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The scientific instruments of the C18th/19th centuries are complex, consequent artefacts, encoding experimental possibilities, older craft knowledge and, frequently, colonial control. Surviving examples are often uniquely well-travelled: globally, locally and within collections. The paper considers the used of Linked Open Data to trace their physical and conceptual itineraries over time.

This panel discusses the Pelagios Network, a decade-long collaboration that has been developing methods, tools and communities for linking Humanities resources online. Our discussion will focus on managing a series of collaborative tensions between decentralisation and coordination, sustainability and development, and individual needs and community growth.

The capacity to make strong connections between historical objects and sources lies at the heart of this project as it does in the everyday museum and historical practices that it is designed to support. Curators creating displays combine artefacts, images, audio-visual materials and histories often drawn from several heritage organisations. Family and local historians connect records from a diversity of sources that illuminate ancestors and localities so as to establish their genealogy or to understand the past of where they live. Academic historians patiently and critically connect a diverse range of archive sources with existing literature to tell new stories about the past. All rely on connecting different fragments of the past as they sew the quilts of narrative that constitute our local and national histories. The difference with this Towards a National Collection project is that it seeks to make such linkages at the national scale of all collections, enabling access together to significant numbers of relevant items from across many GLAM organisations holding heritage in many media. In place of the two-dimensional ranked list of search engines, we aim, with Congruence Engine, to model a world in which users will be able to explore data neighbourhoods where a great diversity of information about heritage items from many sources that are deeply relevant to their investigations will be readily to hand – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, buildings, and the records of previous investigations and relevant activity.

This article explores Damien Hirst’s 2017 exhibitionThe Wreck of the Unbelievable, which mischievously purported to present treasures salvaged from the wreck of the legendaryApistos. How might we preserve, curate, and otherwise mediate such ambitious and distributed artworks, which extend in such convoluted ways through diverse social and cultural spaces, and which deliberately ambiguate their own boundaries and encounters? Where artworks both seek to capture and to intervene in their own historical moment, what obligations and affordances arise for future historians, curators, critics, and publics? Might the challenges set byThe Wreck of the Unbelievableeven model a new kind of digital art history including, for example, data generated incidentally and abundantly by digital processes? This article playfully mobilises new Digital Humanities methods for reading the vast and stormy seas of social media data discourse, reading between the artwork itself and the historical ‘moment’ in which it is so entangled.