My master's dissertation – about how sketchbooks are collected and accessed in UK institutions – is now published online, and free to download, read, share and use.
Showing posts with label #citylis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #citylis. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 December 2017
Digital and tangible: sketchbook research now online
My master's dissertation – about how sketchbooks are collected and accessed in UK institutions – is now published online, and free to download, read, share and use.
Wednesday, 12 July 2017
Sketchbooks in the archives
My dissertation, which explores how sketchbooks are collected and accessed, is, perhaps, at the midpoint – I have discovered much already and yet the real findings are still to come. But I have known for a long time how a sketchbook can be a revealing insight into the world of its creator.
Until now, though, this knowledge has come through being allowed to hold and look through the books of my peers, usually other friends who are artists. What is in a sketchbook can be intensely personal (the private/public element of them is an interesting area) and so we only get to see what its creator is prepared to reveal. And there is always the hint that what may be most enlightening is what isn't being shared.
But when the artist dies and the books find their way into an archive, what then? In the past few weeks I have been visiting institutions to see sketchbooks in their final home. From being the object left in dirty corners of the studio and stuffed into rucksacks for journeys around the globe, here they are, wrapped, supported and cared for, and viewed with lashings of hindsight.
The entry to the Prints and Drawings study room at the British Museum, the home of the nation's drawing collection, is hidden behind a big Michelangelo in Room 90. I have been reading Richard Knott's The Sketchbook War: Saving the Nation's Artists in World War II (The History Press, 2013), which tells the story of nine war artists, including the illustrator Edward Ardizzone. A sketchbook of his from the post-war years is in the museum's collection. Its pages, instead of containing drawings of bomb sites and Blitz scenes, includes pages of sunbathers from Ardizzone's more peaceful travels to the sun in south of France in the 1950s.
In this environment, the books are tangible – they can be held, and the pages turned – but they are fragile, worn in places, and there are signs of restoration in places. They have passed into another state from the time when they were live and incomplete and still in the hands of the artist. While Ardizzone's book contains little written content, another, by the British painter Roger Hilton, has. It starts in January 1946 with diary entries and new year resolutions alongside the drawings, and so the personal comes even more alive. In later years, when he was bedridden and alcoholic, the notes and drawings he left for his wife, the painter Rose Hilton, were published (Night Letters, Newlyn Orion Galleries, 1980) and make a sometimes painful read. The 1946 sketchbook is equally opinionated and direct, yet more sober, mercifully. And his drawings in biro reveal an informal attitude to capturing ideas.
Neither of the artists who filled these books appear to have had posterity in mind at the time of their making. Another visit, to the British Film Institute's archive, to see the filmmaker Derek Jarman's sketchbooks suggest that he recognised that he was making beautiful objects that would be of interest long after what turned into his much-too-early death. The books of notes, plans, sketches, collages and photographs are mainly the same brand and 30x30cm format so that they sit and look well together, and follow themes that relate to the projects he was working at any one time. (A surprising number of artists simply grab the sketchbook with blank pages that is nearest to them to draw in, so that eventually they may contain drawings that span decades.) Jarman's books were no doubt central to his work – he had them with him as filming proceeded – but he appears to have made them as beautiful objects that would be appreciated long after he had gone, and that isn't always the case with sketchbook users.
Meanwhile my survey, sent to UK institutions that hold sketchbooks to find out more about the way they are collected and accessed, is getting responses. It's hard to describe the satisfaction of getting each new completed questionnaire. Thanks to everyone who has responded to it.
Until now, though, this knowledge has come through being allowed to hold and look through the books of my peers, usually other friends who are artists. What is in a sketchbook can be intensely personal (the private/public element of them is an interesting area) and so we only get to see what its creator is prepared to reveal. And there is always the hint that what may be most enlightening is what isn't being shared.
But when the artist dies and the books find their way into an archive, what then? In the past few weeks I have been visiting institutions to see sketchbooks in their final home. From being the object left in dirty corners of the studio and stuffed into rucksacks for journeys around the globe, here they are, wrapped, supported and cared for, and viewed with lashings of hindsight.
