At the beginning of the semester, our group defined our focus statement as such:

We will create a website using css and html on a wordpress platform to make the Tessé room accessible to all visitors to the Met. We will do this by using transparent language, showing video and annotating images in order to elucidate function and usage of materials in 18th century daily life. These materials are x,y,z. It is essential to our project to link materials and their makers. We will do this by connecting specific plates from the Encyclopédie to selected objects in the room. We will choose 10 (ish) plates. We will bring the human back to the humanities; we strive to vivify the Tessé room.

I feel that we pretty well stuck to that focus, and with a little post-production editing could very easily get it to our original vision (including video, more image annotations), but that our project is very successful even without the full inclusion of all our original ideas.

My personal focus statement was this:

I will give visitors to the Met’s Tessè Room a better understanding of the technological advancements that went into making new luxury products by examining a porcelain potpourri boat, a silver coffeepot, and a golden snuff box. I will connect these materials to their makers through both Encyclopedie plates and modern scholarship, and will present my findings to the viewer on a website with the aid of video while using in non-academic language (whether written or spoken).

I think that we certainly have given the items in the room a bit more of a connection to people, but I think that’s the area we should strive to strengthen over the summer. One way to do this is by including a page that explains the guild system and giving more individual artisans biographies, as we did with Diderot. Another way is to create a page for Rose Ducreux, whose wonderful self-portrait hangs in the middle of the Tessé Room. I know that our TA, Caroline, intends to do work on the harp (pictured in the painting) and eighteenth-century music over the summer, and I would like to also do work on the portrait, as well as further work on the fireplace in the room (and other ornate architectural elements) and clocks, all of which was sadly overlooked because of limits of time.

I also would like to add luxury materials (like silver and gold, but also coffee and tobacco) to a map, to further show the tremendous amounts of money and manpower that went into bringing these products to market, and just how luxurious they were when first introduced.

This class taught me so much about Enlightenment France and my own digital skills, and I feel very lucky to have participated in it. I am eager to continue working on digital humanities projects, and hope to use the skills that I’ve acquired this semester as I begin my career as a young art historian. I find the possibilities made possible by the digital humanities for research, scholarship, and museology to be exciting, and believe that such technology also provides ways to reach and excite broader audiences, in the process making the museum and the objects themselves more important and relevant than ever before. I very much want to be a part of that exciting revolution.