The purpose of this study is to realize historical facts and context data examined and arranged around porcelain from Joseon Dynasty in a meta-archive, which is a digital archive of a different concept from existing digitization of archival materials....
The purpose of this study is to realize historical facts and context data examined and arranged around porcelain from Joseon Dynasty in a meta-archive, which is a digital archive of a different concept from existing digitization of archival materials. A meta-archive seeks to build a database with stories by figuring out and connecting the contexts of data that scatters around on the web.
A meta-archive, which is extended from existing digital archive of museum collections, is related to the situations of contemporary museums that are asked to expand from a space of collecting, preserving, and displaying a collection to a space to enable the participation and communication of the audience. The inevitable restriction faced by museums for their exhibition and educational management due to the pandemic has raised a need for active communication with the audience in a digital environment. The making and utilization of content created for this purpose is possible based on "storytelling" rather than technology, and the clear structure and directionality of a story is available on the foundation of a meta-archive. Holding a mutually supplementary position with an offline exhibition space, a meta-archive can induce users to conduct a profound intellectual inquiry into the collections of a museum in an online space.
In South Korea, however, museums, art museum, and exhibition halls related to porcelain have a limited scope of collection information that they provide in the web to the collections themselves. This study thus attempted to expand the knowledge resources of humanities with porcelain from Joseon Dynasty, which contain the aesthetic consciousness and living aspects of people in Joseon Dynasty and further the ruling philosophy of a dynasty, in a digital environment. A meta-archive of porcelain from Joseon Dynasty was designed to provide users with a network among relevant data around porcelain excavated at kiln sites.
In the study, the investigator selected data and set the criteria of their categories to build a meta-archive for porcelain from Joseon Dynasty by collecting and sorting out data and selected 219 pieces of ceramics as the basic collection data. An ontology design was devised to effectively examine complex and diverse networks connoted in the data of events, actors, and places related to the corresponding collection data. The resulting database can put together different pieces of information about the individual articles of a collection including their historical contexts, research achievements, and the old web content in a visualization method called a network graph and provide them to users. It will offer users a path to move freely between the subject resources and conduct an inquiry into the knowledge world of porcelain from Joseon Dynasty without limiting their access only to the archive of a certain agency. Such a meta-archive may serve as a route for archive users to access even specialized knowledge beyond the delivery of fragmentary information by providing them with data from concerned literature data to scientific treatise data about the history of porcelain and culture in Joseon Dyanasty.