Research Catalogue

Research Catalogue

By Celeste Pedro

September 2024 – Have you ever heard about the “Research Catalogue”? It’s an international database for artistic research developed by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), Amsterdam. It provides students, researchers and teachers with a platform for publication and outreach, and it includes various other features, such as a personal repository or applications management modules.

Figure 1. Front page of the Research Catalogue website.

The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, open-source, free-to-use open space for collaboration in the Arts and a vehicle for experimentation, as we will see. There are quite a few institutional partners, mainly from northern countries. The publications and media they produce are arranged in portals, and this database’s information display (or layout) is pleasant and complete.

Some partners maintain peer-reviewed journals with regular calls, but that is not the only way you can publish on this platform, nor do you need to be a member of the Institutional partners to be an author.

Making your research available in different formats

Not all aspects of research are publishable in the typical article format or conform to traditional editorial standards. That does not mean they are not important or relevant. The Research Catalogue allows authors to share and/or publish their research in a very innovative way. They call it the “Expositions” feature (great examples can be found in the “Projects” menu).

Once you set up an account, you can start uploading your materials: texts, images, files, videos, audio, and their corresponding metadata (e.g., date, author, keywords, title, copyright, description). Files can be grouped in folders or sets, that can also be shared privately (as in ongoing collaborative works) or made public.

To create an Exposition, you will need to upgrade your account (no money is involved). There are plenty of guides, faqs and tutorials you can follow to create your format. It involves designing a webpage that will host different types of media, making it possible to organise information visually and spatially, adding in context and science communication potential.

Using the Expositions tool is quite easy; you can start with a familiar blog type of display, a freeform layout (drag and drop style) or an HTML solution, making the most of the variety of media files it allows you to publish. It is not just a simple way to keep a repository or a properly categorised database of all the materials you analyse during your thesis or research project; it is a great way to communicate and disseminate all the normally hidden work involved in creating and applying research methods, or the variety of sources (textual, visual or sound-recordings) that make up our work.

Figure 2. The webpage for the exposition created by Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin, ‘Att föreställa Aniara‘, *Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)*, 0 (2024), showing the navigation pad. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2122718/2122719/0/0 [accessed 19/09/2024]

It is particularly useful in demonstrating processes and milestones during research and expressing unusual research outcomes or the richness of materials and details involved in thematic and visual analysis.

So, if you work with images, art, knowledge visualisation, etc., old and new, I’d recommend this great resource that the Society for Artistic Research makes available to all of us.