https://hugo.chnm.gmu.edu/tags/data/ Recent content in Data on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Hugo en-us Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hugo.chnm.gmu.edu/blog/exploring-south-asia-at-the-met-through-data/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hugo.chnm.gmu.edu/blog/exploring-south-asia-at-the-met-through-data/ <p>Originally published at <a href="https://www.deepthimurali.com/art-history-and-data/south-asia-at-the-met">https://www.deepthimurali.com/art-history-and-data/south-asia-at-the-met</a></p> <hr> <p>Museum metadata is messy metadata (and sometimes, also, just messy in non-computational ways.) But museum metadata is also historical archive that scholars and the public alike ignore.</p> <p>Every object in a museum collection arrives with a story attached — a donor&rsquo;s name, a date, a department assignment, a classification. Individually, these are administrative details: the bureaucratic residue of how an object got from somewhere else to a vitrine, a storage shelf, or a database entry. But at scale, across thousands of objects and more than a century of acquisitions, these details become historical data. They become a record of <em>how</em> an institution decided what South Asia was, who got to decide that, and when those decisions were made.</p>