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Enriching Exhibition Stories: Adding Voices to Quire

Enriching Exhibition Stories: Adding Voices to Quire (project reference AH/Y006011/1) is a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, the Ashmolean Museum, and Yale University.

Project Outputs

  • The Quire Linked Art Extension fetches data from a Linked Art API and merges object records and images (via IIIF) into a Quire project. For installation instructions and comprehensive documentation, visit this page.
  • Dr. Andrew Shapland has reused materials created for his 2023 exhibition Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean within new Quire-generated learning resources for the permanent Aegean World gallery. Visit this page for access to the the resulting resources and to learn more.
  • Explore our Training page for a comprehensive tutorial on using the Quire Linked Art Extension.
  • Find out more about our outreach trial with the Ashmolean and Rumble Museums and Cheney School, including lesson plans and accompanying teaching resources.
  • Read our May 2024 survey of existing Quire use.
  • Check out latool.js, a script that fetches and processes Linked Art from a provided URL.

Project Activities

  • Enriching Exhibition Stories (EES2) at CIDOC 2024. EES2 presented the results of its Labyrinth and Rumble Museum trials at the International Council of Museums CIDOC 2024 conference in November 2024. Read more...
  • Outreach Trial. In October 2024, the EES2 project collaborated with colleagues at the Ashmolean and Rumble Museums, and staff at Cheney School in Oxford, to trial a programme of activities in which students gathered observations and interpretations to create their own digital stories. Read more...
  • Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. EES2 was pleased to hold a ‘train-the-trainer’ workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, in which we introduced the project’s Linked Art extension for Quire. Read more...
  • Getty Quire Workshop. In June 2024, Enriching Exhibition Stories ran a Quire user workshop with our partners at Getty, followed by associated activities at the Getty Villa and IIIF conference. Read more…
  • MSc Practicum Reports. In Trinity Term 2024, the EES2 project was delighted to host two students reading for their MSc in Digital Scholarship.
    • How easily can Linked Art data be retrieved for inclusion in Quire? Sasha Tan considers modelling, versioning, and local practice, and how software tools can help. Read more…
    • How do people use Quire? Thorsteinn Imi King reports on a comparative evaluation of Quire publications and the benefits of Linked Art for digital curators and editors. Read more...
  • Quire Linked Art Extension Documentation. Documentation for the Linked Art Extension for Quire developed by the Enriching Exhibition Stories project is now available.

Project Summary

Traditional exhibition catalogues are extremely informative documents, but may be daunting, perhaps even intimidating, both to those who write them and those who read them. Enriching Exhibition Stories will help museums more easily create supplemental digital forms of exhibition narrative which speak to, and can be voiced by, a wider and more diverse range of perspectives than those who usually engage with exhibitions.

This project builds upon a successful international collaboration between leading researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK and Yale University in the US, alongside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Yale Center for British Art. It draws upon insights from the same team during their research for the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project, which linked and contextualised objects as they move between institutions through exhibitions, combining structured museum collections data with 'rich text' such as newspaper articles and social media.

The project uses the open source Quire software, developed by Getty, which creates rich documents, including exhibition catalogues, but which are easy to author, build, deploy and maintain, even by smaller institutions and individuals. Enriching Exhibition Stories adds capabilities to Quire so that it works with Linked Art -- the structured data used in the earlier research project -- and through it enable new forms of Digital Stories.

Enriching Exhibition Stories works in partnership with museums to ensure our work is embedded in professional best practice as well as software, both through an ongoing dialogue to define requirements, and through two trials of the enhanced-Quire software.

In the first trial we will work with the curator of the recent 'Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality' exhibition at the Ashmolean, to create a Digital Story connecting items from the exhibition through social media commentary.

In our second trial students at the Rumble Museum, Cheney School, will create Digital Stories which reflect their own personal interpretations of exhibition material and context.

Our experience from both these trials will be coalesced in a 'train the trainers' session for museum professionals at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and in dissemination to museum conferences in the UK and US.

All project software, procedures, and documentation, will be made freely available for museums to adopt and adapt at any point in the future.

Project Participants

UK Team

US Team

For enquiries about the project, please contact Dr Kevin Page in the first instance.

About the AHRC

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funds world-class, independent researchers in a wide range of subjects: history, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, languages, design, heritage, area studies, the creative and performing arts, and much more.

Visit the AHRC website at: ahrc.ukri.org, on Twitter at @ahrcpress, and on Facebook search for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, or Instagram at @ahrcpress.