So, what were cabinets of curiosities?
Cabinets of curiosities were precursors of our modern museums, originating in the late sixteenth century and developing through the seventeenth. They were in the first instances private collections,...
View ArticleMuseum Catalogues Through the Ages
While museums in the modern sense were an invention of the eighteenth century, the accumulation of objects, both by individuals and by institutions, goes back millennia, and since the beginning there...
View ArticleThe Social Network of Collections of Curiosities
One of the most fascinating aspects of early modern collections of curiosities is the network of people involved in them, including collectors and their associates and agents of various sorts (donors,...
View ArticleModelling Multi-Level Engagement with Cabinets of Curiosities
The first question we should ask when putting cultural heritage material (or any material) on the Web is, what will the Web allow us to do that would be difficult in a different context? This question...
View ArticleThe Cabinet of Curiosities as Knowledge Environment
In my work on INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments (www.inke.ca), much of my focus was on the history of the book as a knowledge environment and its implications for the way in which we think...
View ArticleNew Project on Sir Hans Sloane's Manuscript Catalogues
We are delighted to hear news of Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of His Collections, a new research project based at the British Museum in collaboration with the Department of...
View ArticleGimcrack gets last laugh
They laughed at Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, a late-seventeenth-century virtuoso, for his scheme of bottling fresh air from around England, storing his stock like wine in a wine cellar, and then breaking it...
View ArticleNew publication and project documentation
The project has a new publication, on "Curating Object-Oriented Collections Using the TEI," recently appearing in the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. In it, I provide a framework for tagging...
View ArticleStrange Fish: an opening gambit
I recently spotted this curiosity in the window of a basement apartment in Saskatoon, looking as if it had escaped from a cabinet somewhere. Varieties of the puffer-fish were popular items for...
View ArticleSSHRC funding for phase two: The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of...
We are pleased to announce that we have received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada / Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines to support the next phase of our...
View ArticleGuillermo del Toro: A Modern Appreciator of Curiosities
A recent special exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario featured a re-creation of Guillermo del Toro’s personal collection of memorabilia, paintings, and sculpture, mostly related to monsters and...
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