After reading Kirschenbaum’s article in A Companion to Digital Humanities, my eye was caught by another article about Art History. This section of Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth’s larger text discusses the progression of art history’s visual records from a material based to technology based repository. This struck a chord with me because art history seems to be one of the fields that particularly resists being digitized, some of this resistance coming in part from the difficulty of transitioning all the physical resources into digital ones that can be remotely accessed.
In keeping with the interface design aspect of this week’s readings, I will present some of the art history and museum related databases and websites that I interact with – namely The Museum System and the Getty’s Union List of Artist Names. The Museum System (TMS for short) is a database used to store records of artwork and artist information held within a museum’s collection. The edition of the software that I use is not as new looking as the most recently available versions and has a Windows ’98 sort of feel to it.
With regards to functionality, the outdatedness of its appearance does almost nothing; everything still operates as needed, but in this age of flat neon colors, as with the most recent iPhone and Android updates, it is a little startling to revert back to beige and blue color schemes. Even though it is not as aesthetically pleasing as other interfaces, it still loosely follows Schneiderman’s Eight Golden rules of Interface Design. TMS could be made less cumbersome (and it perhaps has been in more recent editions) but its interface quirks are within reason, especially when taking into account the amount of information that it processes. Museums use TMS to keep extremely detailed records of their entire permanent collection, and every loaned work that has passed through the museum so there is an enormous amount of information stored in the database.
Another art history related digital repository of information is the Getty’s Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) which is related to the Getty Arts and Architecture Thesaurus that we have learned about for controlled vocabularies. The website also follows the golden rules of interface design and has a more modern appearance to its interface in comparison with that of TMS. The two products offer very different services within art historical and museum studies contexts so I will leave the comparisons here, but I find it interesting to look at which sites and softwares follow trends in their surface design and if usability is always prioritized over aesthetics for these kinds of websites and programs. From what I’ve seen, base functionality (in the sense of presenting information, not necessarily the ease of finding this information) wins over sensory elements of the interface.