Vikki Hill

Current Research Projects

Guild of Painter-Printmakers

Project details:
The proposed research is to construct an on-line database cataloguing the works contained in the print collection of the Royal Society of the Painter-Printmakers, founded in 1880 by Francis Seymour Haden.
This will include digital reproductions of the works alongside the descriptive and technical information relating to the print as well as biographical details pertaining to each artist. The importance of the collection lies in the fact that it spans a period of 125 years and includes examples from a diverse group of printmakers, including established and emerging artists.

Through increasing access to this collection and supplying supplementary information, such as biographical detail, this body of work will prove a significant contribution to the history of printmaking. The body of information contained in the database will also help to form a social and technical, contextual framework for the prints to be viewed through, indicative of historical developments in this field.

Notions of best practice

Project details:
Building upon previous construction of archives, research into what constitutes best practice when designing and building databases is continuing. This is being applied to archives that present either a physical collection or involve the history and techniques of specific printing processes. This will include looking at issues such as methodologies for identifying and capturing the relevant information, structuring this information to the best effect in the database as well as creating strategies for knowledge retrieval.

This work has been outlined in a paper 'Creating and Managing Digital Archives Relating to the History and Technique of Print' presented at the Digital Futures Conference at the Royal Society, October 2006.
Building on the work presented in the paper additional methodologies were presented in a paper entitled 'Methods of Structuring Databases and Digital Archives to provide Narrative and Contextual Pathways Through Historical Texts', at the Networks of Design Conference, University College Falmouth, September 2008

Archive and Memory

Project details:
Expanding upon a paper presented at the 'Photography, Archive and Memory' symposium held at Roehampton University in June 2009 'Relocating the notion of the archive within the digital age' Vikki is currently writing a project bid to investigate what methodologies are currently in place in photographic archives for engaging with web 2.0 social networking sites and whether these can inform any future acquisition and collection policies in anticipation of such a time as when the bulk of new material passing into these archives were images that were born digital.

A second strand of this project will explore whether there are any differences in terms of the authority given to an image in relation to its ability to bear testament to past events when viewed as a digital image rather than a printed image. This will include looking at aspects such as how a digital image is viewed and the visual information decoded as well as the role that other sensory experiences such as that of touch play when working with a printed image.