Hasil untuk "Museums. Collectors and collecting"

Dorothea Strecker, Heinz Pampel, Jonas Höfting

This article presents the results of a survey conducted in 2024 among research performing organizations (RPOs) in Germany on how they collect data on publication costs. Of the 583 invitees, 258 (44.3%) completed the questionnaire. This survey is the first comprehensive study on the recording of publication costs at RPOs in Germany. The results show that the majority of surveyed RPOs recorded publication costs at least in part. However, procedures in this regard were often non-binding. Respondents' ratings of the reliability of the collection of data on publication costs varied by the source of publication funding. Eighty percent of respondents rated the contribution of collecting data on publication costs to shaping the open access transformation as "very important" or "important." Yet, these data were used as a basis for strategic decisions in only 59% of the surveyed RPOs. Moreover, most respondents considered the implementation of an information budget at their institutions by 2025 unlikely. We discuss the implications of these findings for the open access transformation.

Ashleigh L. Whiffin

At National Museums Scotland, there were virtually no portable insect displays for outreach until 2016. Since this turning point, there has been greater interest in promoting the collection via participation in outreach events. This increased interest has necessitated creative solutions for delivering museum specimens and expertise beyond the walls of the collection centre. Several small displays have been created at almost no additional cost by repurposing drawers or existing boxes and using specimens previously destined for disposal. Unit trays are often used to sub-divide the drawers, with header labels providing information. These drawers and boxes cover various themes, from aquatic insects to bee diversity. Some of the most well-used are themed around Carrion insects. A hit with all audiences, from school groups to families, they have been used at science festivals, careers events, Insect Week celebrations, and external outreach collaborations. Some boxes are dual purpose, being used for outreach and training workshops, and can be paired with interactive demonstrations. An overview of these portable displays is provided, along with lessons learned and recommendations for creating similar outreach drawers.

Christine E. Brennan

This essay addresses the Met’s commitment to reaching local communities through circulating exhibitions. It traces the evolution, reception, and influence of the Neighborhood Circulating Exhibitions program, a series of exhibitions sent to public libraries, settlement houses, and high schools in poorer communities around New York City between 1933 and 1942. It also examines the pivotal role played by museum staff in the program’s development and success. The Met’s continued dedication to local communities outside its walls is further demonstrated by discussing later circulating exhibition initiatives, including an exhibition focused on medieval art and culture from the late 1940s. This case study illustrates how objects were chosen, displayed, and reviews educational materials sent with the works of art. Finally, a comparison of The Met’s activities with other museums situates its endeavors within the larger context of circulating exhibition programs during the twentieth century.

Charlie Pilgrim, Joe Morford, Elizabeth Warren et al.

Why do collectives outperform individuals when solving some problems? Fundamentally, collectives have greater computational resources with more sensory information, more memory, more processing capacity, and more ways to act. While greater resources present opportunities, there are also challenges in coordination and cooperation inherent in collectives with distributed, modular structures. Despite these challenges, we show how collective resource advantages lead directly to well-known forms of collective intelligence including the wisdom of the crowd, collective sensing, division of labour, and cultural learning. Our framework also generates testable predictions about collective capabilities in distributed reasoning and context-dependent behavioural switching. Through case studies of animal navigation and decision-making, we demonstrate how collectives leverage their computational resources to solve problems not only more effectively than individuals, but by using qualitatively different problem-solving strategies.

Sumaya Ahmed Salihs, Isaac Wiafe, Jamal-Deen Abdulai et al.

This study presents an approach for collecting speech samples to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for impaired speech, particularly, low-resource languages. It aims to democratize ASR technology and data collection by developing a "cookbook" of best practices and training for community-driven data collection and ASR model building. As a proof-of-concept, this study curated the first open-source dataset of impaired speech in Akan: a widely spoken indigenous language in Ghana. The study involved participants from diverse backgrounds with speech impairments. The resulting dataset, along with the cookbook and open-source tools, are publicly available to enable researchers and practitioners to create inclusive ASR technologies tailored to the unique needs of speech impaired individuals. In addition, this study presents the initial results of fine-tuning open-source ASR models to better recognize impaired speech in Akan.

