Imogen Coulson joined the project in fall 2021 and contributes crucial object and archive research and review. Her experience as project curator for the Lower Niger Bronzes Research Project in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum is vital to the research conducted for Digital Benin. She collaborates on object research for the catalogue and Ẹyo Otọ with Eiloghosa Obobaifo and establishes conceptual, content and data driven processes for Digital Benin. She came up with controlled vocabularies for object designations and categories which linked all records on the platform and allowed for the development of filters in the catalogue. She brought together an elaborate bibliography and authored original research on the objects as data came in from institutions. She also led the review process for all institutional data and coordinated with the review panel. In 2022 she gathered all new and updated object data from institutions and worked on the processing, structuring and enhancing of meta-data of all archival materials. Coulson wrote all introduction pages with details about the archive institution, the collected data and an overview of object groups in the archival materials presented on Digital Benin. Her role and expertise was pivotal to the development of the visual research tools in collaboration with the technical team.
Biography
Imogen holds a B.A. from the University of Cambridge with a specialism in Archaeology, and a M.A. in the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas from the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK. Subsequently, Imogen worked as a Project Curator for the Lower Niger Bronzes Research Project, in the Africa section, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, British Museum. In addition to forming and developing this project alongside colleagues, her research explored the provenance and collection histories of copper alloy cast objects from southern Nigeria in the British Museum’s collections, including a number of those looted by the British from Benin City in 1897. She has attended and presented papers at academic conferences.