Category: data science

The overlooked creative practices of metadata tracking, annotation sharing, and boundary setting

art-history — 5 Oct 2026 — data science

Matthew J. Westerby opens his article “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” with the story of how downstream uses of the British Library’s IIIF images and manifests lost their own access when the Library was the subject of a cyberattack. This domino effect showed a “change in the relationship between institutions and users of online collections in which separate layers exist to serve images and also to present the digital surrogate of a real-world object like a book.”¹ Similar complex layers of delivery and downstream/upstream usage have been on the minds of video game scholars for a long time. There is always a layering between the game’s software and the hardware or the display, as well as between the game as code and the physical object that carries that code, such as a cartridge. Especially with online-all-the-time consoles, a game can be pulled or updated or changed at any time without user consent or warning. These delivery layers are perhaps more apparent to the average gamer than the average user of an IIIF image art surrogate because they have demonstrably affected how games are released and experienced. It is now common (though not acceptable) practice for a game to release in a broken state with day-one patches to download. Patching post-launch was a near impossibility before internet-connected gaming, so the uneven quality of games at release has been felt by all video gamers.

This is not the only place where Westerby’s suggestions and insights for art history run parallel to emerging practice in game studies. Annotating video games is one way game studies is looking to share knowledge weither via annotating games themselves, annotating screen captures of video games, or through examining existing annotation practices like wikis and let’s plays that are a part of the larger life of “networked hyperlinked videogames”.² For the practice part of this post, I used Panopto to experiment with annotating a brief screen capture of me playing The Blood of Dawnwalker. ³

Panopto was the assigned tool for class but I didn’t find it particially useful for the annotations I would like to make where it would be helpful to have them show up on specific parts of the screen during viewing.

One of the reasons wikis are such a robust source of information for video games is that they are such complex artworks that one person could never annotate a full game by themselves. It also adds to the robustness of scholarship when sharing is part of the process, not just the outcome. The Zelda object-focused digital humanities project⁴ that I mentioned in my post about Collection Builder was one project that used this style of sharing. My portion was about multiplicity and repetition of objects in the Zelda series, focusing on small keys, but I was doing it alongside Sydney Bauer whose object was a single American painting, Hannah Iovanna who was examining the still life paintings of a single artist, and Addie Magyar who worked with me on the Zelda portion and also acted as coordinator (Magyar was actually who noticed that small keys are the only constant in all the games). Being able to do those separate case studies with the same methodology while in communication during the process made the projects much richer and more enjoyable. Our discussions and brainstorming sessions brought up the question that I swear one day I will write about: why is there always a wheel of cheese with one little slice out in every video game? I sometimes wish I had picked the history of the wheel of cheese with one little slice out as my art history thesis: a study of why it is the most filling and delightful of foods across time and medium.

Annotating interoperable images is a mode of scholarly communication that is fundamentally different from the traditional sharing of only finished writing in journals and academic press books but no less a creative or scholarly act.⁵ When there’s a wider variety of acceptable ways to communicate information, writing a book or a journal article becomes a choice, not an obligation. The quality of all scholarly communication increases as forms increase because the output mode is not just one default option regardless of the needs of the argument or the data. This also allows for more modes of scholarship that cannot be studied or communicated as well via paper alone, like GIS mapping projects from my previous post. I was unfamiliar with the idea of thick data or data pollution⁶ as terms when I wrote the mapping post, but they are great terms for the concept I was exploring at the end of that post: messy data that balances the line between being so messy it’s no longer a useful tool but isn’t so clean that it carries unquestioned authority with data pollution also covering the source of data like AI or how data is used.

