TY - JOUR
T1 - Depicting historical persons and identities
T2 - A faceted approach
AU - Dobreski, Brian
AU - Qin, Jian
AU - Resnick, Melissa
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 International Society for Knowledge Organization. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Archives are responsible for presenting historical materials to users while also placing them in context. Historical individuals and their identities pose specific challenges for the archive, including how to negotiate changing cultural perspectives on identity and how to convey and explain contexts to modern audiences. Contemporary subject representation practices in cultural heritage tend to offer a reductivist view of personal identity. Using a collection of visual images of nineteenth and twentieth century sideshow performers, the present work explored a faceted approach to representing personal identity in order to: 1) offer a more holistic view of historical individuals, their identities, and relationships; and 2) help place historical terms and perspectives into context in order to better support user understanding. Utilizing an inductive approach, the researchers developed a framework of seven facets of personal identity. A textual keyword analysis of existing title metadata for images in the collection was implemented in order to identify distinct individuals depicted and any facets associated with them. Finally, collection-based language and closest matches from several controlled vocabularies were used to assign values to the facets for all individuals. The resulting metadata offers a flexible, richer, more holistic analysis of personal identity for these materials, while also exposing some deeper issues concerning identity, performance, and visual imagery. Opportunities exist for further automation and application of this faceted system to other historical collections.
AB - Archives are responsible for presenting historical materials to users while also placing them in context. Historical individuals and their identities pose specific challenges for the archive, including how to negotiate changing cultural perspectives on identity and how to convey and explain contexts to modern audiences. Contemporary subject representation practices in cultural heritage tend to offer a reductivist view of personal identity. Using a collection of visual images of nineteenth and twentieth century sideshow performers, the present work explored a faceted approach to representing personal identity in order to: 1) offer a more holistic view of historical individuals, their identities, and relationships; and 2) help place historical terms and perspectives into context in order to better support user understanding. Utilizing an inductive approach, the researchers developed a framework of seven facets of personal identity. A textual keyword analysis of existing title metadata for images in the collection was implemented in order to identify distinct individuals depicted and any facets associated with them. Finally, collection-based language and closest matches from several controlled vocabularies were used to assign values to the facets for all individuals. The resulting metadata offers a flexible, richer, more holistic analysis of personal identity for these materials, while also exposing some deeper issues concerning identity, performance, and visual imagery. Opportunities exist for further automation and application of this faceted system to other historical collections.
KW - Facet analysis
KW - Facets
KW - Keywords
KW - Persons
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U2 - 10.5771/0943-7444-2020-8-668
DO - 10.5771/0943-7444-2020-8-668
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102504629
SN - 0943-7444
VL - 47
SP - 668
EP - 679
JO - Knowledge Organization
JF - Knowledge Organization
IS - 8
ER -