Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1980
L’articolo presenta il nuovo regime patrimoniale delle collezioni del Musée du quai Branly attraverso l’analisi della digitalizzazione delle schede di documentazione e dell’informatizzazione dei processi di gestione degli oggetti. Le collezioni extra-europee, in particolare del Musée de l’Homme, sono state riconfigurate nella nuova istituzione. L’artefatto ‘etnografico’ da oggetto scientifico è diventato ‘un’opera d’arte e di civilizzazione’, un oggetto patrimoniale registrato al Service des Musées de France. I dati documentari cartacei sono stati rielaborati in un nuovo sistema di classificazione: il database TMS oggetti, concepito qui come uno spazio sociale e di conoscenza condiviso da diversi attori museali. Lo studio dell’infrastruttura informazionale mostra le nuove connessioni create tra umani, oggetti e dati digitali. L’analisi della riconfigurazione delle classificazioni mette in scena la materialità dell’ambiente digitale. La manipolazione dei dati digitali permette nuovi metodi di produzione dell’inventario, in particolare la nuova aggregazione dei dati induce a delle associazioni inedite tra oggetti e collezioni.
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Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame
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Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly
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Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame
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10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1980
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Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Paris, France
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Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly
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                                           2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 106-129




Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at
the Musée du quai Branly
Tiziana Nicoletta BELTRAME
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre


ABSTRACT: This article presents the new cultural heritage regime of the Musée du quai
Branly’s collection through an analysis of the digitization of records for objects and docu-
mentary data. Non-European collections, notably those at the Musée de l’Homme, have
been reconfigured within the new institution. The ‘ethnographic’ artifact, which was once a
scientific object, has become a ‘work of art and civilization’ a heritage object registered at
the Service des Musées de France. Documentary data, which used to be recorded on paper,
was entered into a new classification system: the TMS objects database, here conceived as a
social space and a space of knowledge shared by different actors. A study of the informa-
tional infrastructure shows how connections are created between humans, objects, and digit-
al data. Analysis of this reconfiguration leads to an examination of the materiality of the di-
gital environment. Classifications depend on material storage systems. Manipulating digital
data allows for new working methods in creating an inventory, in particular new associations
among data offering new possibilities for bringing together isolated objects and collections
in unique ways.

KEYWORDS: CULTURAL HERITAGE PRACTICES;                 DATABASE;     INFORMATION     INFRASTRUCTURE;
CATALOGUING; MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame
Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 106-129.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1980
TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                        107




    In the last twenty years, social sciences engaged in cultural heritage institutions,
exhibitions and material culture have seen a renewed interest in museums as field
sites (Bouquet 2001)1. The introduction of new information technology has contrib-
uted to altering museum practices (Keene 1998; Knell 2003; Parry 2007), while
museums have incorporated and transformed the digital technologies adopted
(Cameron, Kenderdine 2007). In this context, new arrangements between subjects
and cultural objects have emerged (Salmond, Lythberg 2012).
    Looking behind the scenes at a cultural institution (MacDonald 2002), the Musée
du quai Branly in Paris, we examine how the museum transforms connections crea-
ted between objects, people, and documentary data within a computerized system
for managing collections. Following the theoretical line of “material turn” in social
sciences (Hicks, Beaudry 2010), these entanglements are the substance for the ma-
king of a culture heritage device. This article is the result of an ethnographic case
study I conducted at the Musée du quai Branly (Musée du quai Branly) in Paris bet-
ween 2006 and 2010 for my Doctorate in Ethnology on how the Musée du quai
Branly’s collections have been reconfigured through the process of digitizing its do-
cuments.
    At the time, the Musée du quai Branly, which was at the center of the debate on
the aesthetization of ethnographic artifacts2, offered the ideal context for conducting
fieldwork. In 2001, approximately one hundred objects from the Musée de
l’Homme, all deemed sculptural masterpieces, made their entry into the Pavillon des
Sessions (a branch of the Louvre), thus marking an intellectual turn associated with
the transfer of the Musée de l’Homme’s collections (with the exception of its
European collections) to the future Musée du quai Branly. At this moment the eth-
nographic artifact, once a scientific object, became a “work of art and civilization”.
The bonds of science forged at the Musée de l’Homme were undone and new ele-
ments woven together to form the heritage system of the museum examined in this
article.
    As we know, the usage and meaning of objects shift according to what are often
long and torturous biographies in which objects pass from one spatial, temporal, and
social context to the next several times over the course of their history (Bonnot
2002, 2014). In fact, the status of objects in a museum cannot be completely separa-
ted from that of the institution where they are displayed, particularly at a time when

1. I am grateful to the blind reviewers of this article for their theoretical suggestions and contribu-
tions that helped to extend the historical and ethical debate on the museum’s influence on the con -
struction of meaning.
2. See Nora 2007, 2008.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                               108


