My time at the Texas Fashion Collection

Over the course of my time interning at the Texas Fashion Collection, I have started to grasp the way a historian might approach an art object as opposed to a designer/maker/artist. A main component in that realization is understanding that my method of creation as a historian is text. I have been stubborn up until this point in my career and hoped my messages would translate visually through the art chosen, to carry and express my ideas and theories… this is now longer the case. I am grateful for my time at the Texas Fashion Collection for giving me the ability to see how I research and stray away from the object due to my lack of ability to materialize the messages into written text. As a way to practice that, I was able to come up with a process which has helped me to patiently build my thought/concept/idea in a way which does not confuse my reader, but enriches them.

Apart from learning about my personal method of approaching research and learning from the physical object, I have realized that I do not want to make digitizing art collections the primary focus of my art career at this time. I had seriously considered it as a specialization because of my background in graphic design, the orientation I was planning on taking with my thesis project, and my initial beliefs of what digitizing a collection of artifacts would entail. While I am still attracted and find digitizing collections to be very important in a time where the primary interactions with objects people have is through their electronic device, I do not think I am prepared yet to be in a team with specialists because I don’t feel like I have specialized in what my responsibilities in the team are. Based on my experience at the TFC I feel like what I learned as a result of time there was, the importance of the right terminology used to describe and categorize objects, particularly when terms have different meanings and translations attached to them depending on the time they belong to. As a result of my time at the TFC, I have redirected my area of focus within the art museum society to studying and understanding the meanings of the terminologies used to describe and categorize cultural memory. Sometimes understood as the terms which create a “canon” of knowledge, these terms are significantly important to me as a result of my time with a team digitizing a collection because of the way “metadata” are assigned to the digital object as a way to be able to electronically search and retrieve any pertinent information surrounding the object. The role of metadata and digitized collections does not just affect art, but other cultural sectors of society such as linguistics and literature which I learned as part of a Digitizing workshop given I attended during my time at the TFC. A historian in a time of digitization makes sure the objects are digitized in a manner which is most truthful to the weathering of time on the physical object.