Exploring Practice in a Network Society
CHArt Eighteenth Annual Conference
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DIGITAL
ART HISTORY? Exploring Practice in a Network Society |
Rupert Shepherd, University of Sussex, UK
Databases and Art History: The Material Renaissance Project
The Material Renaissance project is a collaborative three-year research project, funded by the AHRB and the Getty Grant Program, investigating costs and consumption in Italy over the period 1300 to 1650. It involves fifteen academics and postgraduate students, spread over six universities in the United Kingdom and Italy. A fundamental part of the project is the creation of a database of prices, wages and exchange rates for Italy during the period under consideration, in order to provide comparative material to support project members' own research, and eventually that of the broader art-historical community.
My paper will outline the problems entailed in the creation of such a database (ranging from the number and complexities of Italian moneys and units of measurement in the Renaissance, to the problem of ensuring that at least one copy of the database is kept as current as possible whilst researchers are working in archives collecting their data), as well as the pros and cons of the solutions adopted by the project, and an assessment of progress to date (the project will be beginning its third year at the time of the conference). I hope to be able to draw some lessons from the problems we have encountered about the use of databases in such research projects.