museums represent important elements of the cultural industry (Dias 2003) and the
art market, so that their meaning must be continually renegotiated.
    The creation of meanings has deep roots, for instance in France with the Louvre,
when the public art museum became the sign of a politically virtuous state (Duncan
1995: 22). Past and present connections between people, objects and data are
formed through the work of the museum, whose power rests in its ability to de-con-
textualize an object from its indigenous usages and meanings, and re-contextualize it
to serve as a metonym for the museum’s ideological narrative 3. In the case of the
non-European objects transferred from the “old” Musée de l’Homme (1938-2001)
to the Musée du quai Branly, the history of their collecting was associated with an
institutional endeavor to construct a colonial narrative of expansiveness and empire
(Conklin 2013). From a scientific point of view, these artifacts were conceived as
representing the diversity of culture of their provenances within a vision of the unity
of humanity. Yet objects cannot speak for themselves 4. Subjectivity, ideology, and
the curators’ and museum workers’ choice of exhibit designs will always contribute
to creating the specific meaning of an object. The museum constantly puts an object
under the pressure of a way of seeing, as explained by Svetlana Alpers (1991). Yet
the museum works to show the artifact in a particular way, thus erasing some as-
pects of the “life history” of the object (Appadurai 1986; Kopitoff 1986) while
making others emerge.
    Thus I argue that in order to know objects, one must examine the relationships
between them and the people who handle them within the framework, for example,
of computerized catalogues, as Chris Gosden and Frances Larson (2007) argue in
their study of the Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford. Their analysis made it possible to
consider objects in a collection as relational actors in the world of humans. In the
same vein and thanks to the work of Fernando Dominguez Rubio and Elizabeth Sil-
va (2013) on the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York, the trajectories of ob-
jects are confronted with a specific “object-position”, the physicality of which plays
a crucial role in defining relationships.
    The transfer of ethnographic artifacts is accompanied by a change in the modes
of classifying them. Classification is conceived here as a sort of system of attach-
ment (Hennion 2010, 2013) between objects, data, and people involved in creating
and handling new categories of data entry for collections and comprehending the
world.
    This article thus examines not what museums put on display but how they display
it, which challenges their informational and computer infrastructure. A database is


3. This paragraph is inspired by the suggestions of one reviewer.
4. For a critique of “object-based epistemology”, see Conn 1998.


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                        109


conceived here as a social space in which the interests of different actors in a mu-
seum converge5; in other words, a boundary infrastructure (Bowker, Star 1999;
Meyer 2009) and a site of digital configuration (Hine 2006) where knowledge mate-
rializes (Jacob 2007).
    The digitization practices at the Musée du quai Branly both establish and break
connections between different social actors, ultimately creating new meanings for
the objects. This is a longstanding practice in the museum world, but one which
takes on added complexity in the digital world, where categories move on and new
data emerges. Here, museum data are accumulated and reframed according to a new
social and heritage order. The database is the framework used to create the invent-
ory leading to the transformation of non-European ethnographic objects into objects
of “French heritage”, meaning a radical transformation of their legal status as herit-
age objects – they become indestructible, imprescriptible and inalienable. One
might ask then whether the database draws on a neoliberal ideology, particularly in
its tendency to extend the principles of privatization and commodification of all as-
pects of social life6. This is open to debate, yet certainly technology and society are
not separable. Furthermore, with this inseparability in mind, I aim to demonstrate,
in the ethnography of actions carried out on a computer, the materiality of relation-
ships created within the digital world of collections.
    When I first consulted objects using the museum database in 2006, the person in
charge of digital imagery who was helping me said: “The problem is that there was
no initial thesaurus for conducting research”7. In fact, finding objects depended on
how one looked for them, which in turn determined how one classified them. The
very mystery lay precisely in the absence of this classification. Such is the context in
which internal difficulties continually arose in the organization of data.
    In order to explore this issue, I completed two internships (lasting six months and
three months respectively) in the Computerized Inventory and Management of the
Collections division led by the Heritage and Collections Department at the Musée
du quai Branly. The internships were a way of gaining access to the institutional
fieldwork. There I was able to conduct my study by shadowing (Sachs 1993) the ad-
ministrator of the database on a daily basis, which involved examining his working
relationships through the database (work with curators, registrars, restorers, and so
on). This allowed me to explore various areas in the museum, administrative offices,
storerooms, as well as outside the museum walls, as I shall later explain.

5. See Flichy, Parasie 2013.
6. As suggested by a reviewer.
7. Head of digital imagery, my interview, spring 2006. A thesaurus is a structured vocabulary where
words are linked by a relationship of hierarchy or equivalency in relation to the data for the Musée du
quai Branly’s collection.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                           110


Updating: The Arrival of The Museum System Database (TMS)
    All the operations performed in the material and documentary transfer and pro-
cessing of approximately 300,000 objects from the Laboratoire d’ethnologie (ethno-
logy laboratory) at the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national des Arts
d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MNAAO) constitute the “collections project”.
    When the collections project began, a database was created to manage the collec-
tions. The database was run by The Museum System software program (TMS). This
software was provided by a Dutch company, the European subsidiary of the Amer-
ican software manufacturer. When used at the local museum of ethnography in Ley-
den, the program was tested and compared with various other systems for digitizing
data by the person in charge of the division of computerized inventory and manage-
ment. According to the official report on the collections project, “this product was
chosen for its capacity to meet the specific needs of the project – particularly when
it came to handling flow and emplacement – through reading barcode labels” (Naf-
fah, 2004: 18). The database administrator at the Musée du quai Branly said they
chose TMS because of the Structured Query Language format (SQL) used to create
it, a standardized pseudo computer language that could be understood by many pro-
grams and opened with Access. The architecture of the Access program made it
both easier to “create links” using a noncoded reading system, and possible to move
a large amount of data in a single operation, a factor that proved to be crucial during
the indexing process when the thesaurus “categories” were created. Indexing by con-
cepts and key words made it easier to search the data. The designer could thus list
the terms that appeared most frequently (statistical indexing) or select terms in a
thesaurus. TMS is more of a generic software program for museums than one de-
signed for a specific museum. The TMS Objects database was conceived as a work
tool for different departments in a museum and for the general public that can con-
sult much of the data on the internet.
    Choosing the TMS program constituted the first phase in the creation of the ob-
jects database. At this point, two alternatives emerged. The database could either be
constructed gradually using objects, or defined using written documentation from
the two museums that gave the Musée du quai Branly its collection. It was ulti-
mately decided to adopt the second solution, even though it was subsequently neces-
sary to put the documents in order according to the evolution of the museum.
    Once the work methods were defined, a service provider was selected to collect
the paper documentation in the form of records describing and recording the objects
from each museum (the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national des Arts
d’Afrique et d’Océanie). These were subsequently digitized, coded, and organized
into computer records. The documentation was then entirely computerized and


