What follows below is the edited text of an interview conducted by Cathy Aster, Spotlight Service Manager, with Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics on 29 January 2024. Grant is the faculty sponsor of two exhibits: South Africa, Greece, Rome: a digital museum, and Voortrekker Monumentality: a digital archive. This interview was completed as part of a set of activities by the Stanford Libraries Spotlight Service Team to celebrate both the 10-year anniversary of the first Spotlight application launch and the publication milestone of 150 Spotlight exhibits.
Cathy: You currently have two exhibits that you have served as the faculty sponsor for: South Africa, Greece, Rome, and Voortrekker Monumentality. I'm wondering for either or both of those exhibits, what was your impetus for wanting to create the online showcase for this content?
Grant: South Africa, Greece, Rome closely reflects a book that I edited, where my fellow contributors and I were seeking to first collect, and then make sense of South African expressions of ancient Greece and Rome. Our analysis of these expressions, whether in objects, design, ideas, philosophies, or whatever the case may be, was a process that took several years. As the book was coming together I thought to myself, what I've really enjoyed about this project is the process of collecting. I did not want the collecting to end there, and I knew the publisher would never give me a second edition. I really needed a more flexible way of continuing this collection. So the idea was to keep collecting, and to work with a library to create an exhibit on what I hope will be an ongoing collection.
Cathy: Yes, I remember how incredibly assiduous you were about gathering the copyright permissions for all of those materials. This made it easier for us to be able to support you.
Grant: Yes. I learned there was an analogous process between getting permissions for the book and the permissions that the library needed. For me, that just underlined the value of working in parallel streams. I was able to contribute something that I hope may be of interest to the library and its uses present and future, and also as an easy spin-off from the book. It is also an important statement to make that this book represents a process. It is very easy for the book to be the end of that process. I looked to my friends in the library for a way of saying this is just the beginning. Folks come, work with us. There is something of value here. We've defined this. This is our initial curation. Come, work with us. Show us what you have, share it with us, and we will share it with the world.
Grant: For Voortrekker Monumentality, the impetus was less about a process of collecting, but about spreading the word from the two-volume book From Memory to Marble: The historical frieze of the Voortrekker Monument. I worked very closely with the authors and in fact, I introduced them to each other; one living in Munich and the other living in Auckland, New Zealand. In that sense, I felt implicated in the creation of the work. I kept speaking to one of the co-authors throughout the years they were writing the book. I read the proofs and I had conversations, where I would hear about how they found this archive, how they found these documents, and how they found those images that nobody ever thought existed anymore. I then thought, actually in light of the experience that I have had with the South Africa, Greece, Rome exhibit there was the possibility to present some of the co-authors’ materials as a digital archive.
The physical volumes are massive in size, and there is something very forbidding about the format of this book, even though researchers can download the PDF for free. The hefty scale of these assets made me think we could present them to readers in digital form, allowing them to navigate their own way through the materials. If you want to look at the curated features, or just the inauguration, or the designs, or popular culture expressions you can focus on these sections of the exhibit without flipping through the 2 large volumes of these massive PDFs. It is a way of honoring the archival spade work done by my colleagues and working with users to say, hey, look! This is an archive in itself that underlies the book. The book is great. We want you to read the book. This is why you should read the book. However, if you just want to see one element that is of interest, you can navigate it on your own through Spotlight.
Cathy: That comment leads me to my next question, which you already started to answer. I wonder if you could comment on the value of the Spotlight platform for showcasing this content?
Grant: For Voortrekker Monumentality, the platform allows viewers to look at just the images with the metadata. This is an art historical book. It is all about the images and how they are expressed. It is not as if this was a philosophy project, where we would not be able to do the same kind of thing in the same medium. This is visual history and because of its approach the content is very engaging, and you need to study it as visual culture.
You need to go through the Codex book to get the full argument, and to see the argument unfolding in the considerable nuance that the authors give. However in this case the archive is so substantial, something like 700 images, that is sufficient to merit an individual's navigation.
We needed a platform like this to give viewers that opportunity. Some people may look just at the images and not at the book; that is fine. We hope we have given enough explanation here to make that possible so that anyone who has never heard of the material or is not interested in going to the book can actually find a rich explanation within the exhibit itself. That was part of our goal.
Cathy: I'm curious to hear more details about the image and text selection for the 2 exhibits, especially as you were collaborating with other scholars.
Grant: The Voortrekker exhibit closely matches the images in the book. However, we were able to include some images in the digital exhibit that the authors could not get into the print book. So that is one advantage, actually.
In South Africa, Greece, Rome, that is about a very diverse kind of collection, very much like curating an exhibit that anyone might do in a museum. I had some wonderful workshops with the former curator of the Stanford Archaeology Collections. She led my students in an exercise where she showed them several objects, and asked how they would arrange them in an exhibit. It was an exercise in making curatorial sense of a very diverse collection of things. This is related to the South Africa, Greece, Rome exhibit because it is a heterogeneous collection. Some images are political cartoons, others are Greek vases. Some images are flower pots painted as if they were Greek vases by slightly irreverent students. There are historic photographs and architectural photographs. There was a very conscious desire to make South Africa, Greece, Rome a heterogeneous collection for people to ask, what actually unites this? You want to draw them in a little bit. If it is just one vase after the next, and one group of statues, people don’t get the point of the different kinds of issues the objects represent.
Cathy: I'm wondering if that exercise was informed by or built upon those kinds of connections that you made while writing your book? Did you think about them differently in the context of a digital exhibit?
Grant: As the editor, I had different authors and we had come up with this ragbag of things. For Africa, Greece, Rome that was very productive and, in fact, quite a difficult set of relationships to navigate. Some of us liked certain things and others had different ideas. After the images were eventually selected, I had to decide how to group them. I invited critique from colleagues, and I benefited from those concerns and in the end devised a different categorization. This is the fun thing about creating a digital exhibit. You have the flexibility of regrouping and rethinking. What struck me, especially with this exhibit is how the thing looks different if you put it in a different category. In the end, this gave me a new idea about what the content is.
Cathy: I'm wondering if you've heard either anecdotally or had direct conversations with colleagues about what kind of impacts either exhibit has had on the associated research community?
Grant: I wish I could give you a firmer answer right now. I believe the impact is very much in the works. Related to this, I finally have my own website now, called Engaging Archives. The site pulls together content and allows us to showcase a variety of archival projects, including documentaries we’ve made, South African San rock paintings, statues of Mandela, map projects, possibly the largest collection of postcards in South Africa, and more in collaboration with various colleagues.
Cathy: It sounds like your Spotlight exhibits served as a springboard for your own website. I hear that it is a personal inspiration to you and your colleagues. You can ask, can we do something similar, and how can we work together to make these materials available more broadly?
Grant: Absolutely, I think you put it very well. My work with you and your team has actually catalyzed the Engaging Archives project, which is partly rescue archiving, partly seeking out new opportunities. Our dreams are big. I’m a Latin scholar, but thanks to these modest exhibit projects with you and your team, my purview has broadened considerably. So this is about expanding the conversation, and of course, seeking further partnership.
Cathy: Do you have a final comment or thought to add about working with the library and your use of the Spotlight platform?
Grant: I have always found Stanford Libraries to be an excellent partner throughout my time here. What I especially appreciate is that the library is open to initiatives from faculty and that we can continue to work together using platforms such as Spotlight.