Westerby’s choice to end the article with how you can’t control other people’s usage of your images or metadata if you share them, and how the fear of misuse should be a known risk but not a reason to abandon openness was nuanced and powerful.⁷ There will always be people who take good things and warp them. Making decisions based around absolute prevention of misuse is an impossibility and an unnecessary burden. It is better to work from being risk-aware, with practices like the usage tags that Westerby suggests.⁸ It reminded me specifically of the Wretched & Alone SRD,⁹ a system written by Matt Sanders for making solo journaling games in the style of Chris Bisette’s game The Wretched.¹⁰ The Limitations section of the SRD includes “Finally, nazis, homophobes, transphobes, and other bigots are expressly forbidden from making new content using the Wretched and Alone system. If you have to ask whether this includes you, it does.”¹¹ Are parasites going to ignore the usage terms? Likely. Still, by making clear the usage and specifically taking a stance on who is forbidden to use the material, bigots cannot hide behind not knowing or accidental infringement. It makes the deliberate nature of the theft apparent.

Matthew J. Westerby, “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image,” Open Library of Humanities 10, no. 2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.17217.↩︎
Austin Anderson, “Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Videogame,” Electronic Book Review, ahead of print, September 28, 2025, https://doi.org/10.64773/1f7a-df6c.↩︎
“The Blood of Dawnwalker – A Dark Fantasy Narrative Sandbox RPG,” The Blood of Dawnwalker – A Dark Fantasy Narrative Sandbox RPG, accessed October 5, 2026, https://dawnwalkergame.com/us/en/home.↩︎
“Scaling Stories,” Scaling Stories, accessed October 5, 2026, https://sydbauer.wixsite.com/scaling-stories/interactive-feature.↩︎
Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎
Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎
Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎
Westerby, “Annotating Upstream.”↩︎
Matt Sanders, “Wretched & Alone System Reference Document V1.1,” SRD, with Chris Bissette, Sealed Library, 2020, https://sealedlibrary.itch.io/wretched-alone-srd.↩︎
“The Wretched by Chris Bissette,” Itch.io, accessed October 5, 2026, https://loottheroom.itch.io/wretched.↩︎
Sanders, “Wretched & Alone System Reference Document V1.1.”↩︎

The dangers of cartography: I made a map and now I have to plan a trip to get a Braxxie lantern

art-history — 5 Oct 2026 — data science

Behold the Cryptid Art map!

The inspiration for my Cryptid Art map was growing up hearing tales of the Mothman and the Braxton County Monster (also called the Flatwoods Monster or Braxxie to her friends). The Mothman has risen in fame in the last decade, and yet most people I talk to who know the Mothman is from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, only know that as a general factoid or from the video game Fallout 76. Most have no idea the Mothman has any connection to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse, which is a shame.

It may seem strange to connect a massive infrastructural disaster that ended in the deaths of 46 people and the creation of the National Bridge Inspection Standards to the celebration of a cryptid. But the lore of both is deeply intertwined. The Mothman was seen perched on the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, and so has taken on the status of an omen or, more charitably, the idea that he was “trying to warn us.” The tragedy was also caused by systemic infrastructure failure, a reason not to trust what the government tells you, a common theme in West Virginia stories. The danger of trusting the faceless people in power is echoed in the phrase that I heard most during the Mothman Festival hayrides and have a pin repeating: “Don’t fear the Mothman. Fear the Men in Black.” The Mothman behaved like an animal, and so could hurt someone, but never with malice. The Men in Black who came after from the government were the ones who threatened people. Admittedly, it’s a paranoid viewpoint. But given West Virginia’s history, from the Mine Wars to vote buying, and most recently the opioid crisis, I don’t think it’s a misplaced view.

I used Google My Maps¹ for the Cryptid Art map, but I also explored Knight Lab’s StoryMapJS.² I chose My Maps because it focuses it’s display on place, while StoryMapJS prioritizes content. Many of the artworks and related sites have very little information available, so a small description and image work well. For pins with more information available, it is nice to be able to focus on the most unusual or helpful source, like using the Braxxie lantern documentary for the Exxon station where they are sold. StoryMapJS is better for focusing on the object first and the location second, particularly in how it pulls up a large secondary window for the embedded material for each pin. When I was thinking of projects that might work with it, I was thinking of comparatively looking at falconry gloves within different archives and museum collections: where they were found, where they were made, where they were used, and where the material was sourced. This is also reflected in how StoryMapJS uses fixed icons that are tied to the type of material embedded and also the ability to control the order that pins are navigated through.