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                          111


presented in SQL format for insertion into the TMS database. In 2001, the database
was already active, but it continues to be revised to this day.
    The third phase involved the conception and development of what is known in
France as récolement – the verification and itemizing of objects in the inventory. A
team was formed with the aim of analyzing all the objects in both museums and re-
lating them to the computerized documentation (TMS record), to describe the ob-
jects and establish the state of their conservation. Once an object was “found”
thanks to its inventory number, the following chain of events took place: the object
was packed up and transported to the Hôtel Berlier, an industrial warehouse, where
it was unpacked, itemized, labeled, cleaned, and restored. It was then photographed
(3-D images were recorded for some objects), subjected to an anoxia treatment (to
get rid of insects), and temporarily stocked. Once packed up again, the object was
transported to a temporary storeroom at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Na-
tional Library of France) before being installed in glass cases or storerooms at the
Musée du quai Branly in 2006.
    The scientific staff at the museum reread the notices (the information on an ob-
ject contained in the records). They prioritized the four thousand or so objects selec-
ted for the museography. The task of correcting and scientifically enriching the
database constituted an open project. The database was built upon computerized
programs such as the Optical Character Recognition program (OCR) used for the
computerized reading of paper records, which my intermediary at the museum told
me led to “countless mistakes”. OCR is a software program connected to a scanner
that makes it possible to read a document “not by turning it into a photograph” but
by transforming it into a written document. In documents that were typed over a
century ago, “dirty characters” – due, for example, to smudged ink – presented a
problem. The software might interpret a number marked as “100” in smudged ink as
“188” or “166”. Given the gravity of the situation, it was collectively decided that a
team of experts composed of two or three people per geographical department
would be set up to examine all of the records and locate any eventual “aberrations”.
The descriptive documentation from the original museums contained historical in-
terpretations dating from the nineteenth century, such as use of the appellation “fet-
ish”, for example, which is no longer accepted today. It was therefore necessary to
set the database within a more contemporary frame of reference. The application of
museum filters in order to transmit terms considered to be worth indexing often en-
tailed rewriting such terms.
    The transfer thus calls for updating terms such as appellations, administrative ter-
ritories (toponyms), and the names of populations (ethnonyms). In the TMS Objects
database, there was a system of equivalent terms for the toponym and ethnonym
thesauruses for the researchers. The descriptive records of objects and the inventory


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                               112


records or collection records from the Musée de l’Homme were digitized and linked
to the TMS records with the help a multimedia link. These “links” are not available
on the internet, since they could disseminate the elements that were later corrected,
even if these were historical documents legitimizing an object’s place in the mu-
seum’s collection.

Detaching and Rematerializing the World
    In order to analyze the change concerning the ethnographic object and the data it
conveys, it is necessary to closely observe the changes in inventory systems between
the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée du quai Branly; that is, the passage from pa-
per records kept in cabinets at the Musée de l’Homme to the TMS record at the
Musée du quai Branly. This passage has meant that people have become detached
from objects, objects have become detached from data, and data has become de-
tached from the person who created it. Nonetheless, contrary to the myth that digit-
ization opened everything up (which is tantamount to believing that all data is
linked), the new attachment between data and objects occurs within the creation of
new connections between actors at the Musée du quai Branly (Beltrame 2012)8.
    One must first view the inventory system as a system of classification that also
depends on a system of material classification (for example, paper records at the
Musée de l’Homme) as a technology used to put the world in order. In terms of mu-
seum classifications at the beginning of last century, the creation of records for the
structured elements of a collected group of items was one step in a process of objec-
tifying a culture seen as “other”, or classifying in order to separate and exhibit (de
l’Estoile 2007a: 137). During the early twentieth century, handling the paper records
– first at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) and later at the Musée de
l’Homme – was part of an epistemology of collecting that structured nascent ethno-
graphic activity and ethnology (ivi).
    The Musée de l’Homme, inspired by the field of natural history, marked a discip-
linary unification of ethnography and linguistics on the one hand and physical an-
thropology on the other (Zerilli 1998). This unitary conception led to what Paul
Rivet has called “geographic” specialization (de L’Estoile 2007b: 742). This unifica-
tion was based on the physical union of work spaces as a “museum-laboratory”
(Blanckaert 2015). The additional storerooms of departmental laboratories, where
the documentation was kept, were work spaces for scientists who contributed to
classify the collections. In accordance with the paradigm inherited from the
Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, the field appears as an extension of the mu-
seum involved in creating an encyclopedic inventory of the world’s cultures

