Hindsight 20/21

The holdings of the Harvard Art Museums are part of a larger collection: that of Harvard University, itself a collection of departments and schools, institutes and centers, laboratories, libraries, and museums. Varied in shape, scope, and size, these component parts have their roots in the curriculum: in what we teach and learn as a community of researchers, teachers, and students.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the protest movement ignited by the killing of George Floyd have surely left their mark on the curriculum during the academic year 2020-2021. But what sort of mark? How have course offerings or registration and enrollment patterns shifted? How has the balance between in-person and on-line courses changed? What new alignments between disciplines are emerging? In what ways has the student body been most affected? How have the historical contours of the university changed?

These are some of the questions that the culminating event of Curatorial A(i)gents, 20/21 Hindsight, will address. Comprised of a series of data visualizations, data science, and machine learning analyses, 20/21 Hindsight will be built within the framework of Curricle Lens, the research wing of metaLAB’s curricular discovery and exploration tool Curricle, illuminating insights about the University’s resumption of activities during the academic year 2020-2021.

Curatorial A(i)gents presents a series of machine-learning-based experiments with museum collections and data developed by members and affiliates of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a creative research group working in the networked arts and humanities.