Abstract
The Haitian Art Digital Crossroads (HADC) is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant project by Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA). Working with the WCA and other collaborating public institutions to assist in the digitizing and cataloging of their Haitian arts collection, the HADC approaches digital humanities by rethinking standards within art history, library science, cultural studies, and museum studies, with close attention to the peculiarities of Haitian art traditions and practices. The traditional methods of acquiring and displaying information related to visual arts are reduced to collecting the least amount of data to standardize the meta. In most cases, the information provided on Haitian art is incomplete. Depending on the history of acquisition, ‘unknown’ is designated for many data fields. To comprehend Haitian visual art is to go beyond the information provided in provenance or the traditional library or museum methods of accessing, displaying, and archiving. HADC reformulated the three key focus areas to collect, record, and reintroduce Haitian visual art by utilizing Haitian cultural and Vodou principles. The paper addresses how Dr. Petrouchka Moise, the HADC Co-Lead, worked together with museums in developing and creating a series of foundational guidelines to establish best-practice models and ethical standards, using Haitian concepts of collective works to design the “Digital Lakou,” a crowdsourcing sandbox, for stakeholders to develop in order to create a Haitian Kreyol Thesaurus for the project’s glossary and develop interdisciplinary and intergenerational exchanges.
Presenters
Petrouchka MoiseAsst.Professor / Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator, Library, Grinnell College, Iowa, United States Mark Christel
Associate Professor, Department Chair of Grinnell Libraries, Grinnell College, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Intersectionality: Museums, Inclusion, and SDGs
KEYWORDS
Museum, Exhibition, Custodianship, Heritage, Authenticity, Arts, Culture, Digitization, Cataloging
