For the second project of Unit 1 – Methods of Cataloguing – I selected a set of zoological watercolour illustrations from the Harvard Digital Collection. The set of 14 images is titled ‘Andrew Garrett, Early Naturalist of Polynesia’ and features scanned manuscript sheets and various illustrations of fish and shells, that Garrett studied in the Pacific Ocean region.
One of the first observations I made about the set is that it is not possible to view all images simultaneously; the sole way to engage with the catalogue is through embedded presentation ‘slides’ which you can navigate through and zoom into.
I began to experiment with how these images are accessed digitally, from this catalogue, and how that may have an effect on their organisation and presentation. Since you can’t save images from the catalogue, I had to screenshot each illustration, which saves and orders the images on my OS based on how recent the screenshot is. I also hadn’t decided that I was going to catalogue this set until halfway through the slides, so my starting point for engaging with the set was different than the starting point on the Harvard website.
The images in the online set are accompanied by a brief description in the slides, which identifies them. As I was screenshotting, I realised that I needed to classify or name each image, as it was being saved as “Screenshot at *insert time*” and required renaming to make sense of the set. I decided to extract the scientific name of each organism from the online captions and name the screenshots accordingly, which then further organised them differently, this time in alphabetical order.
Another point to note is that the online set has no information regarding the date, size or medium of each image, yet screenshotting them adds certain specifications to the images when translated digitally, such as pixels or size. Building on the OS’s capabilities to view these images, I arranged them on my desktop to see how they could be displayed there.
For the next experiment, I wanted to extract each illustration from the context of the page it was drawn on and to start sorting and classifying. I arranged them by size (smallest to largest), colour (least to most colourful) and into three sets of items within the set.
Focussing on individual characteristics, I wanted to frame and arrange aspects of the illustrations, specifically the eyes and patterns found on the fish and shells. Given the fact that the original set can’t be viewed simultaneously, I arranged these fragments to recreate a composite of the catalogue and form new images. This was also intended to be a comment on the colonial idea of ‘explorer’ and the Eurocentric notion of ‘discovering’ organisms, specifies and living beings, despite their existence within Indigenous worldviews and contexts well before their supposed verification by European colonialists. The composite images are a bastardisation of the set of drawings with the intention of subverting the idea of discovery.
For the the third experiment, I was interested in the use of ‘slides’ as a way of presenting the fish – on the website this refers to digital presentation slides to flip through, but it brought scientific/microscope slides to mind. I also wanted to see how the images could be displayed physically and not onscreen, so I printed two sets of the collection – one in colour and the other black and white linework of the silhouettes of each organism. These were printed on trace paper and overlaid as individual ‘slides’, that could be viewed as a composite set but also individually. The linework silhouettes were arranged from smallest to largest, to be able to compare the relative sizes of the fish, while the coloured set followed the original order from the Harvard website. The black background was unintentional, but I felt that it ultimately referred back to the idea of microscopic slides and framing each organism, out of its original context.