CURATION

CURATION

Curation is, among other things, a means of establishing connectivity: either by making existing connections visible, or by forging new ones. Either way, the goal is to create (some semblance of) order from chaos, coherence from disarray, meaning from memory. In simplest terms, the act of curation involves selecting, organizing, and maintaining. Here that work is done not on artifacts or artworks, but on digitized versions of material objects, on documents, and on "born-digital" content.

Selectivity

Perhaps one day in the distant future Beautiful Spaces will emerge as a repository for all knowledge of Crimea under Russian rule. For now though, its contents are limited. Consciously limited. I have tried to include material that 1) speaks to the significance of physical space for understanding Crimea's own identity and its place within the Russian Empire, 2) represents much larger bodies of evidence, and 3) lends itself to digital representation. In other words, if the site has a boutique feel, that is by design. The overarching goal, of course, is to distill the wonderfully complex, variable, and multifaceted story of a place - and its people - without essentializing that story (or place, or people). 

Metadata

The art of Beautiful Spaces, such as it is, lies in its metadata. Here metadata (data about data) is intended to facilitate citation, analysis, and contextualization.

Omeka uses the Dublin Core metadata standards and I have abided by those standards whenever possible. Whenever that was not possible, I customized. In some cases that meant defining new metadata elements, in others by introducing new Item Types, etc. If I have done my job, each Item in this site should come braced with information about where I found it and where it resides, who produced it (and when), its genre, relevant contents, and location (where appropriate).

A note on language: Crimea has been home to peoples of a dizzying array of ethnic and religious backgrounds, including Greeks, Armenians, Karaims, Germans, Ukrainians, and Turks. It has been (among other things) a Greek colony, a Genoese outpost, a Mongol ulus, a Tatar khanate, a Russian province, an autonomous Soviet socialist republic, an oblast within two different Soviet socialist republics, an autonomous republic within an independent Ukraine, an independent republic, and a republic of the Russian Federation. Crimea's history, therefore, has been written in many languages and dispersed throughout many archives. Its toponymy has been reinvented on several occasions (most notably in 1945, a year after the deportation of the Crimean Tatar population). Language and politics became inextricably linked long ago in Crimea and it can be difficult to write without the nagging sensation that one is somehow - albeit unintentionally - substantiating the claims of a certain set of actors by adopting a particular spelling of a placename.

For the sake of consistency, I reproduce the names of places and individuals as they appear in the primary documents. Because the vast majority of my archival material is in Russian, Russian spellings occur frequently throughout the site. Whenever possible, I include the original Cyrillic along with my transliteration. I include alternate name attestations in the metadata whenever this is done in the sources (and it often is). 

Collections

Collections bring together Items that share a common source, purpose, or defining feature. This is not entirely unlike the work done by tags, but there are a couple of important differences between tags and collections: 

• A tag is an attribute of a given Item. It is a piece of metadata. A Collection is a container for one or more Items.
• An Item can appear in one, and only one, Collection. By contrast, there is no limit to the number of tags assigned to a given Item. Assiging an Item to a Collection therefore privileges a particular attribute as crucial to the historical understanding of the Item.
• As site author, I can determine the order in which Items appear within a Collection and describe its organizing principles. This lends a Collection a bit more scholarly heft than a tag.

In sum, while a Collection is not a terribly hierarchical construct, it does function differently than the site taxonomy.

Meanwhile, unlike a "Narration," a Collection relies on its content to communicate its argument or perspective. Its goal is to evoke, through an accumulation of similar pieces of evidence, an impression or perhaps an idea, to cultivate interest, or to facilitate further analysis. That said, a few Collections exist simply as pools of reference information.

Beautiful Spaces Collections 

• The Many Lives of Mirzas
• Bossoli's Album
• Demidov's Voyage
• Uvarov's Antiquities
• Dachas
• Ruins
• Estates
• Mosques
• State-Owned Gardens
• Vineyards
• Keppen's Antiquities
• Original Maps
• Source Maps
• Property Maps
• Biographical Sketches
• Archival Core
• Essential Published Sources
• Archives and Libraries
• Annotations