Curatorial Statement
Project Inception and History
The Visualising Transnational Museology (VTM) project aims to visualise the global
distribution of publications. The project began with a University of St Andrews (USTAN)
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion project scoping resources for museum studies teaching
between St Andrews and the Caribbean in partnership with The University of the West Indies
(The UWI). USTAN and UWI are now co-creating an innovative, new Caribbean Cultures and
Curation module to be offered to students of Social Anthropology, Museum and Heritage
Studies, and cognate disciplines from 2022-23. The project is based at the University of St
Andrews and is supervised by lecturers of the Museums and Galleries Studies programme.
Project Audience and Data Processing
We have identified three key audiences for the project website visualisation: students
and academics, researchers, and museum professionals. Each audience will view the same data
in a way that is beneficial to them. As such, we have endeavoured to standardise the display of
information on the visualisation and in the data compilation. In the future, the bibliography will
be available on GitHub for ease of access and searchability.
Data Collection Process
A bibliography for teaching Museum Theory and Practice at the transatlantic level was the starting point for this project. We continued to build on that bibliography over the last several months to create the visualisation. So far, the team has collated over 90 sources relating to transnational museology, many of which specifically reference museology in Latin American and Caribbean contexts.
As we seek to expand the bibliography beyond the Anglophone sphere, we have been
made aware of the team’s current linguistic limitations. We are therefore actively seeking new
sources in more languages to expand the project’s reach. The support of the International
Council of Museum’s museology group, ICOFOM, is instrumental in this endeavour.
Additionally, researchers at UWI and other institutions have provided invaluable feedback for
the team to reflect upon and challenge the ways in which we collect and display the data. With
their help, the team has learned where and how we can question colonial power structures
within museology and the VTM project itself. Decolonising our mindsets is an ongoing process
for the team, who continue to learn and reflect in the process of our practice-based research.
We strive to make the project an example of decolonisation in practice rather than merely
appropriating decolonisation as an ideology. We are also cognisant of the ever-changing
definition of decolonisation and the lack of international consensus on the word itself.
Along with the base information of the resources, we have been tracking the authors’ institutional affiliations. In doing so, we are able to create a more accurate visualisation. However, the process of creating our resource has also brought to light a number of systemic biases that deserve reflection and future corrective action. For example, utilising the publishers’ locations for the visualisation heavily skewed the map, because it placed many of the resources in Europe and North America, regardless of their authors. As such, we chose to utilise institutional affiliation because it demonstrated the global aspect of the works, their authors, and their institutions. However, this is merely one way of viewing the data. There are plenty of other ways in which the data may be visualised that would provide another perspective and this scoping will form part of the iterative process of this pedagogical research project.
Signed,
Alex Lednicky, Julie Jarsova, & Kate M Wilcox
Students at the University of St Andrews, Department of Art History