Misheel: What journey did you take to get where you are now? Did you always want to be a professor?
Professor Pattuelli: I never anticipated becoming a professor, actually. I come from a family of teachers, but didn’t see that for me in my early life. My journey has also been tied to my physical location. I became a librarian in Italy because of my interest in learning, culture, and sharing. It gave me the possibility of working with my local community and to make an impact while learning and growing on my own too. My desire to grow led me to India. I was interested in the culture and wanted to connect with people. I felt really good there. Then I had the opportunity to come to the US to study and grow, and I became a professor. I didn’t plan my life, and I'm still not planning my life. I'm more interested in taking opportunities that I come across. These opportunities have shaped me into who I am.
Misheel: What is your day-to-day work like? Can you describe a typical day, or if there are no typical days, what is one day at work like?
Professor Pattuelli: My days are not repetitive. I'd get very bored. I wake up very early when my brain is more active with ideas. I spend the first part of the morning making connections on the work that I'm involved with and things that I want to do socially or culturally. It's also the best time for me to work if I'm writing a paper. I prepare for class, and correspond with students and people I'm collaborating with. I spend the rest of my day at school meeting with students and teaching, sometimes six or more hours. It can be tiring, but working with students also energizes me. At this stage of my career, it's very important for me to mentor others, to share what I've learned. I also visit museums and art galleries close to work…the Whitney, the Rubin Museum and galleries in Chelsea.
Misheel: You talked about creativity do you ever translate that into your own work?
Professor Pattuelli: I'm not an artist, but I think creativity is a major drive for me. I have close relationships with people in the art world, so the projects I work on often look at art that goes in new directions. I also coordinate the Pratt SI Museums and Digital Culture MS Program. I think creativity means connecting people, ideas, resources...and linking the invisible, the not so obvious.
Misheel: I read that you are the founder of Linked Jazz. Why did you decide to create this?
Professor Pattuelli: As I mentioned, I enjoy linking things. By connecting the arts, you find new meanings, and you give context by situating them in new environments. I've been working for a while on a certain type of technology called The Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD). As I was working with this technology, I decided a good environment was jazz, because I like jazz. Specifically, I was interested in the interaction among the jazz community, which is extremely intertwined. People who play together are also friends, so there is a good network of mentorship and influence. That's why I decided to apply this technology to jazz. The project is ongoing, and there are always different facets. Recently we've been looking at the proportion of women in jazz. Using Linked Open Data, we're able to study different communities in jazz that may not have a large online presence in order to connect them with the larger community.
Misheel: How are you making information on cultural heritage more available? What goes into making this more accessible?
Professor Pattuelli: Cultural heritage is not only monuments, it's things like archival materials. Using The Semantic Web and Linked Open Data makes this information more accessible so researchers can find it more easily and make use of it in new ways. I have two projects in the pipeline, one is on the art historian Bernard Berenson. I'm collaborating with an archivist at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies which is located on the outskirts of Florence in Berenson's former residence, Villa I Tatti. We're extracting information from an archive of 33 diaries written by Mary Smith Costelloe, Berenson's wife, in order to visualize the cultural environment that surrounded Mary, what she was experiencing in her travels, in her day to day life, the kind of people she was connecting with, etc. The other project that I'm just starting is about Robert Rauschenberg. I'm working on connecting his personal archives, his own artwork and the art he collected with different pieces of information from different sources.
Misheel: What kind of advice can you give to young students about applying knowledge they learn in classes?
Professor Pattuelli: Students I teach want to become information professionals such as librarians and archivists. There is enormous value in knowledge. Knowledge has a way of finding its way help people, to enrich people, to guide them. Knowledge, even without a direct purpose at first, can find a situation in which it can be applied later. I also try to share with students the importance of having a critical view of systems, to understand limitations, to have some skepticism so they can make changes. Where I work, we have connections with the professional world outside the classroom...internships, fellowships. I teach a class called practicum seminar which is based on the experience they have working outside the classroom. They always have real-world scenarios to apply knowledge. My role is to help them to look at what they're doing outside the classroom with a critical eye toward the organizational culture, systems they use, system biases, how to improve systems, and just be self-reflective. I try to encourage them to cultivate their curiosity to drive them toward their interests, especially since a lot of students already come with a strong sociopolitical perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment