From the report:
It is these interests and concerns that underpin “Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship“, a collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab, the British Library, and Yale University Library. This 12-month project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council aims to open up new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Our pilot research will investigate the temporal and spatial legacy of a catalogue I know well – the landmark ‘Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum’, produced by Mary Dorothy George between 1930 and 1954, 1.1 million words of text to which all scholars of the long-eighteenth century printed image are indebted, and which forms the basis of many catalogue entries at other institutions, not least those of our partners at the Lewis Walpole Library. We are particularly interested in tracing the temporal and spatial legacies of this catalogue, and plan to repurpose corpus linguistic methods developed in our “Curatorial Voice” project (generously funded by the British Academy) to examine the enduring legacies of Dorothy George’s “voice” beyond her printed volumes.