Depicting historical persons and identities: A faceted approach.

Dobreski, B., J. Qin, & M. Resnick. (2020). Depicting historical persons and identities: A faceted approach. Knowledge Organization, 47(8): 668-679. https://www.ergon-verlag.de/isko_ko/downloads/ko_47_2020_8_5.pdf

Archives are responsible for presenting historical materials to users while also placing them in context. Historical individuals and their identities pose specific challenges for the archive, including how to negotiate changing cultural perspectives on identity and how to convey and explain contexts to modern audiences. Contemporary subject representation practices in cultural heritage tend to offer a reductivist view of personal identity. Using a collection of visual images of nineteenth and twentieth century sideshow performers, the present work explored a faceted approach to representing personal identity in order to: 1) offer a more holistic view of historical individuals, their identities, and relationships; and 2) help place historical terms and perspectives into context in order to better support user understanding.