Online Museum Collections as Artifacts: A Case Study of New Guinean Necklaces Illustrating Mathematical Approaches as Diagnostics for Collections Management
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online September, 2022
Online Museum Collections as Artifacts: A Case Study of New Guinean Necklaces Illustrating Mathematical Approaches as Diagnostics for Collections Management
Mathematical approaches assessing similarity in terms of culture, geography, and zoological components were applied to nine online collections of New Guinean necklaces. When mapped in multidimensional space for peoples, no strong clustering of collections was found, and for provinces two collections formed a distinct cluster from the rest. In zoological space there was no clustering, but one collection occupied a distinctly separate space. A highly significant (p < .001) effect of collection on the zoological species richness was found. There were significant differences (p < .05) in zoological entropy between several collections, and a degree of uncertainty or surprise in the zoological composition of the necklace collections. The processes behind such patterns are likely complex, and may reflect issues of funding, unconscious bias, and colonial or missionary histories. The methods explored provide diagnostic tools useful for testing the underlying structures and bias of collections.
AnantaArisRetnoDwiUtamiWilujeng WahyuHandayaniNur Budi. 2016. “Statistics on Ethnic Diversity in the Land of Papua, Indonesia.” Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies3 (3): 458–74.
2.
AndersonHelenGalvinElizabethde Torres RodriguezJorge. 2018. “Museological Approaches to the Management of Digital Research and Engagement: The African Rock Art Image Project.” The African Archaeological Review35 (2): 321–37.
3.
AxelssonBodil. 2018. “Online Collections, Curatorial Agency and Machine-Assisted Curating.” In The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication, edited by DrotnerK.DziekanV.ParryR.SchrøderK. C., 67–79. London: Routledge.
4.
BertacchiniEnricoMorandoFederico. 2013. “The Future of Museums in the Digital Age: New Models for Access to and Use of Digital Collections.” International Journal of Arts Management15 (2): 60–72.
5.
BoakesElizabeth H.McGowanPhilip J. K.FullerRichard A.Chang-qingDingClarkNatalie E.O’ConnorKimMaceGeorgina M.. 2010. “Distorted Views of Biodiversity: Spatial and Temporal Bias in Species Occurrence Data.” PLoS Biology8 (6): e1000385.
6.
BrayJ. RogerCurtisJohn T.. 1957. “An Ordination of Upland Forest Communities of Southern Wisconsin.” Ecological Monographs27 (4): 1–27.
7.
BulmerRalph. 1968. “The Strategies of Hunting in New Guinea.” Oceania38 (4): 302–18.
8.
BuseAdolf. 1982. “The Likelihood Ratio, Wald, and Lagrange Multiplier Tests: An Expository Note.” The American Statistician36 (3a): 153–7.
9.
ClerkinCaitlin ChienTaylorBradley L.. 2021. “Online Encounters With Museum Antiquities.” American Journal of Archaeology125 (1): 165–75.
10.
CooksonMichael. 2000. “From the Archives: The Archbold Expeditions to New Guinea: A Preliminary Survey of Archival Materials Held at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.” The Journal of Pacific History35 (3): 313–18.
11.
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds). 2021. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-Fourth Edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com (accessed June 20, 2021).
12.
FifeWayne. 2001. “Creating the Moral Body: Missionaries and the Technology of Power in Early Papua New Guinea.” Ethnology40(3): 251–69.
13.
FifeWayne. 2004. “Extending the Metaphor: British Missionaries.” In Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, edited by BadoneE.RosemanS. R., 140–59. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
14.
FisherRonald Aylmer. 1935. The Design of Experiments. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Press.
15.
FoleyWilliam A.1992. “New Guinea Languages.” International Encyclopedia of Linguistics3: 87–90.
16.
FranklinKarl J.1973. The Linguistic Situation in the Gulf District and Adjacent Areas, Papua New Guinea. Monograph Series C, No. 26. Canberra: The Australian National University.
17.
GowerGrahamFendersonLindsey E.SalisAlexander T.HelgenKristofer M.van LoenenAyla L.HeinigerHollyHofman-KamińskaEmilia, et al. 2019. “Widespread Male Sex Bias in Mammal Fossil and Museum Collections.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences116 (38): 19019–24.