8. On the task of creating thesaurus “categories”, see Beltrame 2012a.


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                   113


(Bourguet 1997). The field materializes at the Musée de l’Homme through a system
of documentary classification in cultural areas composed of paper records indexed
in files that are classified in wall cabinets. These pieces of furniture – which underlie
a technical, cognitive, administrative, and scientific reconfiguration – are a “thinking
system” as well as a system of knowledge (Gardey 2008: 171).
    This system of material classification relayed a thought system characteristic of
ethnographic collections, divided into geographical areas and techniques. The classi-
fications organized cultural events, showing how humans observed in different con-
texts and periods transformed matter into finished products. Each department man-
aged its collections, and curator-researchers went from the documentary space to the
storerooms in a movement of spatial continuity and freedom of action. They dealt
with objects and records as needed. With the transfer of the Musée du quai Branly’s
collections, most researchers did not follow the objects.
    The Musée du quai Branly breaks away from the heritage of the Muséum nation-
al d’histoire naturelle. While asserting its ambition to be a research center for the so-
cial sciences, it proposes a conception of multidisciplinarity that, when the museum
opened, associated aesthetics, art history, anthropology, and history. In this new in-
stitution, the unification of art and ethnology requires that a division according to
geographical areas be maintained, which is also in keeping with the divisions adop-
ted by the art market. The aesthetization of ethnographic artifacts was accompanied
by a new system of heritage, put in place notably with the creation of the inventory
deposited at the Service des Musées de France en 20139.
    The classification of objects at the Musée de l’Homme was the fruit of work car-
ried out by researchers who were members of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie (Centre
national de recherche scientifique), some of whom acted as curators. Today, these
collections are governed by laws pertaining to French national museums (Delaporte
2006: 74). They are therefore subject to the procedures of the former Direction des
Musées de France, now known as the Service des Musées de France (SMF), under
the aegis of the Ministère de la Culture. The depositing of the inventory in 2013
marked the inscription of collections from the Musée de l’Homme within the Musée
du quai Branly, which became the new depository of the national collections 10. In
fact, this change in legal category from scientific inventory to heritage inventory led
to a new “poetics of museum display” (Karp, Lavine 1991) that proposed bringing
together objects according to their formal qualities.
    At the Musée du quai Branly, the records appearing in response to a request were
not organized as a scientific discourse of arborescent relationships with other cat-

9. On the task of creating links between objects and inventory, see Beltrame 2012b.
10. In the case of the Musée National d’Art d’Afrique et d’Océanie, an inventory had already been
deposited at the Ministère de la Culture.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                           114


egories, as they were at the Musée de l’Homme. No analogy could be made between
opening a drawer at the Musée de l’Homme and opening a record at the Musée du
quai Branly. At the Musée de l’Homme, looking up “Dogons” brought up all the
thematic records of the geographical file concerning the objects linked to this popu-
lation. The records for Dogon objects were arranged according to criteria based on
geographical classification and technique, which were developed by researchers over
the course of the last century. Similarly, looking up the term “Dogon” in the data-
base by entering “ethnonym” (thesaurus) could reveal all the records indexed under
“Dogon”. But this latter request involving recurring terms meant that all the objects
that came up were not situated within the prior narrative logic.
    The computer infrastructure prescribes modes of accumulating and classifying
data that lead to new practices when it comes to handling the TMS Objects record.
At the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée de l’Homme, the wall
cabinets containing various files organized data in space. The information concern-
ing each object was placed in the space devoted to the department being referenced,
where the magnitude of a collection was visible. At the Musée du quai Branly, the
TMS computer record for an object allows for the accumulation of information and
diverse operations, including registration, inventory, documentation, condition re-
port, and traceability. At the Musée de l’Homme, the drawers contained the records,
and they formed a panoptical system for building knowledge around the collections.
The TMS Objects record is what actually contained the classifications (headings and
thesaurus). In the new system, the TMS Objects record is not simply the sum of all
documentary elements found in the various paper records at the Musée de l’Homme,
but the digital avatar of the object from the collection with which the curator works.
    In the recreation of links between the TMS Objects records at the Musée du quai
Branly, constituting groups could involve taking up categories developed by collect-
ors at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Musée de l’Homme, but the
records (and therefore the objects) could also be connected to other groups de-
veloped by curators or those in charge of the database. On the one hand, an object
could be indexed within the TMS Objects database in a different category from the
one built by the collector, whose name appears on the inventory record; on the other
hand, it could also be entered under several categories. The multiple classifications
to which each object belongs are not the result of a desire to centralize data that
would prevail over the restitution of structured groups by collectors at the Musée de
l’Homme. In this context, it is instead a matter of considering the indexation effected
by the head of the TMS Objects database as a response to intersecting logic, includ-
ing: computer logic, for instance searching under “recurring” terms or the possibility
of moving a mass of data during a single operation; the logic of conservation and
traceability, in the case of creating object categories linked to the organization of


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                          115


their physical location, itself organized by material (for example, whether or not it is
perishable); and scientific logic, in order to meet the needs formulated by curators
(for example, when a temporary exhibition is being created).

Waxing Nostalgic: Tracking an Object
   New connections have also been created between objects and storage spaces.
Céline Rosselin and Marie-Pierre Julien (2005) have proposed tracking objects in
order to note how their social and symbolic statuses gradually evolve according to
their biographical trajectory. In this section, I will explore, in the vein of Dominguez
Rubio and Silva (2013), another level of tracking involving moving objects in the
storeroom space. This concerns viewing the object through its barcode, which per-
mits the recording of each movement within the museum (traceability). A new type
of attachment is created between the object and space through the barcode. This
also amounts to a physical detachment between object and curator, whereby the cur-
ator’s visual memory becomes confused due to this shift from the “warehouse as
laboratory” at the Musée de l’Homme to the new institution’s “safe” – like store-
room.
   Barcodes originated in the industrial system, and their use in consumer products
is well known. The barcode label was adopted to process the roughly 300,000 ob-
jects currently held at the Musée du quai Branly. By attaching an object in the col-
lection to a digitized record using a barcode label, a new technical system for man-
aging the collection began to emerge, one where curators are no more than actors
handling objects. The project of transferring, processing, and arranging objects is
the job of the museum’s registrar department (installers, restorers, and so on) and
the external service providers it solicits. This undertaking can involve students in an-
thropology, archaeology, art history, museology and documentation, who all per-
form different tasks according to a standardized protocol for processing each object,
including writing condition reports, cleaning the object, administering the anoxia
treatment, taking photographs, packing, transporting, and applying barcode labels.
   When the barcode scanner is used, the record keeps track of the object’s move-
ments and current location. The movements are recorded as visible lines under the
heading “location history”. When the place where the object is kept is defined, the
curators use the record in which its digital photo appears. Indeed, access to store-
rooms when projects are undertaken is subject to constraints linked to the organiza-
tion of the task of arranging the objects on the shelves, set by the teams of service
providers and the department managing the storerooms at the Musée du quai
Branly. The curator does not work with the barcodes and rarely works with the ob-
ject’s computerized number; instead she uses the TMS Objects record and the in-
ventory number. Registrars and service providers are the ones who refer to the bar-

