Developing Online Exhibitions and Metadata for History of Science Collections across India and the UK
One of the early questions Ganesh, from the India team, asked as we began working on the digitisation of Mr Basavaraj’s collection was about metadata.
This was unsurprising. Ganesh has a background in research engineering and, throughout the project, one of his critical contributions has been to keep bringing us back to questions of accuracy, transferability and use. Ganesh’s question was pertinent. The information that accompanied the object (whether located in India or the UK) would need to make sense for the database in which it was stored, the collection it belonged to, the countries it had been catalogued and critically people around the world who would use it.
The metadata we were developing had to do several things at once.
enrich the catalogue
allow the collections in India and the UK to be in conversation with each other
support the stories we wanted to tell on the digital exhibition
make visible what is often invisible in standard catalogue records
In the online workshops before Shankar, Naaja and I travelled to India, we returned to this question repeatedly. Colleagues in India were developing an atlas of mathematical practices as well as a historical archive. In the UK, one of our concerns was how the 3D exhibition would be developed, particularly because Cabinet, the platform we had originally hoped to use, was going out of commission. Cabinet had been a sophisticated interface for object-led research and teaching at Oxford, so replacing it was not simply a technical problem. It was a methodological one.
Dr Kathryn Eccles, Oxford-based Co-I on the project, led the work of finding a solution that could be useful not only for this project but potentially for other museums too. We were still able to use the existing software for photography and creating 3D images, and Shankar was trained in photogrammetry. Later, he would discover that photogrammetry is not straightforward with very shiny objects, especially those with highly reflective surfaces — but that is another blog post. The India digitisation team were also trained, and Sarah Halliday, who developed our project website, advised us on using Kunstmatrix for the exhibition.
But once we had images, another question followed: what metadata standards should sit behind them?
We looked at existing museum standards such as SPECTRUM, and at wider digital metadata approaches such as Dublin Core and CIDOC CRM. What we were learning through our project encouraged us to push the metadata further. As well as the technical aspects of the measuring objects, we wanted to capture their social history. Our joint workshops were full of the histories of trade, taxation, land, grain, labour, trust, deception, inspection, colonial governance and everyday negotiation. The fields we were developing needed to reflect this.
As well as the more usual object name, materials, size and place, we wanted the fields to encompass richer contextual information about associated communities, commodities, regional variations and more. There was also the all-important question of the languages that the fields should be able to accommodate. In my practice, I am interested in the points at which databases ‘break’, it is exactly these points of rupture that we learn what it is that the database is not able to fully capture. It is not sufficient, for example, to say that a grain-measuring cup is significant only because it tells us about a market interaction between trader and customer. It may also be implicated in colonial governance, particularly where a specific unit of weight or capacity was imposed, legislated and required for use. A more recent analogy might be the UK’s shift from imperial measures such as pounds and ounces to metric measures such as kilograms and grams. Such changes also have implications beyond the marketplace, including for household economies, where people have to adapt everyday practices of buying, cooking, storing and budgeting.
A chain used to measure land contains histories that intersect local land knowledge, surveying and associated taxes. A container used to measure rice is connected to questions of agriculture, the quality of the rice, how it is distributed and whether or not there is too much, too little or enough.
The precision involved in the instruments themselves raised another set of questions. Take a metre ruler for example. If it is divided into centimetres or even millimetres, its overall length doesn’t change but it has a finer least count (or the smallest division that it can measure – it is more precise). This is important to note when it comes to capturing technological change and the sorts of factors that instruments that become more precise can change.
A metre ruler marked only in centimetres can tell us that a piece of wood, cloth or metal is approximately 27 cm long. A metre ruler marked in millimetres allows the same object to be recorded as 27.4 cm or 274 mm. The ruler has not become longer, but it has become capable of supporting more precise work. This matters because finer graduations can change what the instrument is useful for: from rough measuring in a market or household context to technical drawing, carpentry, engineering, tailoring, schooling or scientific instruction. In this sense, the least count is not just a technical detail. It can help us trace changing expectations about skill, standardisation and the kinds of work that required finer measurement.
These are just a few of the reasons that our work on metadata was a key strand of the project and how it enabled us to ask better historical questions. What were we claiming that objects measured? What histories did they capture? What were the roles of trust, enforcement, resistance and the ways in which everyday lives were both subject to and absent from colonial regulation? And what becomes visible when instruments from India and the UK are described in ways that allow their technical, social and political lives to be seen together?