Ye Zheng, Yidan Hu

Trajectory collection is essential for location-based services, yet it can reveal highly sensitive information about users, such as daily routines and activities, raising serious privacy concerns. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong privacy guarantees for users even when the data collector is untrusted. However, existing trajectory collection methods under LDP are largely confined to discrete location spaces, where the size of the location space affects both privacy guarantees and trajectory utility. Moreover, many real-world applications, such as flying trajectories or wearable-sensor traces, naturally operate in continuous spaces, making these discrete-space methods inadequate. This paper shifts the focus from discrete to continuous spaces for trajectory collection under LDP. We propose two methods: TraCS-D, which perturbs the direction and distance of locations, and TraCS-C, which perturbs the Cartesian coordinates of locations. Both methods are theoretically and experimentally analyzed for trajectory utility in continuous spaces. TraCS can also be applied to discrete spaces by rounding perturbed locations to any discrete space embedded in the continuous space. In this case, the privacy and utility guarantees of TraCS are independent of the number of locations in the space, and each perturbation requires only $Θ(1)$ time complexity. Evaluation results on discrete location spaces validate the efficiency advantage and demonstrate that TraCS outperforms state-of-the-art methods with improved trajectory utility, particularly for large privacy parameters.

Anastasia Zhukova, Christian E. Matt, Bela Gipp

Domain-specific languages that use a lot of specific terminology often fall into the category of low-resource languages. Collecting test datasets in a narrow domain is time-consuming and requires skilled human resources with domain knowledge and training for the annotation task. This study addresses the challenge of automated collecting test datasets to evaluate semantic search in low-resource domain-specific German language of the process industry. Our approach proposes an end-to-end annotation pipeline for automated query generation to the score reassessment of query-document pairs. To overcome the lack of text encoders trained in the German chemistry domain, we explore a principle of an ensemble of "weak" text encoders trained on common knowledge datasets. We combine individual relevance scores from diverse models to retrieve document candidates and relevance scores generated by an LLM, aiming to achieve consensus on query-document alignment. Evaluation results demonstrate that the ensemble method significantly improves alignment with human-assigned relevance scores, outperforming individual models in both inter-coder agreement and accuracy metrics. These findings suggest that ensemble learning can effectively adapt semantic search systems for specialized, low-resource languages, offering a practical solution to resource limitations in domain-specific contexts.

Arindam Bhattacharya, Jordan Cotler, Aurélien Dersy et al.

Collective coordinates are frequently employed in path integrals to manage divergences caused by fluctuations around saddle points that align with classical symmetries. These coordinates parameterize a manifold of zero modes and more broadly provide judicious coordinates on the space of fields. However, changing from local coordinates around a saddle point to more global collective coordinates is remarkably subtle. The main complication is that the mapping from local coordinates to collective coordinates is generically multi-valued. Consequently one is forced to either restrict the domain of path integral in a delicate way, or otherwise correct for the multi-valuedness by dividing the path integral by certain intersection numbers. We provide a careful treatment of how to fix collective coordinates while accounting for these intersection numbers, and then demonstrate the importance of the fix for free theories. We also provide a detailed study of the fix for interacting theories and show that the contributions of higher intersections to the path integral can be non-perturbatively suppressed. Using a variety of examples ranging from single-particle quantum mechanics to quantum field theory, we explain and resolve various pitfalls in the implementation of collective coordinates.