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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                                           116


codes and physically handle the objects. This makes curators nostalgic. Such nostal-
gia for the object is also a nostalgia for how storerooms used to be organized.
   The storerooms project was equipped with a plan for preventing the risk of flood-
ing: “Plan de Prévention du Risque d’Inondation”, or “PPRI”. Curators place objects
in PPRI 1, PPR 2 and PPRI 3 categories, in order of priority for evacuating objects
in the event of an emergency and at a rate established by the project manager for
each PPRI category. The Oceania storerooms were among the first to be completed,
and the curators were given the opportunity to go down and see them: “It’s still a bit
abstract for us because we do not yet have a habit of coming down here on a regular
basis, walking around, and making the place ours. It’s still very foreign to us”
(Mélanie, my interview, march 2008). In fact, the way the storerooms are organized
makes the objects both visible and invisible. The priority objects, which are placed
in the first rows at the front of the storeroom, are easily located. However, their
packaging, which is necessary in case they need to be removed in an emergency, is
such that they must be kept in boxes, thus making them invisible. Compactus
shelving also contributes to making them invisible: “What’s difficult for us is pre-
cisely that the PPRI organization is geographically and stylistically disorienting,
meaning that everything is mixed up” (Mélanie, my interview, march 2008). For
Mélanie, styling makes it possible to determine the geographical location of an ob-
ject.
      Seeing how motifs are put together, the types of materials employed for an object, and
      combining them with the motifs covering this object in formal lines lets me determine
      whether the object comes from Melanesia, New Guinea, or the Middle Sepik and that,
      if that’s how it has evolved, then it’s probably an Iatmul object! That’s it! The task in-
      volves a combination of reading different elements, how they’re fashioned, what mater-
      ials are used, what motifs are present on the object, all of which collide with your visu-
      al memory! It involves things you have already seen (Mélanie, my interview, march
      2008).

   Storerooms organized according to how things are divided and packaged accord-
ing to PPRI contribute to the loss of the stylistic markers specific to a given context.
   Although Mélanie confirmed that she is able to move about in the storerooms,
she said: “You can’t, however, move the objects! We’re not the ones taking care of
traceability and all that, so you look but can’t touch, meaning that you don’t move
the objects because it creates a headache!” (Mélanie, my interview, march 2008).
The relationship between “object” and “shelf” is recorded at the computer level. If
someone changes an object’s physical location without noting its new address, it also
messes up the memory of the object’s digital avatar. Even though the object can no
longer be manipulated informally, it needs to be put back in the same place. In the
hazy space and time of this initial arrangement of objects, Melanie – who remained


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                   117


hopeful about visually reappropriating where objects are placed in the storerooms –
said she took advantage of invitations from the storerooms management department
to familiarize herself with how the rooms and objects are organized.
    The art of memory, especially visual memory, is undone here (Yates 1966). Vis-
ibility is no longer essential when it comes to memorization, since computerized
traceability departs from the curators’ system of visual memory. Along with
memory, the task of visually linking a series of objects in space also disappears.
Thus curators’ working methods change along with the previous relationships
between objects in the storeroom space. Other methods emerge as the curator who
enters the storeroom creates a new mental map, notices new classifications in space
(such as the PPRI), knowing that the objects prioritized in the event of evacuation
are found at the front of the storeroom. Ways at the back are the last objects to be
removed. Nonetheless, whether work involves the object or its digital avatar, each
modification or addition must be documented and justified. An object’s physical po-
sition in the storeroom, as well as the position of data in the TMS database, is de-
termined within a system today that curbs the curator’s autonomy of action.

Back to the Future: Resolutions
    New links are also established with the past. During the transfer of the collection
and verification of the inventory (récolement), the paper records were digitized. Cer-
tain records, however, were not found. These “orphaned” objects without records
were recorded as “X” by the Musée du quai Branly and were inventoried using a se -
quential computerized number (for example, “X378783”)11. When the museum
opened in 2006, it included some 20,000 objects recorded as “X”. Next to these ob-
jects, the database harbored 27,000 digital records that had not been verified in the
inventory (or récolé). A record that is non récolé is one that has not been associated
with any object but which has nonetheless been digitized within the TMS database.
It circulates in the database just like an object would. According to Denise, head of
the TMS database, some objects may correspond to records that are non récolé. An
“X project” has been created to resolve this issue and is coordinated by Flore, a
member of the Computerized Inventory and Management of the Collections divi-
sion at the Musée du quai Branly.
    Once the traces provided by previous inventories at the Musée de l’Homme are
digitized, the history of objects that have lost their connection to a collection during
the transfer to the Musée du quai Branly must be found. Those objects with no ap-
parent connection are recorded as “X” by the new institution. These “X” objects


