ended up in Dagestan working in the plant protection system, whereas Drebentsov in Murmansk at the polar institute, and later in the regional museum of local history. In the new places, the researchers continued their zoological practices, collecting and organizing collections of vertebrate animals (mainly mammals and birds) and achieved a high level of recognition: Diukov became one of the key zoologists and nature popularisers in Dagestan, and so did Drebentsov in Murman. Their destinies turned out differently: M. Diukov was eventually repressed (spent five years in concentration camps) and went missing, whereas V. Drebentsov became a recipient of various state awards. The names of both researchers should be included in the registers of zoologists who formed the foundations of modern knowledge and collections. The authors associate the preservation and transfer of their collections with the activities of O. Myhulin, who in 1938 published the monograph “Mammals of the Ukrainian SSR”, which is largely based on the analysis of mammal collections.

Briony Widdis

Abstract The World Cultures collection at National Museums Northern Ireland is an essential source for the study of Irish collecting in the wider British Empire. The 2022 redisplay of the collection in the Ulster Museum's exhibition, Inclusive Global Histories, is part of a staged engagement with local and source communities. Given the critical importance of the global museum decolonisation work of which the exhibition is an example, a fresh consideration of this ethnographic collection's history is timely. This article reviews the collection within the context of the three museums that have housed it, and investigates how curators within the institution understood, represented and displayed the collection. It does so through a case study of a war canoe (tomako), that was taken from the Solomon Islands, by John Casement, a captain in the Royal Navy, and is the largest and among the most significant items within the collection. The canoe's centrality to the gallery — built around it in 1925 — that now contains Inclusive Global Histories reveals complex social networks between nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors, curators and photographers, and aids understanding of how global human cultures have been regarded in Northern Ireland's civic life.

Simon Spier

This article examines the role of French antique dealers and the auction sales that took place at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s in forming the sizeable collection of fine and decorative art of John and Joséphine Bowes, founders of the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Using primary sources published here for the first time, and presenting an extensive online Appendix of auction sales that appear in the archive at the Bowes Museum, it will demonstrate that the Bowes participated in a collecting network that was the product of a rapidly expanding art market in the second half of the nineteenth century. This argues against previous studies of the Bowes’ collecting, which have viewed them as singular and idiosyncratic collectors, and instead places them in the context of emerging private collections such as the Wallace Collection and public institutions such as the South Kensington Museum. However, rather than suggesting that the Bowes emulated private and institutional collectors such as Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Charles Robinson, it is shown that the sophistication of the art market at this point allowed for diversity in collecting, allowing less wealthy and lower-status collectors to form collections of note.

S. Frahnert, D. Turner, Cordula Bracker

Gustav Adolf Fischer (18481886) was an important German naturalist and ornithological collector in Africa. The extensive ornithological collections from his several expeditions were sent to at least two different museums (Zoological Museum Berlin and Zoological Museum Hamburg), and to a smaller extent, some private sales are assumed. Together with Anton Reichenow, Fischer described many species new to science, so the many types in the collections make them especially important. We located 616 bird specimens in the collections of the Museum fr Naturkunde Berlin and the Museum der Natur Hamburg along with a few further specimens in the collections of the Museum Heineanum Halberstadt, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden, The Natural History Museum-UK (Tring), the American Museum of Natural History, New York and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. Among these, type specimens for 133 species and subspecies of birds were traced. For all of them, an update of the collecting localities with particular emphasis on some previously unknown locations is provided. A taxonomic update of the described species is given and a designation of lectotypes for the following four taxa was necessary: Francolinus Altumi G.A. Fischer & Reichenow, 1884, Accipiter minullus tropicalis Reichenow, 1898, Hypochera ultramarina var. orientalisReichenow, 1894 and Spinus citrinelloides frontalis Reichenow, 1904b.

M.ª Luisa Martín Ansón, Concepción Abad Castro

Entre las piezas procedentes del monasterio de Santa María la Real de Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) hoy custodiadas en el MAN se encuentra el sepulcro de doña Inés Rodríguez de Villalobos, personaje perteneciente a una importante familia castellana de la Baja Edad Media. En esta investigación se ilustra la figura de doña Inés, el linaje al que perteneció, así como las diversas ramas familiares que integraron su genealogía, estableciendo algunos matices desconocidos hasta el momento. Presentamos también datos documentales que permiten restituir el panteón familiar en el templo del conjunto monástico y, finalmente, nos detenemos en el análisis de la pieza, que se aborda no solo desde el punto de vista iconográfico, sino también estilístico, señalando a Antón Pérez de Carrión como autor de la misma.