Anja Schwarz, Fiona Möhrle, Sabine von Mering

German-speaking naturalists working in southeastern Australia in the mid-19th century relied heavily on the expertise of First Nations intermediaries who acted as guides, collectors, traders and translators (Clarke 2008, Olsen and Russell 2019). Many of these naturalists went to Australia because of the research opportunities offered by the British Empire at a time when the German nation states did not have colonies of their own. Others sought to escape political upheaval at home. They were welcome employees for colonial government agencies due to their training in the emerging research-oriented natural sciences that the reformed German universities offered at a time when British universities were still providing a broad general education (Home 1995, Kirchberger 2000). Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822–1878 ) and Gerard Krefft (1830–1881 ), who both worked in colonial Victoria and New South Wales, are among this group. Throughout their work, they corresponded extensively with naturalists in Berlin, exchanging specimens and ideas. But the preserved Australian animals, plants and rock samples, as well as the written and drawn records of animals and landscapes now held at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), are much more than objects of scientific interest. They also contain information about Australia's First Nations. The collections provide evidence of their role in collecting as well as their knowledge of the natural world, which has long been overlooked and, at least in part deliberately, made invisible by Western knowledge systems (e.g., Das and Lowe 2018, Ashby 2020). People data have been recognised as crucial for linking such collection objects with expeditions, publications, archival material and correspondence (Groom et al. 2020, Groom et al. 2022). It can thus potentially help reconstruct invisibilized Indigenous histories and knowledge. However, while the MfN keeps information about European collectors and other non-indigenous agents associated with their specimens in internal catalogues, databases and wikis, Indigenous actors remain largely absent from these repositories, which reproduce the colonial archive 'along the archival grain' (Stoler 2009). With this in mind, we discuss in our presentation the complexities of using persistent identifiers and tools, such as Wikidata, to improve the integration and linkage of people data in the work currently being undertaken by the MfN and the Berlin's Australian Archive project to digitise and make accessible the museum’s collections. Drawing upon the guidance provided by the FAIR*1 and CARE*2 principles for data (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Carroll et al. 2020), and learning from the 2012 ATSILIRN Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services*3, the 2019 Tandanya Adelaide Declaration and the 2020 AIATSIS Code of Ethics*4, we address the potential of these efforts in terms of collection accessibility, and also highlight the challenges and limitations of this approach in the context of colonial collections.

Carmen Ramírez Cañas, Penélope I. Martínez de los Reyes, Antonio M. Sáez Romero

Culinary culture has played an essential role in the configuration and interaction of human societies throughout history, shaping both individual and collective identities. Like the modern Mediterranean diet, Phoenician-Punic subsistence relied on cereals, often in the form of bread. However, literary, epigraphic and material evidence on its production and consumption among Iron Age communities in the western Mediterranean is significantly limited. This article discusses the results of an experimental project regarding the construction process, use, and maintenance of the pyrostructures (tannūr ovens) used to bake bread, establishing comparisons with a selection of previous research from other Mediterranean geographical and cultural settings. The two ovens used, a fixed adobe and a ceramic portable, have made it possible to bake bread and cook other meals using cookware replicas. Thus, technical procedures, such as the timing of baking processes and the estimation of fuel, etc., have been analysed. This experimental and ethnographic approach, combined with the archaeological record, has provided new insight into resource management and production patterns regarding this staple food. Insight into the development of “kitchens” and complex cooking throughout the Iron Age in this peripheral area of the Mediterranean world was also gained.

Simone Tosoni

It is well known that throughout his long and brilliant career Trevor Pinch was a leading scholar in at least three research fields. In the sociology of scientific knowledge he was one of the most influential contributors, both alone and in collaboration with his mentor Harry Collins (see in particular Collins and Pinch, 1982; and Pinch 1985, 1986). He co-founded and developed the sociology of technology and the field of science and technology studies for which, in 2018, he was awarded the prestigious John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Later in his career, he was a core player in the field of sound studies (see for example Pinch and Bijsterveld (eds), 2003, 2004, 2012), to which he was led by his work on the Moog synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco, 2002) and his passionate love for music. However, the work of Trevor Pinch, and in particular the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach that he developed with Wiebe Bijker (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), has also been influential for many other neighbouring research fields to which he contributed only indirectly or episodically. This is the case for organisational studies, for example, or for studies of innovation. It is also the case for media studies. In what follows, as a media scholar, I represent the intellectual debt of my field to the work of Trevor Pinch. To do so, I will first clarify the role played by SCOT in the disciplinary tradition of media studies, in particular in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century. I will then move my focus to lesser-known works by Trevor Pinch on mediated communication, which he sporadically addressed as part of his broader research interests (related, for example, to the practice of selling). My attempt will be to retrace the tenets of Pinch’s own take on media as they emerge both from these too rare interventions and from the methodological reflection he has dedicated to the topic. In my final remarks, I will draw on the two preceding sections to highlight some other possible points of crosspollination between the current field of media studies and Trevor Pinch’s work, that remain to be explored in depth.