11. Object X378783 corresponds to a pair of leather bracelets in the Africa heritage unit.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                                           118


must be reassociated with a collection for them to be entered into the museum in-
ventory using a standardized number.
   The inventory was created using the digital objects, by the museum’s new actors
as well as the service providers. Indeed, the technological change occurred within a
social context already in movement: new professional tasks arose, characteristic of
those who work on computers to trace objects recorded as “X”. Thus the role of
“Xologist” (Xologue), a name coined by the institution, emerged.
   Within this project, the possibilities of placing requests and of handling and har-
monizing data produce different methods of creating a connection between object
and collection12. Standardization can create new inventory numbers or recreate the
match of an object recorded as “X” with an available inventory number in the TMS
and Docmuse databases. Docmuse is the database used by the Documentation and
Archives service at the Musée du quai Branly, run by the Media Library depart-
ment. These databases are treated as excavation sites. As Michel Foucault observed
(1969), methods of order form the bases of knowledge and the archaeological
foundations of its possibility. By defining the archive as ‘the system of its function-
ing’ Foucault asserted that the system, far from serving a total history, is what allows
one to distinguish between discourses in their many existences.
    With the permission of the museum’s project manager, I was able to observe the
task of researching the objects recorded as “X” carried out by an agency providing
the service13. In offices located on the ground floor of a building in Paris, usually
three people work on a computer to reestablish connections between objects and
collections. As noted earlier, the Musée du quai Branly calls them “Xologists”. They
are the “little hands of the informational infrastructure” 14 that on a daily basis gener-
ate the museum’s heritage inventory. Before the protocol for researching objects re-
corded as “X” was put in place, the head of the database set up meetings with curat-
ors to introduce them to the Xologists, some of whom they knew already.
   The Xologists are constantly in contact with the museum’s project manager Flore,
who was recently transferred to the communications department. Through her, and

12. There are three resolutions for objects recorded as “X”. The first is the verification (récolement)
of a record and the object to which it belongs, or the matching of an object and a number from the
old inventories from the Musée de l’Homme or the Musée National d’Art d’Afrique et d’Océanie,
which leads to the standardization of the object number. “Collection tracking” is used when the col-
lection an object belongs to is located, but the object’s original numbering in the collection cannot be
found. “Retrospective inventory” occurs when the standardization of the object’s inventory number
takes place by assigning an Musée du quai Branly number created from scratch.
13. The external service providers, who have university degrees in art history, documentation, and
anthropology, provide services that replace the previous practices of curators at the Musée de
l’Homme.
14. This refers to the title of the dossier by Denis, Pontille 2012.


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                               119


via the interface used to research objects recorded as “X”, the Xologists also com-
municate with curators. If necessary, they make plans to meet in the museum store-
rooms in order to peruse the objects laid out on tables by registrars keeping track of
their traceability.
   The interface was created by Oscar, the administrator of the database, who du-
plicated the data according to a different method of organization. Some headings
feature the standard record of an object (appellation, description, measurements and
so on), while others are specific to the “X project”. The lower part of the record
presents new fields, notably concerning the Xologist’s research, including the Xolo-
gist’s identifying trigram, the level of certainty concerning the match between an ob-
ject and an inventory number, the return to an object, validation, and so on. The in-
formation regarding resolution is filed by the Xologist under the tab marked “Notes”
according to the standard display for the resolved object recorded as “X”. The re-
cord of the “X search” is then erased. The standardization of the inventory number
systematically leads to the disappearance of the record for the object recorded as
“X”.
   Over the course of a few days, I followed the work of a few Xologists 15, including
that of Pierre and Françoise. Pierre studied Amerindian anthropology and was in
charge of resolving objects recorded as “X” for the Americas. He has worked as a
service provider for the museum since the collections project began and is now on
his third project. He seemed overwhelmed by a heap of folders of various colors
piled up next to the computer on his desk. They were the current research folders
for the objects recorded as “X”.
   Pierre began by apologizing for the “disorder” caused by his folders. It became
clear that this accumulation was the driving force behind his analysis. He creates
folders for each object recorded as “X”, which he classifies by country – which
means that in most cases he is referring to the collections. Indeed, a sort of equival-
ence between collector (and therefore the assigned collection) and geographical area
was established during ethnographic missions in the twentieth century. The collec-
tions of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro referenced a collector’s mission on
different territories, and were recorded, object by object, in the common inventory
register. At the Musée de l’Homme, the collections were primarily managed by geo-
graphical departments, each of which produced its own inventory. Pierre must con-
textualize the objects within the collections identified with the collectors.
   In order to describe his work, I will introduce a specific case involving an object
recorded as “X”: a group of fragments, one of which was temporarily recorded by
the institution as “Z”. The TMS database holds the objects and elements recorded as


15. For a deeper understanding of the different tasks of Xologists, see Beltrame 2014.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                                             120


“Z”. “Z” is a category that identifies all non-heritage objects. Objects recorded as
“Z” are not registered in the inventory deposited at the Service des Musées de
France; these include architectural decorative elements in the Musée du quai
Branly’s building on the Rue de l’Université (for example, the column painted by an
Australian artist in the museum’s library, or the ceilings of the building’s four
floors). Legally, these elements are not part of the museum’s collection. All objects
recorded in the database, whether protected by heritage laws or not, coexist in the
same flux of data but are named differently and have different destinies: the former
have to be transferred over time to future generations, the latter (the “Z”) can be
changed or disappear, depending on the wishes of the museum.
   Flore, the museum manager for the “X project”, shared the following concerns
about the presence of fragments and inventoried elements at the Musée du quai
Branly recorded as “X”:
       Among the objects recorded as “X”, there are many like that, bits of wood, bits of
       thread that were recovered near objects and about which [people] were unsure if they
       belonged to the objects or if they were just bits of wood placed on the shelf; they
       therefore kept everything and recorded it as “X”, saying, “You never know”. Then they
       put everything in the “fragments group” or the “elements group”. So either we manage
       to find the object to which the fragment or element belongs 16, and, best case scenario,
       we put it right back with the object, we tie a “knot”, we associate it, and never discuss
       it again; or we record this object as “Z”, and it is identified, and we notify the restorer
       that it needs to be restored as necessary to go with the object of which it is a part.
       Through TMS, they are linked (an entry text associates them), referred to each other.
       Normally, TMS links a fragment to its source object, as we say – the object from
       which it originates (Flore, my interview, may 2010).

