Mapping Philippine Material Culture is an online Open Access map and archive of Philippine objects housed around the world. A link has also been added into the Resources page.
This digital humanities project is a visual inventory of Philippine objects dating to the mid-20th century which are in holdings of museums and private collections outside of the Philippines. The open access online inventory gathers photographic and textual information about these objects and aggregates the data in an easy-to- navigate, all-in-one sortable portal.
Beyond the creation of a consolidated database of baseline information culled from holding institutions’ photos and catalogue entries, the project also introduces annotations by respected Philippine scholars for object entries that may be inaccurate, misinformed or archaic ( e.g. the use of Negrito, or in some cases, the pan-regional term Igorot, where a more specific ethno-linguistic group might be identified.)
Additionally, the project also hopes to bring together discrete objects from different museums and curating digital exhibits that bring thematic links to surface. The curation of these links and the tangents within the global database will draw out substantive correlations, deploying cross-referenced, inter-textual, trans-disciplinary analyses. The site hopes to open a discursive field around these widely-dispersed Philippine objects and expect to contribute to filling myriad lacunae in this field.
An ever-expanding project, work on the database will involve continually seeking to identify, document and annotate as much data that is made available. We anticipate contributions from scholars of material culture studies, history, art history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, and the other human sciences.