Sean Dewar, Georg Grasegger, Kaie Kubjas et al.

In this note we study the uniqueness problem for collections of pennies and marbles. More generally, consider a collection of unit $d$-spheres that may touch but not overlap. Given the existence of such a collection, one may analyse the contact graph of the collection. In particular we consider the uniqueness of the collection arising from the contact graph. Using the language of graph rigidity theory, we prove a precise characterisation of uniqueness (global rigidity) in dimensions 2 and 3 when the contact graph is additionally chordal. We then illustrate a wide range of examples in these cases. That is, we illustrate collections of marbles and pennies that can be perturbed continuously (flexible), are locally unique (rigid) and are unique (globally rigid). We also contrast these examples with the usual generic setting of graph rigidity.

Young-Ho Kim, Diana Chou, Bongshin Lee et al.

Current activity tracking technologies are largely trained on younger adults' data, which can lead to solutions that are not well-suited for older adults. To build activity trackers for older adults, it is crucial to collect training data with them. To this end, we examine the feasibility and challenges with older adults in collecting activity labels by leveraging speech. Specifically, we built MyMove, a speech-based smartwatch app to facilitate the in-situ labeling with a low capture burden. We conducted a 7-day deployment study, where 13 older adults collected their activity labels and smartwatch sensor data, while wearing a thigh-worn activity monitor. Participants were highly engaged, capturing 1,224 verbal reports in total. We extracted 1,885 activities with corresponding effort level and timespan, and examined the usefulness of these reports as activity labels. We discuss the implications of our approach and the collected dataset in supporting older adults through personalized activity tracking technologies.

Yao Su, Zhentian Qian, Lifang He et al.

Brain extraction and registration are important preprocessing steps in neuroimaging data analysis, where the goal is to extract the brain regions from MRI scans (i.e., extraction step) and align them with a target brain image (i.e., registration step). Conventional research mainly focuses on developing methods for the extraction and registration tasks separately under supervised settings. The performance of these methods highly depends on the amount of training samples and visual inspections performed by experts for error correction. However, in many medical studies, collecting voxel-level labels and conducting manual quality control in high-dimensional neuroimages (e.g., 3D MRI) are very expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, brain extraction and registration are highly related tasks in neuroimaging data and should be solved collectively. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised collective extraction and registration in neuroimaging data. We propose a unified end-to-end framework, called ERNet (Extraction-Registration Network), to jointly optimize the extraction and registration tasks, allowing feedback between them. Specifically, we use a pair of multi-stage extraction and registration modules to learn the extraction mask and transformation, where the extraction network improves the extraction accuracy incrementally and the registration network successively warps the extracted image until it is well-aligned with the target image. Experiment results on real-world datasets show that our proposed method can effectively improve the performance on extraction and registration tasks in neuroimaging data. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/ERNetERNet/ERNet

