Way back in 2012 I had a week-long residency at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York. It's interesting reading the post I wrote for the Cooper Hewitt Lab blog again and thinking about which of the challenges I faced would be easier now, and which are fundamental to working with museum data. The post is also an accidental paean for tools I loved that that are now gone – ManyEyes, Fusion tables. At least Google Refine / OpenRefine lives on!
My experience wrestling with collections metadata at the Cooper Hewitt profoundly influenced how I taught data visualisation and digital cultural heritage for at least the next decade.
Go back in time with this post from 2012: Mia Ridge explores the shape of Cooper-Hewitt collections.