Bram Willemsen, Dmytro Kalpakchi, Gabriel Skantze

An idealized, though simplistic, view of the referring expression production and grounding process in (situated) dialogue assumes that a speaker must merely appropriately specify their expression so that the target referent may be successfully identified by the addressee. However, referring in conversation is a collaborative process that cannot be aptly characterized as an exchange of minimally-specified referring expressions. Concerns have been raised regarding assumptions made by prior work on visually-grounded dialogue that reveal an oversimplified view of conversation and the referential process. We address these concerns by introducing a collaborative image ranking task, a grounded agreement game we call "A Game Of Sorts". In our game, players are tasked with reaching agreement on how to rank a set of images given some sorting criterion through a largely unrestricted, role-symmetric dialogue. By putting emphasis on the argumentation in this mixed-initiative interaction, we collect discussions that involve the collaborative referential process. We describe results of a small-scale data collection experiment with the proposed task. All discussed materials, which includes the collected data, the codebase, and a containerized version of the application, are publicly available.

Tanja Katharina Kaiser, Tristan Potten, Heiko Hamann

Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on using methods of evolutionary computation to generate collective decision-making mechanisms exist. These works use task-specific fitness functions rewarding the accomplishment of the respective collective decision-making task. But task-independent rewards, such as for prediction error minimization, may promote the emergence of diverse and innovative solutions. We evolve collective decision-making mechanisms using a task-specific fitness function rewarding correct robot opinions, a task-independent reward for prediction accuracy, and a hybrid fitness function combining the two previous. In our simulations, we use the collective perception scenario, that is, robots must collectively determine which of two environmental features is more frequent. We show that evolution successfully optimizes fitness in all three scenarios, but that only the task-specific fitness function and the hybrid fitness function lead to the emergence of collective decision-making behaviors. In benchmark experiments, we show the competitiveness of the evolved decision-making mechanisms to the voter model and the majority rule and analyze the scalability of the decision-making mechanisms with problem difficulty.

Jing Wei, Sungdong Kim, Hyunhoon Jung et al.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Shivin Dass, Karl Pertsch, Hejia Zhang et al.

Large-scale data is an essential component of machine learning as demonstrated in recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision research. However, collecting large-scale robotic data is much more expensive and slower as each operator can control only a single robot at a time. To make this costly data collection process efficient and scalable, we propose Policy Assisted TeleOperation (PATO), a system which automates part of the demonstration collection process using a learned assistive policy. PATO autonomously executes repetitive behaviors in data collection and asks for human input only when it is uncertain about which subtask or behavior to execute. We conduct teleoperation user studies both with a real robot and a simulated robot fleet and demonstrate that our assisted teleoperation system reduces human operators' mental load while improving data collection efficiency. Further, it enables a single operator to control multiple robots in parallel, which is a first step towards scalable robotic data collection. For code and video results, see https://clvrai.com/pato

Irene Seco Serra

Las colecciones del ARQUA albergan una interesante figura tallada en esteatita de Shou Lao o el Anciano del Polo Sur, el dios chino de la longevidad, hallada en Cartagena en los años veinte del siglo xx. Muy popular en China durante las dinastías Ming (1368-1644) y Qing (1644-1912), esta deidad suele formar parte de una tríada de dioses estelares de la suerte. En este caso se trata de una pieza sencilla que, a diferencia de otras representaciones de esta divinidad presentes en museos españoles, nos habla de la vida cotidiana y nos permite atisbar las relaciones de la zona con Asia Oriental a través del misterio de su origen.

K. I. Kholodkov, I. M. Aleshin, S. D. Ivanov

This article covers a nouveau idea of how to collect and handle geophysical data with a peer-to-peer network in near real-time. The text covers a brief introduction to the cause, the technology, and the particular case of collecting data from GNSS stations. We describe the proof-of-concept implementation that has been tested. The test was conducted with an experimental GNSS station and a data aggregation facility. In the test, original raw GNSS signal measurements were transferred to the data aggregation center and subsequently to the consumer. Our implementation utilized BitTorrent to communicate and transfer data. The solution could be used to establish the majority of data aggregation centers activities to provide fast, reliable, and transparent real-time data handling experience to the scientific community.

Piotr Czepas

Niniejszy artykuł jest próbą podjęcia zagadnienia potrzeby i znaczenia badań terenowych prowadzonych przez placówki muzealne, które poświęcone są problematyce tradycyjnego budownictwa chłopskiego. W jego ramach dokonano przeglądu prac badawczych podjętych na obszarze Polski środkowej na przestrzeni XX stulecia. Szczególną uwagę skupiono na badaniach terenowych zrealizowanych z ramienia Muzeum Archeologicznego i Etnograficznego w Łodzi w Stobiecku Miejskim (dziś część miasta Radomska) oraz w wybranych wsiach regionu łęczyckiego. Ich rezultaty przyczyniły się bowiem do powstania w pierwszych dekadach XXI wieku dwóch placówek tj. Zagrody Tatarskiej oraz Łęczyckiej Zagrody Chłopskiej stanowiących odpowiednio część Muzeum Regionalnego im. Stanisława Sankowskiego w Radomsku oraz Muzeum Archeologicznego i Etnograficznego w Łodzi. W ramach opracowania spróbowano udzielić odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy aktualnie zasadne jest prowadzenie etnograficznych badań terenowych z ramienia placówek muzealnych nad budownictwem wiejskim wzniesionym po II wojnie światowej.