Martin Thomas

past actions and how they matter today. The research which frames the book included the identification of hundreds of Aboriginal Australian objects in institutions and collections across the United Kingdom. Through a network of researchers both in Europe and Australia, many contributing to this book, we see an initial map of cultural material outside of the Australian continent. Another interesting aspect of the book is that it seeks to present a range of methodologies that not only fit the work but also help to understand the ‘overlapping past and present contexts within which objects are created, circulated’ (17). This approach reflects the complexities of different power dynamics between, say, Britain and Aboriginal Australia. The book includes a broad and diverse range of meanings, collectors and collecting practices, sometimes with the recognition of the issue of the oppressed and the oppressor, and sometimes without. It attempts not only to consider how useful it is that someone thought to collect things in the first place but that these items remain in reasonable care today. Where the book mis-steps is in the use of terminologies that have become Indigenouscentric like the use of ‘ancestors’ to describe people from the past. It also lags a little in the case of some of the authors who are well known in the field but perhaps were more repetitive than innovative in their interpretations. Sculthorpe for example brings to life the work of finding and locating objects and their stories from a colonised perspective, where others appear to some extent to lean into the idea that the Empire was not so bad. It’s possible that a book that explores this dualism is important. Its internal moorings within the British Museum are broken up with the work of Jilda Andrews, who takes the reader back to country. However, this feels like a book more appropriate for the British reader than the Indigenous one. And it is easy to see how one might find refuge in the idea of objects having a geographical place-based meaning, and that without country, these objects have no cultural meaning – yet that too seems to have a pull at the heart. Aspects of the work seem to be unapologetic about these items’ acquisition and the impact of disenfranchisement experienced by Aboriginal Australians at the time. These items were seen as suitable for sale and not enough is known about them to decipher their true exchange history. Instead, we are being asked to view the British collectors as people just like us, they have ancestors too. The book also suggests that these factors should not deflect our acknowledgement that someone was curious enough to preserve these things, so that we can explore their meanings today. All valid points. For those interested in museum studies, Indigenous collections or in the work to locate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material currently held in institutions in Europe, this book is a great point of reference. However, it should be acknowledged that the meticulous work of Sculthorpe really gives this book gravitas. This book presents opportunities for further research and debate. It is well worth reading.

Nicole Yasuhara

Abstract:Oregon Historical Society (OHS) Deputy Museum Director Nicole Yasuhara reflects on Sarah Keyes’s Summer 2020 article titled “From Stories to Salt Cairns: Uncovering Indigenous Influence in the Formative Years of the Oregon Historical Society, 1898–1905.” Yasuhara’s primary role of “safeguarding the institution’s three-dimensional cultural resources” at OHS also involves “delineating and safeguarding the information we have about each object” — a task that is often extremely difficult. There are approximately 5,200 Native belongings in the OHS Museum collections, most collected during OHS’s formative years, and as Yasuhara attests, those objects “were stripped of their history,” no doubt due to “power structures between pioneer collectors and their Native sources.” Yasuhara also discusses current institutional practices and goals that guide confront this history and “begin to address the inherently colonial practices of early collecting institutions, including OHS.” That change, she urges, must grow from deeply personal ideological shifts in which practitioners recognize our own privilege and utilize an inclusion and equity lens in our everyday lives.”

Jialin Hu, Jia Pang

: In the 20th century, Britain became one of the most important countries to collect ancient Chinese bronzes overseas. Most of these works of art are preserved in museums in London, Cambridge, Oxford and other places. However, little known is about that Scottish collectors and museums also play a vital role. There are three museums in Scotland that collect ancient Chinese bronzes, including the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow

Jude Philp

This chapter describes the ways that collections were made in British New Guinea during Sir William MacGregor’s tenure (1888–1898) through a focus on the people employed in field collecting for bird specimens. It makes explicit the involvement of local peoples and other specialist collectors living in the region at the time. The creation of the collections was thus through two knowledge systems: that of western science and those of British New Guinean peoples. The influence of locals and other people is evident in the shape of the collection and the kinds of birds acquired. I argue that the curation of the bird specimens at Queensland Museum divorced specimens from the human contexts which contributed to reinforcing the hierarchical colonial structure. Despite this, examination of the collection’s composition shows the focus on ‘beautiful and gorgeous’ species which emphasises the knowledge of British New Guinea’s people and reveals the larger and more complex sphere of social relations that were a feature of MacGregor’s tenure.

A. Bain

R. Buschmann

Abstract The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of German New Guinea, the article maintains that epistemological concerns, as symbolic currency both in terms of inter-museum exchange and in terms of contributing to individual and institutional prestige, guiding ethnographic intuitions had little influence on colonial resident collectors. Colonial residents, who resented the heavy hand of colonial and museum officials in Berlin, infused duplication with their own desires, which included commercial gain or the conferment of the many German state decorations. The colonized indigenous population benefited from the increasing demand for their material culture, which provided valuable items and bargaining chips in the emerging colonial exchange. Duplicates are identified as doppelgängers to explore the political tensions that emerged in connection with duplication among museum officials and European and indigenous colonial residents.