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Specific Wikipedia article where collaboration is desired
I mentioned this to Liam a few days ago and he suggested I post about it here, as an example of a specific situtation where Wikipedia and museums can have a mutually beneficial collaboration. One hobbyhorse of mine is a Wikipedia article I created, "List of works by Thomas Eakins" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Thom...). Thomas Eakins is a well-known American artist. While there have been several catalogs of his works published, these were incomplete and/or unillustrated. My goal in creating that article was to create a complete, illustrated online catalog.
Wikipedia would obviously benefit from having a complete listing of Eakins's works. And museums would benefit too, I think. If a museum owns an Eakins painting, but nobody knows they do, then what good does it do for them? After nearly a year of searching, there are dozens and dozens of Eakins paintings I cannot locate. Some of these are in private collections, but I'm sure many others are in museums that don't go a good job of publicizing this fact. And more basically, what's the point of having a Thomas Eakins painting in your collection if nobody knows who he was or why he was important?
With that in mind, I'd like to list some of the issues I have encountered in creating that article. I'm not looking to fix blame, but to lay out specific things that could be remedied from cooperation with experts in the museum world:
(1) Paintings that are hard to find - I admit that I'm not an art expert. (Far from it, I'm hobbyist, at best). So there may be resources out there that I'm not aware of. But as far as I can tell (after asking an expert or two) there is no comprehensive database anywhere on the web where I can go, and enter a painting, to find out where it is/who owns it. As an outsider looking in, this seems strange to me. On the internet, there are comprehensive databases of movies, music, television shows, broadway plays, etc. Why isn't there something similiar for the art community?
(2) Paintings that are "hidden" - some (many? most?) museums do not have a complete listing of their works available online, in effect hiding the ones that aren't listed. Case and point - Thomas Eakins's "Grouse" (Goodrich #248). After searching, I found out that this is owned by the Mint Museum of Art, according to 'Thomas Eakins' by Darrell Sewell, 2001, page 248. But if you go to the American art section of their website (http://www.mintmuseum.org/american-art.html), there's no indication that they own it. So if you are searching for an obscure painting, you're out of luck unless you're prepared to thumb through thousands of pages of literature (assuming that even exists for what you're searching for)
(3) Nonexistant or poor-quality reproductions - I know museums are touchy about this subject, but one constant source of difficulty with creating "List of works by Thomas Eakins" has been the dearth of quality online reproductions of Eakins's work. High quality images of Eakins's better-known works are common, but once you go off the beaten path to look for more obscure works, you're out of luck. Many of the pictures for those obscure works I got by scanning black-and-white reproductions printed in decades-old books or papers; a few were available online using Zoomify or similiar technologies, which are designed to prevent re-using images from a museum's website; for some of those paintings I had to visit the museum in person to photograph because no reproductions exist anywhere (for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alfred_Reynolds_... ). And some paintings simply have no illustration at all, because no reproductions exist and the owner does not allow photography.
As I said above, this is a touchy subject, so in most cases I didn't say that I was working for Wikipedia. But in those few cases where I did broach the subject, and said that I was working on an online catalogue raisonne, the conversation inevitably went nowhere. Partly that could be my fault -- I didn't know whose job it is to make these decisions (to make high quality scans available to Wikipedia), so in those cases I was probably talking to the wrong person.
(4) Museum staff who are unfamiliar with the museum's collections - twice in the last year, I have visited museums for the express purpose of photographing Eakins works, only to be incorrectly told by musuem staffers that the museum owns no such work. (In both cases, the museums's own websites said otherwise). I didn't argue the point, even though I knew I was right. I'm not sure what the best thing to do when this happens is. Perhaps I should phone ahead beforehand?
(5) A lack of subject expertise - as I've already said, I'm not an art expert. But on several occasions I have gotten help from people who are experts on Thomas Eakins and their help has been extremely valuable. Just to give one specific example: I was trying to track down several unnamed Eakins works mentioned as missing by Henry Adam's "Eakins Revealed". Kathleen Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art gave me the contact information for Henry Adams, who in turn pointed me towards his source - the Phd dissertation of Elizabeth Milroy. This kind of cooperation from experts is absolutely essential in building an article like this.
Again, I want to re-iterate that I'm not looking to fix blame. I think this is an area that Wikipedia and museums can work together, and I'd like to find ways to do it.
Lastly, I'd like to thank the good people at the Archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Nan Goff and Kathleen Foster in particular), who were very generous with their time in helping me access Lloyd Goodrich's notes.
