Creating order from chaos : A classificatory approach to retrieval in a local history photographic archive
- Submitting institution
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The University of Huddersfield
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 16
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1386/jwcp.7.3.427_1
- Title of journal
- Journal of Writing in Creative Practice
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 427
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 1753-5190
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The discussion in this article centres on a historic, innovative case study, which was the first ever Heritage Lottery funded digital image project(established in1997)in the United Kingdom, for which the author was Project Officer. The article forms part of a the med journal issue on rewriting the archive in the context of creative practice, along side other contributions from artists and designers. With a collective remit of exploring “thinking through writing, ”the article provides the first reflective and critical appraisal of this significant project, in the context of the challenges and opportunities afforded by new technological advances emerging in the 1990sand the promise of unprecedented access through digitisation. Underpined by theories of image analysis, classification and retrieval, the article explores the case study through different timeframes. It revisits the 1990s to understand the present, shaping and contributing future insights, including faceted search and search by gesture. The digitisation project methods for this substantial archive are detailed, with the challenge of making scenes from250,000 Victorian and Edwardian glass plate negatives (previously the sole preserve of curators)publicly accessible by scanning and subject indexing. The task of providing such new metadata for digital image surrogates is analysed in terms of what would best meet end-user needs in a touch screen public access system, detailing how and why the development of a novel hierarchical classification scheme was warranted to allow productive browsing of these historic collections of everyday life. Prior to this, subject access (if any) was via curator-only catalogues, with no mechanism for the general public to easily access these historic archives by and for themselves. Despite notable technological changes since the project’s inception, the article demonstrates that classification has remained a constant –a fundamental tool for archival organisation and retrieval, affording multidimensional access to digital image archives.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -