Glossary
This page contains history, museum, and digital humanities terminology. (Please note this list is not exhaustive).
| Terminology | Definition |
| Accession | The formal legal process of recording a new item into an existing collection of books, paintings, or artifacts |
| Acquisition | The administrative, decision-making and documentation process involved in adding an object to a collection |
| Antiquity | The period of the ancient past that commences with the classical period and ends before the Middle Ages. As a common noun, it refers to the ancient quality of something: 'an object of great antiquity' |
| Archival Processing | The act of surveying, arranging, describing, and performing basic preservation activities on the recorded material of an individual, family, or organization after they are permanently transferred to an archive |
| Artifact | An object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest |
| Conservation | The act of conserving; prevention of injury, decay, waste, or loss. In contrast to restoration, conservation emphasizes arresting deterioration over repairing an object to look as it once did. 'Preventive conservation' is the practice of creating the optimum conditions for for an object's storage/transport and so on to prevent deterioration or damage. 'Interventive conservation' refers to the practice of a conservation taking a form of action directly upon an object, such as cleaning and repair |
| Content Management System | A software program or suite of applications designed to enable the creation, editing, review, organization, and publication of content to the Web from a central interface. Popular content management systems include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! |
| Controlled Vocabulary | Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems |
| Cultural Sustainability | Cultural sustainability as it relates to sustainable development, has to do with maintaining cultural beliefs, cultural practices, heritage conservation, culture as its own entity, and the question of whether or not any given cultures will exist in the future |
| Curator | A curator is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator," and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission |
| Database | A collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired data. The structure of a database is dependent on the type of relationship being described. A database differs from a file of that same information in that it describes how the data relate to one another instead of presenting an unordered collection of the same content |
| Decorative Arts | The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose aim is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. This includes most of the arts which make objects for the interiors of buildings, as well as interior design, but typically excludes architecture |
| Digital History | Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing |
| Digital Humanities | An area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application |
| Dublin Core | A standard set of vocabulary terms used to describe a wide range of resources. This set of elements comprises a basic, standardized, shared system of metadata widely used by libraries, governments, international organizations, and businesses |
| Experiential Learning | Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience, and is more narrowly defined as "learning through reflection on doing" |
| Fine Arts | In European academic traditions, fine art is made primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork |
| Genealogy | Line of descent traced through a person's ancestors; the word also refers to the study of and tracing of lines pf descent |
| Historiography | The study of the writing of history and of written histories |
| Library and Information Science | An interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and regulation of information, whether in physical or digital forms |
| Material Culture | The aspect of culture manifested by the physical objects and architecture of a society. The term is primarily used in archaeology and anthropology, but is also of interest to sociology, geography and history |
| Materiality | The material or physical aspect of a thing; the quality of being composed of physical matter |
| Metadata | Data describing other data. Metadata provide information about one or more aspects of data, such as type, date, creator, location, and so on. Most often encountered in library and archival contexts, metadata facilitate the organization, discovery, and use of a wide range of resources |
| Methodology | A method or body of methods used in a particular field of study, a description of which often includes justification of the suitability of the techniques used in it |
| Museology | Museology or museum studies is the study of museums. It explores the history of museums and their role in society, as well as the activities they engage in, including curating, preservation, public programming, and education |
| Museum Education | Museum education is a specialized field devoted to developing and strengthening the education role of informal education spaces and institutions such as museums |
| Omeka | A free, open-source Web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. It is available as either a hosted application, or as a content management system (CMS) downloaded and installed on an outside server. Developed at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Omeka is designed to help nonspecialists digitally present collections-based research. Omeka uses Dublin Core metadata standards to organize content |
| Peer Review | Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field |
| Place-Based Education | Place-based learning engages students in their community, including their physical environment, local culture, history, or people. With place-based learning, students get to see the results of their work in their community |
| Provenance | The place of origin or earliest known history of something or a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality |
| Public Art | Any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse |
| Public History | The use of historical skills and methods outside of the traditional academic realm of history. Public historians use their training to meet the needs of the community-the public-whether that community is defined as a city, a neighborhood, a business, or a historical society |
| Restoration | The action of returning something to a former owner, place, or condition. In contrast to conservation, it implies repairing an object to look as it did originally |
Definitions were taken from:
“Glossary of Digital Humanities Terms.” Folgerpedia, August 27, 2019. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Glossary_of_digital_humanities_terms.
Hannan, Leonnie and Sarah Longair. History Through Material Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.