I think there is some baked-in skepticism of the accuracy and completeness of maps that maybe isn’t there for museum exhibitions, and that skepticism is valuable to engage with. Because we’ve probably all had a GPS app try to take us down a closed road or otherwise lead us astray, it’s all the more illuminating to notice how much maps can be used to both enforce and question authority. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel in her chapter for The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, uses the example of how nationalists (including the Nazis) use “artistic geovisualization” to claim spaces, heritages, and artworks as their own and to justify their crimes.³ Joyeux-Prunel continues by explaining how art history is returning to cartography via digital mapping because it allows new questions to emerge “that had been buried for a long time, either because they could be embarrassing (such as the place of origin of a style, too often understood as a ‘center of influence’), or the geopolitics of art, or because they could not be given satisfactory answers[.]”⁴

An excellent example of case studies that ask all three of those types of questions and investigate them with “Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods” is Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles’ “An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.”⁵ In my opinion, the case studies have the added benefit of dejustifying Nazi crimes by picking them apart and not allowing them to hide in historical assumption. Mapping the SS camp system and the architecture of the SS camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Knowles and Jaskot used different sources of information and visualization approaches. What they had in common was how GIS was able to shed new insight even in a field as highly studied as the SS camps and raise new questions because it was able to connect information to a spatial context.⁶

Building my own map, I was surprised by how difficult many of the decisions I needed to make were and how they immediately made me realize I was creating from a position of authority whether I wanted that or not. One of my earliest decisions was whether to pin the Silver Bridge Wall mural. The Mothman and Silver Bridge stories are connected, but they are not the same. Still, the Mothman stripped of the Silver Bridge is stripped of an important part of its history in Point Pleasant. So I included the mural, with a simple description focused on the purpose of the map: “The Mothman was seen on top of the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, leading some to believe he is an omen of doom or was trying to warn the town of the approaching tragedy.”

I plan to continue to work on my Cryptid Art map with the mission that there should be art of cryptids in their hometowns (as long as those communities want it). So in the future I plan to add cryptid origin points even where there isn’t art yet. I may also add local artists who make cryptid art. Lately, instead of worrying whether something fits a set of rules or parameters, I’ve been asking whether it’s kinder to include it than to leave it off. Being messier but kinder in action is perhaps how we keep tools with an inherent authority, like cartography, from having so much power to warp or control. The future of transparency in digital tools may be to strip back the veneer of clean data and UIs without losing the purpose of the tool, embracing messiness and a degree of friction so that questions naturally arise about where the information comes from and who decided its presentation.

“My Maps,” accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.google.com/maps/about/mymaps/.↩︎
“StoryMapJS,” StoryMapJS, accessed October 5, 2026, https://storymap.knightlab.com.↩︎
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. Kathryn Brown, Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2022), 88–89.↩︎
Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” 89.↩︎
“An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.getty.edu/news/dah_jaskot_knowles/.↩︎
“An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.”↩︎

Linking humans and data

art-history — 28 Sep 2026 — data science

Working on the Artist Book Critical Index (ABCI), I’ve already gotten to work with data I really enjoy: linked data, the semantic web, distributed knowledge graphs. I enjoy ontology and vocabulary creation and being part of building semantic frameworks that other organizations can then pick up and use.

Angela Dressen’s “Cultural Heritage Data for Research – An Introduction” covers semantic web work in the art history space with clear appreciation and understanding, but in the Linked Art section, it also presents the idea that with proper tools, you then don’t need data scientists in the museum space.¹ The idea that if the structure’s in place and it’s easy enough to use, museums don’t need data professionals in permanent positions is part of why digital humanities projects fall short or become obsolete. When data projects are approached as short-term, quick-burst projects, they die out quickly. Not because the data isn’t good anymore or the tools are bad, but because there is no one cranking the engine to improve the data and move the project forward. If there’s one thing I’ve learned working on the ABCI, it’s that there has to be human energy for all aspects of the project, including the data handling and project maintenance.

