Daejeon, July 27–31
Half-day workshop (3-4 hours), offered in-person with hybrid option for remote participants.
No separate call for participation.
Exhibition space is never neutral. The ways in which artworks and objects are positioned, the distances between them, the architectural features that frame them, and the pathways visitors take through galleries all fundamentally shape how cultural artifacts are experienced, understood, and remembered. Yet despite the centrality of spatial arrangements to curatorial practice, the documentation and analysis of these spatial dimensions remain surprisingly underdeveloped in museum studies and art history. The topological relationships between objects, the sequential organization of rooms, and the subtle juxtapositions that generate meaning remain largely undocumented. Researchers attempting to reconstruct past exhibitions must work with incomplete and often contradictory documentation, formulating educated hypotheses about the display.
This workshop introduces Display, an OWL ontology and a free and open-source web application developed by the Ouvroir d’histoire de l’art et de muséologie numériques at the Université de Montréal, as part of the Partnership New Uses of Collections in Art Museums (CIÉCO) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Display is both a conceptual and technical device designed to enable structured documentation of exhibition installations by linking artworks, exhibits and spatial configurations to understand curatorial decisions through a flexible ontological model capable of handling the uncertainties inherent in historical documentation.
The development of Display emerged from an iterative co-creation process grounded in concrete research cases. Rather than starting with abstract technical requirements, the project moved from the field to the ontology, and from the ontology to the user interface, remaining anchored in the reality of curatorial and scholarly practices. The Display ontology allows for explicit and formal description of the features of an installation or exhibition (proximity and contiguity of works, vis-à-vis arrangements, etc.). While remaining compatible with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM), the ontology prioritizes modelling centred on spatial relationships by drawing on a specialization of the Building Topology Ontology (BOT). This abstract model allows for the recording of historical information concerning installations and proposes solutions to account for uncertainty and documentary gaps.
The application architecture is based on implementing a SPARQL endpoint using the Apache Jena framework, coupled with an inference engine. The use of CRAFTS enabled the creation of a REST API for data access through JSON-LD using patterns close to those proposed by the Linked Art model. The web client articulates three distinct views for data entry and visualization: a 3D scene developed with Three.js, a documentary source processing module, and a structured data view. Within a project, users can create different versions of an exhibition by exploiting archival or visual documentation. The interface design is based on the procedures employed by researchers in documenting exhibitions and allows for exploring different hypotheses while relying on the data model.
Figure 1. View of the 3D scene of the Display tool, developed by Tractr. Artwork information is provided for illustrative purposes only.
This workshop offers both a practical experience and a space for critical reflection on the epistemological dimensions of exhibition documentation. Participants will learn how the ontology describes the topology of the exhibition, how to import exhibition data from various sources, model relationships between objects using the Display interface, manage sources, and visualize installations. It will be the perfect opportunity for us to conduct a user study to get feedback for further iteration. Beyond the digital tool, we will present Display as a research environment in which technical development, ontological modelling, and exhibition research are iteratively co-produced, allowing methodological questions to directly shape the tool and, in turn, the research it enables.
Zoë Renaudie
Email: zoe.renaudie@umontreal.ca
Affiliation: Université de MontréalAffiliation: Université de Montréal
Zoë Renaudie is a contemporary art conservator and head of the laboratory of digital history of art and museology called L’Ouvroir at the Université de Montréal. With over a decade of experience in cultural institutions, she has specialized in exhibition documentation and the conservation of complex artworks. This practical expertise inspired her return to research, conducting a PhD under the supervision of Emmanuel Château-Dutier at the Université de Montréal, entitled Conserving the Ephemeral: Toward the Documentation of the Exhibition, as part of the partnership New Uses of Collections in Art Museums (CIÉCO). She gives courses and professional training on digital approaches to art history and museology.
Target audience: The workshop is designed for any digital humanities researchers interested in application with semantic web back-end, or museum professionals (curators, registrars, conservators), art historians, and graduate students working with exhibition documentation, spatial analysis of cultural heritage, or digital museology.
The workshop welcomes participants with different levels of technical expertise, requiring no prior knowledge of ontologies or Semantic Web technologies.
Expected participants: 20 participants, based on attendance at previous Display workshops conducted by L’Ouvroir and growing interest in exhibition documentation tools within the digital humanities community.
Introduction and Context (15 minutes)
Presentation of Display (15 minutes)
Hands-on Session (2 hours with a break in the middle)
User Experience and Feedback (15 minutes)
Conclusion and Perspectives (15 minutes)
Total duration: 3 hours (4 hours with informal setup/buffer time)