   The link between a fragment recorded as “X” or “Z” and the “source object” is
digital. During the physical reassociation, “X” and “Z” disappear.
   The case presented by Pierre belongs to this category of fragments initially reas-
sembled in a group:
       That one was complicated because it’s a group of small pieces… X391237 and the
       fragments that had been put together did not necessarily belong to the same
       collection… now the group no longer exists, and the fragments have been separated.

   Pierre, who knows the Brazil collections well, searched for these fragments
among the Brazilian unbaked clay figurines. He also referred to a note on the verific-
ation (récolement) of a small group that was written when the collections were trans-
ferred. He was thus able to resolve some of the objects recorded as “X”. “Among
nine objects recorded under a single “X”, three have been separated into three “X”s,

16. It should be mentioned that, according to the institution’s vocabulary, a “fragment” is a piece that
has accidentally detached from an object, and an “element” is one part of a composite object.


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                      121


and there has also been a return to the object”. Among these three objects, two were
then attributed: one was reassociated with its object (pot and small plug), and the
other, the fragment of a seat back, was recorded as “Z” while waiting to be reat -
tached to its physical object. There remains one ceramic fragment to identify.
      The only one that was not found is X436277… I thought it could correspond with…
      but no… one should not trust the chromatic variation of photos too much. For me, it’s
      perhaps a zoomorphic bowl in the shape of a tortoise, you see… First I thought it was
      more simple because it referred to animal forms, but there are a lot of those, in fact.
      The return to the object for verification would presuppose taking out a number of ob-
      jects to compare them to the pieces… So the decision was taken to place them in “ret-
      rospective inventory” because it was too time-consuming for a single case; a reasoned
      decision was made, knowing that someone will perhaps stumble upon this again later
      (Pierre, my interview, december 2010).

   In carrying out the investigation, Pierre usually begins by researching the col-
lector’s name and then his or her collections by comparing them with other requests
by material or appellation. He knows the names of the most important collectors.
      It just so happens that they are usually ethnologists, so I know a lot of people who
      have worked on Amazonia… When I am [working] on the Jules Crevaux collections,
      for example, I know that it will correspond to the north and west of Amazonia; it will
      be Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, and then Bolivia… When I am working on a collection
      and I see a name, I know the geographical provenance of these collections… It also
      helps me to remember them… That’s why I manage to remember a certain number of
      collectors, because I already knew them; otherwise, there are so many that it’s
      difficult… For Mesoamerica, I know a lot less; I only know the major collectors
      (Pierre, my interview, december 2010).

    The handling of digital material makes it possible to access countless data no one
can possibly remember. Through his work with digital and paper folders, Pierre can
develop analyses providing new clues.
    The practices adopted by Pierre – and the Xologists in general – fragment the
data accumulated and stocked in the databases in which they circulate in a disag-
gregated way in order to be recomposed. Pierre handles his documentary corpus by
geographical area, while other Xologists adopt a method using types of objects.
    When I met Françoise, she presented the case of object X368933, a spear with
an old number written in the “substitute number”17 section of the TMS Objects re-
cord: “It’s a spear that has a substitute number from the Musée de l’Homme, so the
first step was to conduct a search using the number “*50.76.6*”. In the database, the
“*” (asterisk) enables one to find all of the inventory numbers containing the numer-

17. Former Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro or Musée de l’Homme number marked on the
object and noted in the TMS Objects record.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                                             122


ical sequence “50.76.6”. “And nothing came up!” she exclaimed. She also tried
breaking the number down into “*50.76*” and “*76.6*”, but this case did not yield
“any relevant result” either.
   At this stage, she assumed there had been an error in transcribing the substitute
number.
      In this case we conduct a search using question marks in the numbers… I made a few
      attempts, and, for the “*50xx6*”, in the end I got 404 results. Then I chose for them
      to be displayed as a list in order to be able to identify them. The first thing I did was to
      classify them by Heritage Unit in order to find “Africa non récolé”, and then I went
      straight to see if, among the Musée de l’Homme records that are non récolé, there
      wouldn’t eventually be any… And right there… I found a record that was non récolé,
      and it was the “71.1950.75”… The transcription error most likely occurred during the
      collections project… you might see the number written on the object and confuse the
      numbers, you know… In this case, “76” was written instead of “75” for the collection
      number. I checked the description – plus I had a beautiful sketch [of the object] – and
      the measurements matched… It’s level 1 on the scale of certainty of the record for
      “search for objects recorded as ‘x’” (Françoise, my interview, december 2010).

    She is currently dealing with a group of objects recorded as “X” that have no ref-
erences to any previous inventory, and her searches often end up with the option val-
idated by the curators of retrospective inventory. According to Urry (1995), the
construction of the past is always mediated by a person’s ways of understanding the
world. These are cultural and historical ways, argues Urry, and sociotechnical forms,
as suggested here, of creating new connections in the world. The absence or weak-
ness of clues generally leads curators to opt for recording an object from scratch
(such as the retrospective inventory). Thus the history of the object is recorded from
its institutional present (digital or otherwise), creating new traces instead of just
finding them.