18.
GuralnickRobertVan CleveJeremy. 2005. “Strengths and Weaknesses of Museum and National Survey Data Sets for Predicting Regional Species Richness: Comparative and Combined Approaches.” Diversity and Distributions11 (4): 349–59.
19.
GusindeMartin. 1961. “Somatology of the Ayom Pygmies of New Guinea.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society105 (4): 394–411.
20.
HamiltonAndrew J.HopwoodBronwyn. 2021. “A Highly Species-Rich Jaw-Bone Artefact From New Guinea.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences13 (6): 1–7.
21.
HamiltonAndrew J.NovotnýVojtechWatersEdward K.BassetYvesBenkeKurt K.GrimbacherPeter S.MillerScott E., et al. 2013. “Estimating Global Arthropod Species Richness: Refining Probabilistic Models Using Probability Bounds Analysis.” Oecologia171 (2): 357–65.
22.
HammarströmHaraldForkelRobertHaspelmathMartinBankSebastian. 2021. “Language: Glottolog 4.4.” Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. https://glottolog.org/ (accessed June 16, 2021).
23.
HealeyChristopher J.1985. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology24 (3): 153–65.
24.
HugoGraemeCraigBarryFyfeAndrewPawleyAndrewBryantAllenBoltonJackBoltonJill. n.d. “Upper Sepik–Central New Guinea Project.” http://uscngp.com/ (accessed June 13, 2021).
25.
HurleyAndrew2016. “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide.” The Public Historian38 (1): 69–88.
26.
HutchesonKermit. 1970. “A Test for Comparing Diversities Based on the Shannon Formula.” Journal of Theoretical Biology29 (1): 151–4.
27.
KruskalJoseph B.1964. “Multidimensional Scaling by Optimizing Goodness of Fit to a Nonmetric Hypothesis.” Psychometrika29 (1): 1–27.
MargalefRamón. 1972. “Homage to Evelyn Hutchinson, or Why There is an Upper Limit to Diversity.” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences44: 211–35.
NelsonHank N.1978. “Loyalties at Sword-Point: The Lutheran Missionaries in Wartime New Guinea, 1939–45.” Australian Journal of Politics & History24 (2): 199–217.
32.
O’HanlonMichael. 1999. “‘Mostly Harmless’? Missionaries, Administrators and Material Culture on the Coast of British New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute5: 377–97.
33.
PattersonH. DesmondThompsonRobin. 1971. “Recovery of Inter-Block Information When Block Sizes are Unequal.” Biometrika58 (3): 545–54.
34.
PlaLaura. 2004. “Bootstrap Confidence Intervals for the Shannon Biodiversity Index: A Simulation Study.” Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics9 (1): 42–56.
35.
RoseMary Z.2016. “Why and How to Create Digital Special Collections.” CLA Journal59 (3): 259–68.
36.
RossMalcolm. 2005. “Pronouns as a Preliminary Diagnostic for Grouping Papuan Languages.” Papuan Pasts: Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Histories of Papuan-Speaking Peoples572: 15–65.
37.
ShannonClaude E.1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal27 (3): 379–423.
38.
ShepardRoger N.1962a. “The Analysis of Proximities: Multidimensional Scaling With an Unknown Distance Function. I.” Psychometrika27 (2): 125–40.
39.
ShepardRoger N.1962b. “The Analysis of Proximities: Multidimensional Scaling With an Unknown Distance Function. II.” Psychometrika27 (2): 219–46.
40.
SmithGeoffrey P.1988. “Morobe Counting Systems.” Papers in New Guinea Linguistics76: 1–132.
41.
SomerfieldPaul J.2008. “Identification of the Bray-Curtis Similarity Index: Comment on Yoshioka (2008).” Marine Ecology Progress Series372: 303–6.
42.
StaubermannKlaus. 2018. “Museum Research Databases for the History of Science and Technology.” Icon24: 186–95.
43.
StorkNigel E.McBroomJamesGelyClaireHamiltonAndrew J.. 2015. “New Approaches Narrow Global Species Estimates for Beetles, Insects, and Terrestrial Arthropods.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences112 (24): 7519–23.