The ABCI started as a Zotero library made by the Sloane Art Library’s now-retired manager, Josh Hockensmith, who is a book artist. He was making an index of reference works connected to artists’ books: where they were cited and on what page an image could be found. Graduate students were then assigned to the project and started expanding beyond UNC’s own collection by adding WorldCat links. It is a really unique, robust data set that could only come from human beings.

One of the key points Broman and Woo make in “Data Organization in Spreadsheets” is that the raw data should live in a different place than where it is analyzed and manipulated.² This was one of the untidiest aspects of the original Zotero ABCI library. The workflow for photographing artist books was living in the same Zotero, and it was difficult to untangle verified entries from unverified ones, even when they were marked with workflow tags.

We also had to deal with missing data, the equivalent of what Broman and Woo talk about with leaving cells empty.³ The early ABCI entries had full metadata. But as the point became simply tracking citations between books and linking to the catalog entry at UNC or WorldCat.org, entries started having just author and title, with no standardization in capitalization, author name order, or which creators should be listed. And because the citation information had to live in Zotero’s notes field, which is a free-for-all of text, we had to figure out some constraints, along with using Claude Code, to pull the citation data out and attach it to the items it belonged to.

One of my favorite parts of the process has been creating ontologies and vocabularies. It’s modeling how the data should look in triple format, in our case Turtle, with an example, because often when you start doing an example is when you start saying, “Oh no, that data would be great to have, but we don’t have that,” or, “What do we call a construction method?” Luckily, I was able to piggyback off the work of the Book Arts Research Database⁴ and Opening Artists’ Books⁵ for reference.

Sometimes a tool becomes unexpectedly good at another job, in this case, metadata checking. One unexpected side effect of the ABCI has been pointing out where our catalog metadata was misentered or left out. More than once, the Sloane Art Librarian, Alice Whiteside, has asked me to use the tool to pull books with a particular construction method, only to find that a book is missing or mislabeled. If you are working with incorrect data to start with, you’re going to end up with incorrect data.

As for data I would like to work with in the near future, I’ve been fascinated lately by maps of crafters and craft spaces. Especially having read more of Brendan Keogh’s recent work about viewing video game developers as craftspeople, I’d like to make a network map of video game creators and the companies or specific games they’ve connected to. Art history already acknowledges that who an artist is taught by and where they have worked has a large influence on their oeuvre. This type of lineage study is not something I’ve encountered yet in game studies.

My first step for a network map of game artists/craftspeople would be to model one simple connection. I generally do not start in a spreadsheet but think with pen and paper about how the graph might flow and then start throwing it into Turtle triples. I would start with a relatively well-established indie or smaller-team game from a company where English is a primary language. From there, I would pick one creator in an art leadership role, like an art director or character designer, and work through their CV. Once I know what information I’m looking for, I’d break out the spreadsheet to gather everything about one person, translate it over, see how it works, and troubleshoot. Then I’d look to other sources of linked data I could link out to, like Wikidata. From there, whether or how to proceed to a larger scale would really depend on what the data revealed in the small model.

Dressen, A., (2025) “Cultural Heritage Data for Research – An Introduction”, Open Library of Humanities 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.18710 ↩︎
Broman, Karl W., and Kara H. Woo. 2018. “Data Organization in Spreadsheets.” The American Statistician 72 (1): 2–10. doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989.↩︎
Broman, Karl W., and Kara H. Woo. 2018. “Data Organization in Spreadsheets.” The American Statistician 72 (1): 2–10. doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989.↩︎
https://researchbookart.uicb.uiowa.edu/↩︎
https://oab.lib.utah.edu/↩︎