The entry to the Prints and Drawings study room at the British Museum, the home of the nation's drawing collection, is hidden behind a big Michelangelo in Room 90. I have been reading Richard Knott's The Sketchbook War: Saving the Nation's Artists in World War II (The History Press, 2013), which tells the story of nine war artists, including the illustrator Edward Ardizzone. A sketchbook of his from the post-war years is in the museum's collection. Its pages, instead of containing drawings of bomb sites and Blitz scenes, includes pages of sunbathers from Ardizzone's more peaceful travels to the sun in south of France in the 1950s.
In this environment, the books are tangible – they can be held, and the pages turned – but they are fragile, worn in places, and there are signs of restoration in places. They have passed into another state from the time when they were live and incomplete and still in the hands of the artist. While Ardizzone's book contains little written content, another, by the British painter Roger Hilton, has. It starts in January 1946 with diary entries and new year resolutions alongside the drawings, and so the personal comes even more alive. In later years, when he was bedridden and alcoholic, the notes and drawings he left for his wife, the painter Rose Hilton, were published (Night Letters, Newlyn Orion Galleries, 1980) and make a sometimes painful read. The 1946 sketchbook is equally opinionated and direct, yet more sober, mercifully. And his drawings in biro reveal an informal attitude to capturing ideas.
Neither of the artists who filled these books appear to have had posterity in mind at the time of their making. Another visit, to the British Film Institute's archive, to see the filmmaker Derek Jarman's sketchbooks suggest that he recognised that he was making beautiful objects that would be of interest long after what turned into his much-too-early death. The books of notes, plans, sketches, collages and photographs are mainly the same brand and 30x30cm format so that they sit and look well together, and follow themes that relate to the projects he was working at any one time. (A surprising number of artists simply grab the sketchbook with blank pages that is nearest to them to draw in, so that eventually they may contain drawings that span decades.) Jarman's books were no doubt central to his work – he had them with him as filming proceeded – but he appears to have made them as beautiful objects that would be appreciated long after he had gone, and that isn't always the case with sketchbook users.
Meanwhile my survey, sent to UK institutions that hold sketchbooks to find out more about the way they are collected and accessed, is getting responses. It's hard to describe the satisfaction of getting each new completed questionnaire. Thanks to everyone who has responded to it.
Friday, 19 May 2017
Sketchbook research begins
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| Inside the British Library: pencils only in the reading rooms |
Term 2 has ended, and the second set of assignments has been handed in, graded and (nearly all) returned. Things are going well. Attention turns to the dissertation, which first calls for a 2,000-3,000 word proposal. I mentioned in my last post about a moment of realisation I experienced midway through the Radical Collections conference in March. Hearing Siobhan Britton (University of Brighton) talking about her research into zine collections made me think about the idea of a dissertation on a document type that means a lot to me: the sketchbook.
Sketchbooks have been a constant for me since I was at art school. I've sold drawings and paintings over time, but all the sketchbooks are still with me now, because that is the usual story of sketchbooks: they aren't for sale and are still in the corner of the studio when the artist drops dead. The sketchbooks often end up in an archive as a group, bequeathed, or perhaps donated by the artist's family. What happens then? How are they collected, found and accessed? They fall somewhere between book and work of art, demanding to have their pages tangibly turned. How easy is it, or is it even possible, to actually hold them in your hands at different archives? How often are they accessible digitally?
So research is now underway. Lyn, my supervisor, has read and OKed the proposal. There isn't much previous research into this aspect of sketchbooks and I'm not sure where it will take me. Tomorrow I'm heading to meet other artists who use sketchbooks at the Rabley Drawing Centre in Wiltshire, where I have had a couple of books selected for the Sketch 2017 group exhibition.
If you have experience of accessing sketchbooks in galleries, libraries, archives or museums, either physically or digitally, I'd be very happy for you to get in touch. Or follow me @jameshobbsart.
