In 2020, DARIAH selected two streams of funding as part of the Theme funding call, ‘Arts Exchanges’ and ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’. The call attracted a high number of well articulated and competitive applications, mainly addressing, perhaps not surprisingly, the topic of ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’.
With an overall budget of 87.920 €, DARIAH funded nine projects for a year (December 2020 – December 2021). This series presents their results with a special focus on each of these projects.
Contemporary collecting and COVID-19: Barriers, bottlenecks, and perspectives in digital curation
Coordinator: Chiara Zuanni (University of Graz, Centre for Information Modelling)
The project “Contemporary collecting and COVID-19”, based at the University of Graz, focused on the challenges memory institutions encounter in curating memories and witnesses of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The project aimed to foster an interdisciplinary discussion around the challenges of contemporary collecting in memory institutions, as well as to explore solutions for the collection, management, preservation, and dissemination of collections related to COVID-19, in collaboration with a range of cultural stakeholders.
Survey
The project conducted a survey of collections of memories and objects related to COVID-19 in Europe, with the aim to map these initiatives, their scopes and methods. Drawing on the map of museum digital initiatives during the pandemic previously developed by the PI (https://digitalmuseums.at), a first group of relevant initiatives was identified. New projects were then added to the dataset, which now comprises little more than 100 collecting initiatives. This list of initiatives aiming to document the pandemic was further enriched with information collected via a questionnaire, which aimed at collecting information on the focus of each collection, the collection, acquisition, cataloguing, curating, and display processes, and the overall experience and attitude to contemporary collecting and digital curation of the cultural heritage organisations who led these projects. The survey was conducted in spring 2021 and the answers were – at times – complemented by online interviews.
Online events and workshops
The project also organised a series of online events with practitioners and researchers from the fields of archives, museums, heritage studies, digital humanities, and web archiving. The first two events, held in summer 2021, included formal presentations on specific projects (University of Cambridge Libraries, Wien Museum, London Transport Museum, House of Austrian History, Aalborg City Archive) followed by a roundtable discussion. Instead the last two events, in autumn 2021, were workshops aimed at discussing participants’ experiences and the key trends emerging from the project. Overall these events were attended by about 80 participants. Further workshops took place in Graz (Austria) and involved local museums, the GrazMuseum and the Universalmuseum Joanneum Volkskundemuseum, two organisations that have both been active in documenting the pandemic in Graz and its region. These events enabled more face-to-face discussions with the museums’ staff and more in-depth insight into their collecting projects. The results of all these events have informed the project recommendations, which will be published on its portal by the end of 2021.
Digital project
Finally, an online portal will present the results of the research as well as more serendipitous explorations of possible approaches to the digital curation of COVID-19 memories. This digital project has focused on two main objectives: presenting European collections of memories of the pandemic and presenting good practices and solutions for dealing with the challenges these same collections raise. The data collected in the survey and questionnaires, as well as the results of the events, are therefore presented here. First, the list of projects is available for consultation; secondly, the portal presents and discusses methods adopted for the collection, cataloguing, preservation, and display of memories and witnesses of the pandemic (previous permission of the relevant organisation/professional).
This portal, hosting the data and a ‘white paper’ covering the key findings of the project, will be launched at the end of 2022 and will be available as part of GAMS, the OAIS compliant asset management system for the management, publication and long-term archiving of digital resources from the Humanities developed at the Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz.
* DARIAH Theme is an annual thematic priority set by the Board of Directors of DARIAH-EU. The aim is to stimulate activities and events related to an important topic of research in the digitally enabled arts and humanities by issuing a call for funding.