As the director of a museum with an Eakins portrait which IS in the table created by MPellegrini, I'm struck by the hope that a table of works marks a reasonable point of departure for an article on a very complicated and prodigious artist. The forum in which we have chosen to highlight a portrait by the artist in the IMA's collection is here:
http://www.imamuseum.org/art/collections/artwork/pianist-stanley-addicks-eakins-thomas
While the reference in the Wikipedia table is here:
The Pianist (Stanley Addicks)
278
Oil on canvas
Circa 1895
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana[61]
The provision of a table with five fields of data is a beginning--but what museums think is important to furnish may not line up with what is sought in creating a list. We often seek to situate a work within the career of the artist, and to do that, a more forensic search of the date and circumstances of a particular work are likelier to bear fruit when tied to works of the assumed period of the work than against the entirety of the artist's oeuvre. From the intersecting circles of research on intersecting periods, media, and specific works, there can emerge a fuller picture of an artist's contributions--still leaving plenty of room for debate about authenticity, workshop v. autograph work, poor condition hiding true artistry that leads to an inaccurate attribution, etc.
As to why there is no single list of works of art, that is a good question--and the answer is tied to the fact that lifelong research on the career of a single artist has been the preferred mechanism for assembling a comprehensive catalog, rather than the roll-up-our-sleeves and compile a list approach. The blending of paintings and works on paper, for example, in a list, leads to an inchoate mass of data when it would be easier to make headway by segregating media.
All of which is to say that museum scholarship is untidy in the extreme, since it has relied on the chance expertise of individual curators making time to undertake collections research when not planning exhibitions, sorting through loan requests, researching and chasing acquisitions, cultivating patrons, and navigating the bureaucracies spun by directors, registrars, conservators, designers, installers, and photographers, to name a few.
I should emphasize that an entry in that table does not have to be the extent of the collaboration. Wikipedia has many articles on individual works of art, ranging from skimpy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestlers_%28painting%29
to "featured" articles which are considered the best on the site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swimming_Hole
To prove my point, I've gone ahead and created an article about your Eakins painting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_%28painti...
It's short, but it's a start (It was surprisingly hard to find a substantive mentions of the painting or Stanely Addicks personally in the Eakins literature.) Now if I may be so bold, I'm now going to throw the ball into your court -- let's find a way to make that article grow. I'll be happy to walk anyone through the process of editing and/or clean up after them if they're having problems.
Museums could contribute many examples to almost any article - washing machines from different manufacturers and periods, buttons from throughout history, hats of every sort from everywhere - a general question for Wikimedia then is whether such examples are desirable and if so whether their are special editorial guidelines that are recommended. Within these constraints museums could vastly extend the power of Wikipedia as an explanatory force.
David Bearman
"a general question for Wikimedia then is whether such examples are desirable" - Certainly. And if there's no good article on Wikipedia that "fits", then on Wikimedia Commons.
"and if so whether their are special editorial guidelines that are recommended." - I'm don't understand this question. We want all editors to follow the general rules of Wikipedia like neutrality, no original research, etc. These aren't particularly onerous requirements. What special editorial guidelines are you talking about?
Just a note that if anyone at the conference is representing a museum on that list (or better yet, you represent a museum with an Eakins painting that I haven't located or which isn't on that list), I'd love to have a chat with you.
Your compiling the locations of Eakins works is original research in the world I come from. And publishing examples of museum objects to an article about that sort of thing, whether specimens of plants or locomotives from our collections, to an appropriate article on the subject, is original research (see http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/original_res...) and in some people's minds it represents a conflict of interest as well and raises issues of notability (see http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/notability_c...). I hope these are the kinds of things we can sort through a bit at the workshop, since they are serious barriers to curators contributing content
David Bearman
"Your compiling the locations of Eakins works is original research in the world I come from." - it would be original reseach if I said that "I know painting X is in museum Y because I visited Y and saw X there." But that is not the case with my Eakins article - with few exceptions, I have not visited the museums listed there.
I know those paintings are in those museums because I found those paintings listed on the Museum's websites, or in published paper catalogs. It is not original research because the claim that those museums own those paintings did not originate with me. I can point to a credible source for each and every entry listed (Ideally, I should have have a citation for each entry in the table, and eventually I might do that. From a practical standpoint, I don't think anyone is going to get upset because it is obvious from looking at that article that I used lots of sources and wasn't making it up)
"And publishing examples of museum objects to an article about that sort of thing, whether specimens of plants or locomotives from our collections, to an appropriate article on the subject, is original research" - I'm not sure what you mean by 'publishing examples of museum objects.' Are you talking about providing pictures of curatorial objects? Or about writing about them? The former doesn't require citations and cannot be construed as original research; the latter does and can.