Saturday, 3 December 2016
Attention, not quality
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| A Wordle word cloud from the article below |
Altmetrics picks up on the impact of scholarly communication through social media and blogs long before citation counts take effect, perhaps years later. Altmetrics is, perhaps, like the thermometer in the mouth of research, picking up on just how hot (or not) open-source published material is. But altmetrics is an indication of attention, not quality, as I seem to have written in my notes more than once. Attention, not quality.
With the rise of digital come opportunities to analyse and explore, to corral datasets into useful ways of finding insights and unearthing what has been overlooked or unrecognised. Coding with Python is an area for me yet to explore fully. Word clouds, while simple and engaging to experiment with, do not analyse text in a way that is particularly revealing. (The one above has been created from this blog post, and reflects the way that I keep repeating the words attention, not quality.) Digital humanities, although typically unwilling to be precisely defined, is an interesting arena where digital media and scholarly research meet.
And should we be afraid of AI? Am I a Singularatarian or AItheist? It is hard to come to a categorical decision with Floridi's argument without oversimplifying the argument. Much of AI seems to me to be promising and romanticised, or as prosaic as Amazon's recommendations and fraud detection. Useful and largely unrecognised by most of perhaps, but yet to really find its greatest moments.
Saturday, 12 November 2016
The hunt for data
Our most recent sessions in the always intriguing Digital Information and Technologies (DITA) module have continued our study of how the outpouring of digital information in our society today is stored, described, structured, managed and shared. What is usually the natural, unthinking act of hunting for that simple something online – presidential election coverage, latest cricket scores, the location of that particular book – has been taken apart piece by piece.
Our look under the bonnet of information retrieval is taking us places one step (or more) back from what the average user in the modern digital environment would confront. Even this simple blog post, as I write it now, has a different interface from the one in which you are reading it. I can add the metadata through labels (listed below), see the coding around italicised fonts, and add details about location. In DITA we have looked at the ways data can be organised and made accessible online, and the rise of linked data and the semantic web through RDF, the resource description framework.
It is, it must be said, a world of many initialisms. The data file formats CSV (comma separated value) and TSV (tab separated value), DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a vocabulary of terms used to describe web resources making them easier to find), URIs (unique resource identifiers, which identify the name of a web resource), SQL (Structured Query Language, the standard language for relational database management systems), and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which hide the complexities of a system so that third parties can build on and develop applications). QEI: quite enough initialisms.
In the circular way that this course often throws up (the problems of getting information about getting information, to put it crudely), the session Searching for the Data was of immediate practical interest. Instead of the default course of action of resorting immediately to a simple Google search, it armed us with more focused and nuanced ways of revealing the data that we are looking for, and even what we didn't know we were looking for. With December approaching and four assessments to be completed by early in the new year, these are practical information retrieval skills that will be tried and tested in the weeks to come as we hunt for the books and journal articles that will help us on our way.
Our look under the bonnet of information retrieval is taking us places one step (or more) back from what the average user in the modern digital environment would confront. Even this simple blog post, as I write it now, has a different interface from the one in which you are reading it. I can add the metadata through labels (listed below), see the coding around italicised fonts, and add details about location. In DITA we have looked at the ways data can be organised and made accessible online, and the rise of linked data and the semantic web through RDF, the resource description framework.
It is, it must be said, a world of many initialisms. The data file formats CSV (comma separated value) and TSV (tab separated value), DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a vocabulary of terms used to describe web resources making them easier to find), URIs (unique resource identifiers, which identify the name of a web resource), SQL (Structured Query Language, the standard language for relational database management systems), and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which hide the complexities of a system so that third parties can build on and develop applications). QEI: quite enough initialisms.
In the circular way that this course often throws up (the problems of getting information about getting information, to put it crudely), the session Searching for the Data was of immediate practical interest. Instead of the default course of action of resorting immediately to a simple Google search, it armed us with more focused and nuanced ways of revealing the data that we are looking for, and even what we didn't know we were looking for. With December approaching and four assessments to be completed by early in the new year, these are practical information retrieval skills that will be tried and tested in the weeks to come as we hunt for the books and journal articles that will help us on our way.
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