Sharpening Collections
A quick look at documenting with Airtable
A lot of work I did in 2024 revolved around sorting, photographing, and indexing items that SL and I have collected. We spent time winnowing and making decisions.
Airtable is our database of choice— it gives us the flexibility to design different data models to fully describe items, sort them visually to keep track of artists, materials, editions, and other pertinent facts.
Here’s an inside look at the indexing projects we’re working on, how we develop them, and how we’ve trimmed them to zero-in on things that matter to us.
New York Times Front Sections
I wrote about my newspaper collection back in 2013, when I had 110. I kept collecting, and it became unwieldy. I made some queries of antique newspaper dealers and they each gave me an answer like this one:
“As far as I know, newspapers from the 1990s and more recent are pretty much impossible to sell. We don’t buy them and don’t know of anyone that does.”
In order to free up space, I discarded more than 50 dated before 2013, and kept another 91 published after 2013.
For the sake of completeness, I kept records of the newspapers I discarded— the total got to 320.
Vintage Luggage Decals
SL recently wrote about this collection. Airtable allows us to show everything that is octagon-shaped, from England, or has clouds in the design.
Art Collection
The largest index we have is of art—outsider, slaps, wheatpaste, silkscreen gig posters, and other Arte Agora. Our goal is to use it as the basis for a large-scale museum show that introduces the concept of art made, sold, or placed in the public way to a mass audience.
Index of Churches in the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago
This is a long-term project to attend Mass at every Church in the Archdiocese and index them according to architectural features, music style, typology of Stations of the Cross depictions, method of procession for the Eucharist, and so on.
Magazine collection
SL has collected select magazines from newsstands and subscriptions going back to 2000. We reviewed every magazine and kept 408. It’s quite a collection!
Buildings on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach
Sneak peek / secret project / data forever.