The New Texture of the Past
    The inventory, as well as the marking, can be unreliable (Kavanagh 1999). With-
in the framework of the current project, Xologists and curators are led to constantly
negotiate an object’s possible history. The possibility of coming back to it at another
moment by other researchers allows them to overcome the fear of assignation. The
TMS database, which can be continually modified, perpetually indexes an object’s
characteristics. The sorting of associations between objects and collections takes
place within the database. That which can be patrimonialized is the result of a
massive transfer of heterogeneous objects placed on the shelves of the former store-
room. Even if their nature is not always obvious, they have all been recorded in the
TMS database. The moving of objects made possible by managing the TMS data-


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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                           123


base accompanies an attempt to be exhaustive. When it is difficult to make a clear-
cut decision about where an object in a collection belongs due to a lack of support-
ing documentary elements, retrospective inventory makes it possible to resolve the
issue. It is a documentary tool for handling doubt concerning an object’s reliability
within a context where all registered objects can be patrimonialized a priori. Reliab-
ility is thus generated by the social and technical system rooted in a specific context
at a given moment. Even when the object is physically absent, the records that are
non récolé can themselves be patrimonialized, since they live in the same environ-
ment as the objects’ digital avatars.
    Digital archiving modifies the research trajectories and the regime surrounding
the presence of a document and an object by lending the past a new texture, one that
is always malleable but in a different way. As Geoffrey C. Bowker asserts:
       Our past has always been malleable, but now it is malleable with a new viscosity. The
       new texture of our past is that we can go from the global to the local and back again
       with great speed. […]. It is not that we have the ability to aggregate brute numbers –
       that have been available since the early nineteenth century at least in a number of do-
       mains. It is rather that we can aggregate the data along multiple different dimensions
       and perform complex operations over that set of dimensions. It is the pleats and the
       folds of our data rather than their number that constitute their texture (Bowker 2005:
       7).

    The digitalization of previous inventories makes it possible for new forms of ex-
perience between people, objects, and their histories to emerge. On the one hand,
the Xologist works with a digital avatar that brings together a bundle of possible in-
dexations in an environment with specific characteristics. When matching a collec-
tion, the Xologist manipulates data by its folds (Deleuze 1988) 18, which are treated
here as the data’s relational capacity to be arranged in different groups and on mul-
tiple levels. Recording and the logics of renumbering are currently generated by a
network of people and objects that has been reconfigured within the new institution,
where new “coherencies” are produced.
       That’s why we wait for the end of the project to do it, in order to maintain a certain co-
       herency if other objects are found in the process, to keep all the spoons together, that
       sort of thing… But the person in charge of the database does not quite know yet how
       she’s going to organize herself. A priori, that’s the direction she should give in order to
       make sure that the objects don’t get dispersed again, when we’ve managed to find some
       sort of guiding thread (Flore, my interview, may 2010).




18. With the concept of the fold, Gilles Deleuze (1988) described arrangements as “agencements”.
In accordance with the twisting of this infinitely movable line, the fold constitutes distinct domains
by connecting them.


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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                             124


    Here, object categories appear as real data-entry systems embodied by the ob-
served collections, and as modes of organizing and configuring the French heritage.
Xologists use the physical traces of inventories as a means of rebuilding the pasts of
objects in the Musée du quai Branly’s collection through the mediation of the TMS
database. Practices for creating the heritage inventory in the new institution are
rooted in a concrete process, at once in the space, the materials, and the movements
of Xologists. Recording and classifying the analyses of objects recorded as “X” in
the TMS database pave the way for building heritage. While every heritage system
is explicitly devoted to conservation, the acts of classifying never cease to transform
it, and make themselves the subject of new archival and conservational practices.
Such practices demonstrate that museums, which seem devoted to objects and the
past, are also concerned with the organization of the present and the social relation-
ships this entails. Inventory involves the collective efforts of those in charge of the
collections and service providers, which are mediated by the administrators of the
TMS database. Everyone works together toward the resolution of objects recorded
as “X” in the database, a digital space that connects them – sometimes even before
they have had the chance to meet in the basement of the museum.

Conclusion
   If we assume that the work of the museum has always included the re-ordering
of the world, the digitization of collections then follows a longstanding museologic-
al practice of de- and re-contextualizing objects. Yet it complexifies it in new ways.
While object categories at the Musée de l’Homme are undone, at the Musée du quai
Branly new intersections of sets of items are formed by a network of logics: inform-
ational, curatorial, scientific and of heritage. The digital avatar of the object is more
than the sum of its documenting operations. It becomes the object with which curat-
ors and other museum professionals work. It also contains its own categories. The
new data organization is accompanied by the reconfiguration of storeroom spaces al-
lowed for by the barcode, thus undoing the act of visual memorization by the curat-
or or researcher. The digital avatar records its own position, and the digital memory
must be preserved to find the object in the space, entering data and taking care not
to mess up the relationship between the object and its physical position.
   In this sequence of breaking old connections and creating new ones, a political
shift from science to art occurs, with the creation and deposit of the new collection
inventory protected by laws of heritage. The act of putting the heritage objects in or-
der is accompanied by a reconfiguration of social order. While the Xologist and oth-
er service providers, for instance, create a connection between object and collection
and establish a new patrimonial order, the “social” order between database users is
stabilized, including the distance between the object and the curator and the emer-

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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                        125


gence of other institutional roles (or service providers) in the processing of an ob-
ject. Observing such process, one can see how the history of an object is created,
not rediscovered, by a new sociotechnical system. This is not about the authority of
the past resurfacing, but about the inscription of its traces within the institutional
present.




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CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS                                                                   126




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TIZIANA NICOLETTA BELTRAME                                                                  127

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                                         2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 106-128
                                           2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 106-129




 Tiziana Nicoletta BELTRAME is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laboratoire d’Ethnolo-
 gie et Sociologie Comparative (LESC-CNRS), University of Paris Ouest Nanterre and at
 the Department of Philosophy, Social Sciences and Education, University of Perugia,
 Italy. She is the recipient of a research grant from the Franco-Italian University and from
 the Axa Research Fund. She also contributes to Artmap, a platform featuring the work of
 anthropologists, arts and science historians and practitioners exploring new ways of under-
 standing ambient media and material culture.




                                                                 Tiziana Nicoletta BELTRAME
                                                   Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
                                                                       belletrame@gmail.com




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame
Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 106-129.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1980
