Young Forum for Collection and Object Research

The platform „Junges Forum für Sammlungs- und Objektforschung“ (Young Forum for Collection and Object Research) is a joint project of the Gesellschaft für Universitätssammlungen e.V. and the universities and museums of Berlin, Göttingen, Tübingen, Dresden, Halle-Wittenberg, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Gießen and Bremerhaven. It centers around questions, methods and results of object-based research, particularly in scientific collections.. The establishment of such a platform strengthens work with (university) collections and offers young researchers the opportunity to acquire important methodological skills in dealing with objects. The events further promote networking and interdisciplinary exchange between young researchers and with experts. The annually workshop series, established in 2016, and the resulting publications, edited by Ernst Seidl, Frank Steinheimer and Cornelia Weber, are kindly funded by the VolkswagenStiftung.

To the complete publication series of Junges Forum

The increased attention and re-evaluation of scientific collections at universities, colleges and academies in recent years has also considerably increased the relevance of the material object as scientific evidence, especially in relation to written documents and images. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of theoretical foundations for the scientific processing of collection and object situations or even common methodological ideas that go beyond individual specialist cultures. This is especially true when a material object is given only the character of an image, thus excluding an important part of its potential for knowledge. Even decades of setting analytical priorities, such as the material turn, weren't able to change that.

Here, the concreteness of the objects are questioned. This presupposes that the object is not merely a substitute, but a crucial part of reality – moreover, that it represents its own form and quality of reality. The object has properties, is assigned function and meaning. As medium, means, tool or artwork, it possesses an independant right to be researched and understood. Many objects materialise an immaterial thought construct that is difficult to capture any other way. Even images or our language, which is usually the best at conveying complex theoretical contexts, can't match or replace the potential of the material object. For it is often only the object that allows a multitude of theories, facts, connections and considerations of uses and periods of time to become visible at all, to make them materially ‘tangible’, and to initiate processes of cognition. In a nutshell: Not only are libraries, archives and image collections teaching and research infrastructures worth of preserving and developing, but so are many object collections.

Scientific collections at universities offer a wide range of opportunities: as a material value per se, as cultural heritage of the university, as direct source or research infrastructure, as teaching materials and teaching infrastructure, for the concretisation of subject-specific content, for interdisciplinary and practical qualification opportunities, for the profile and image building of the university, for an optimised educational policy perception at the level of the sponsor, i.e. usually the state, for improved public visibility and thus for opening up and positively changing the perception of a university that is often regarded as hermetic from the outside – to name only the most important potentials.  The question arises wether, beyond the individual perspectives of the history of the subject and the history of science, there is an interdisciplinary methodological focus that can point to collection-specific, i.e. 'object-scientific' ways forward. This workshop sheds light on the relevance of objects: Form, materiality, dimension, context of origin, concrete use, spatial capacity, contemporary witness, representational function, aesthetic appeal and many other object-specific properties can thus become clearer from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Abstracts from all disciplines, including the natural sciences, have been invited to participate in the discussion, in order to define the foundations of the object studies tendencies.