Catalogues-as-data: practice, principles, and prospects

Catalogues are data. And as a precursor to a range of tasks – from using catalogues proxies for understanding the collections they describe to undertaking reparative cataloguing – it is important to get to know that data. This panel draws together practitioners, researchers, and creators of catalogues-as-data to report on novel work that stewards, develops, and advances catalogues-as-data in a range of digital humanities contexts. What will emerge are practices, principles, and prospects for future catalogues-as-data work that are grounded in DH Benelux’s unique interdisciplinary Digital Humanities community. At a time when there are ever fewer barriers to accessing both high-performance computation and machine approaches to computational analysis of catalogue data, we argue that the grounded and critical approaches to catalogues-as-data advanced by this panel are vital interventions.