September 24, 2013 at 12:30pm ET
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor
Curarium is a collection of collections, an “animated archive,” designed to serve as a model for crowdsourcing annotation, curation, and augmentation of works within and beyond their respective collections. A web-based platform, Curarium aims to construct sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as groups of items within a corpora.
The first project to be ingested into Curarium is Villa I Tatti’s Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance collection, a unique archive of photographs of “homeless” paintings assembled by art historian Bernard Berenson. Taking the collection and its metadata out of VIA and putting it into Curarium will allow engagement with a wider audience, which will then identify, classify, describe and analyze the objects in the collection, as well as reconstruct the stories of objects that have either disappeared or been destroyed.
About Jeffrey
Jeffrey Schnapp is the Faculty Director of metaLAB, and a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and in the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He is the author twenty-five books and several hundred essays, and in addition to playing a leadership role in the area of digital humanities since the early 1980s, he has pursued curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His Trento Tunnels project — a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum– was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE.
About Matthew
Matthew Battles is the Associate Director of metaLAB and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The author of Library: an Unquiet History and Widener: Biography of a Library, he has written widely on the cultural and intellectual history of collections. He managed the publication program at Harvard’s Houghton Library, designing scholarly publications and exhibition catalogs and helping to design and stage exhibitions; he also served as senior scholarly editor for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
About Pablo
Pablo Barría Urenda holds a degree in Architecture by the Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaíso, Chile, and a Masters in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is interested in the intersection between design and digital media, and has worked with metaLAB as an interface designer in a number of projects including Teaching with Things and Homeless Paintings.
