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Aleksandra K. KASATKINA. MUSEUM BIOGRAPHY OF A SET OF GENITAL PIERCING TOOLS FROM THE COLLECTION MAE № 2286. A TEXTUAL (AND TEST) MODEL OF A DIGITAL PUBLICATION

Aleksandra K. KASATKINA — Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, St. Petersburg)
E-mail: Kasatkina@kunstkamera.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The paper continues a series of preliminary notes for the digital catalogue of collections brought by German ethnologist Albert Grubauer in 1911 from ex British North Borneo (now state Sabah, Malaysia) and sold to the MAE in 1914. The author completes the work started by her predecessors in the museum on identification of two objects misrecognized when the collection was registered. Reconstructing museum biographies of the two tools for genital piercing, the author creates a textual model of digital publication in hope to show that a properly organized digital infrastructure is able to facilitate not just museum records and exhibi- tions, but also research on museum collections. This experimental text is a collection of digital data objects: images of artifacts, fragments of documents and publications and their transcripts, commentaries of the researcher. The textual format makes the author put the objects in a certain rigid line, giving her at the same time possibility of metacommentary for her actions. An obvious limitation of digital publication of a museum collection is impossibility to digitize tactile qualities of an object which are so important for museum heuristics. Still, possibility to juxtapose images and excerpts from documents at the one surface of a digital page may significantly lower chances for identification failures and prompt to productive comparisons. With such a tool at hand, curator of a digitalized museum collection inevitably becomes also researcher.

 

KEYWORDS: museum heuristics, digital science, database, digital catalogue, digital museum, MAE RAS, Grubauer, genital piercing, Borneo, body modifications

 

УДК 069.5:39(595)
DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2019-1(3)-139-160

 

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