The Cabinet of Curiosities

by James MacDonell on 2025-12-17T11:59:17+00:00 | 0 Comments

The Hartley Library Cabinet of Curiosities is a project that I have been working on for the last year. The primary aim was to create an interactive gallery of objects that have been found around the Library during the Collections Development and Discovery project (CD&D) to tie in with the ‘Looking Back, Looking Forward: Hartley Library Transformations’ exhibition (Nov 2025-Jan 2026). But it was also a way in which I could further develop my skills, combining 3D digitisation with content creation. This meant developing skills in 3D modelling, developing narratives, graphic design and learning object creation.

Click here to view the accessible version of this interactive content

The CD&D project was a huge project to review the library’s printed book collection. During that review a series of interesting ‘ephemera’ were found in books and on shelves (though some of these items have been collected over several years). They make for an incredibly odd collection: 100-year-old postcards wedged between the pages of a book; notes left by students for their peers to find; an entire ceramic model village left on the shelves. As part of the outreach portion of CD&D, some of these items were shown in a cabinet in the library foyer entitled the Hidden Hartley Exhibition.

The Hidden Hartley Exhibition in the Library foyer, currently displaying a Darth Vader mask, ceramic houses and Disney Infinity figures that were found on the shelves around Hartley Library.

It was here that I was introduced to this collection of objects. The juxtaposition between the historic and the modern, the silly and the serious really called to me. This nature of the objects and presentation style reminded me of cabinets of curiosities which were early attempts during the Renaissance of assembling and cataloguing collections ranging from natural history and biological specimens, to archaeological or ethnographical artefacts. These items found around the library seemed to fit the eclectic, seemingly random nature of these renaissance collections, and this was where the idea came from to create a digital ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ using 2D and 3D scans of the objects serving as a shareable, digital record of the temporary displays.

Part of the 3D scanning was done by two MA Archaeology students who were on professional placement with us, with these objects serving as their introduction to the basics of 3D scanning. While mostly a smooth process, there were some difficulties with some of the items, particularly an orange plastic duck which proved difficult to scan for several reasons. When I told the students to name their files something memorable so they can keep track of the scans later, one student christened it the ‘evil duck’. The flat items such as postcards or notes were imaged by Katie and Kiki, our Digital Scholarship Administrators. Katie also transcribed any text present on these 2D items, even going so far as translating a postcard written in German! These 2D images could then be applied to a 3D plane to allow users to interact and rotate them in 3D space.

Pictured above is the ‘evil duck’ being 3D scanned by one of the placement students using a method called photogrammetry, where hundreds of photos are taken of the object and run through a programme to create a 3D model. In the end this method proved ineffective as the duck was too reflective and the reflection of the camera was present in each image, confusing the software’s ability to align the photos together.

After the digitisation process was complete, I used Blender and Substance painter to model and texture the cabinet respectively, which was the first time I had used these tools for creating something from scratch as opposed to modifying existing 3D scans. I then used Blender to assemble the scene and render out the images and videos needed to assemble the experience in Thinglink, though this proved to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. This was partly due to my decision to use video transitions between items rather than jumping between static images. The hope was that the videos would help make the cabinet feel more ‘real’ or ‘alive’ while also helping to create a sense of continuity between the seemingly random objects by showing the transitions between them. This process required a lot of learning and significant trial and error, with one scene having to be rendered a total of five separate times to get the camera focus and lighting right!

Behind the scenes of the Cabinet of Curiosities with the textures and lighting turned off. The oddly shaped triangles with round circles at the end represent ‘bones’ which are used to animate 3D models. In this case they are used to unfold paper.

While the work on the technical side of assembling the cabinet ticked along over the course of a few months, I found myself thinking about the objects themselves a lot more. In a classic example of scope creep, my plans moved from creating a digital gallery towards the creation of an entire digital experience. I hoped that an engaging and humorous sub-narrative would help people connect with the ‘wacky’ nature of this collection in the absence of getting to experience rifling through a box and being perplexed at each item as I had. The narrative took the form of having these items be sent back in time to be catalogued and described by an historic collector before being placed in an ornate and austere looking cabinet of curiosities. Through the eyes of this historic collector these mundane objects become wondrous, a wind-up plastic duck suddenly becomes an intricately crafted automaton made of some unknown material that could clearly only belong to some rich individual. By heightening the absurdity, I had hoped to further heighten the incongruity and juxtaposition of this collection – they aren’t treasures or historical artefacts in the traditional sense worthy of inclusion in an historical cabinet of curiosities, but their mundane nature becomes wonderous when coupled with the often unlikely and unexpected story in how they ended up on the shelves of a university library.

A scene from the Cabinet of Curiosities where the historic collector marvels at a cheap, plastic, wind-up duck.

After some deliberation I decided that the character of this historical collector should be Henry Robinson Hartley, the nineteenth century eccentric whose donation to the city led to the founding of the Hartley Institute and eventually the University of Southampton. However, Hartley probably wouldn’t have had a cabinet of curiosities as their heyday predated him by about a century or more. Nor would he likely have drawn a connection between a library punch card and the writings of Charles Babbage and Ava Lovelace. And though echoing a common joke amongst archaeologists, Hartley probably wouldn’t have misidentified wall art of a painted eagle on a stone plaque as a mysterious Celtic ritual tablet. So, though this is not a rigorous reconstruction of Hartley’s likely attitudes, the ‘voice’ I created for him acts as a lens with which we can explore Victorian attitudes to cataloguing, history, art, culture and even library sciences, all allowing us to draw comparisons and contrasts to the modern day. Learning to let go of dogmatic adhesion to historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment was difficult but given that the main ‘narrative’ of this experience involves time travel I hope no one will mind me taking some historical liberties!

A stone plaque with a painting of an eagle on it. A common joke amongst archaeologists is that there is a tendency to identify objects as ritual in use whenever their precise use is uncertain. However, for this object the reality is more absurd than fiction; on the reverse of the plaque is a sticker listing a catalogue ID. Someone had stolen the original book off the shelves but left this plaque with its accompanying catalogue ID in its place.

Using the analogy of the classic comedic duo, if Hartley represents the ‘funny man’ then the character of the ‘temporally displaced librarian’ serves as the ‘straight man,’ tempering Hartley’s wild theories with a simple and mundane cataloguing description. This dynamic is further expanded on in the librarian’s, often slightly sassy, personal notes on Hartley’s interpretation, providing additional context to help explain why Hartley came to the conclusions he did. At their most basic level these notes were a vehicle for me to ‘geek out’ about history and explain the silly jokes and mistakes Hartley makes. The worst of these ‘jokes’ I have to say is Hartley’s identification of a miniature painting (polaroid) of a Roman Mithraic feast (Christmas Party) complete with Phrygian Cap (Santa hat) and ceremonial stole (a tie). Beyond humour, these notes allowed for me to explore why Hartley might have misidentified these items, allowing me to use these objects not just as an exploration of what gets left in a modern library, but reflect on how libraries, galleries, collections, research, cataloguing and even life in general has changed in the past 150 years.

A collection of images from the Cabinet of Curiosities showing the original item, Hartley’s interpretation and the temporally displaced librarians slightly sassy notes on Hartley’s ‘interesting’ ideas.

I have found I learn best by throwing myself into the deep end and giving it a go, and this project was no exception. I’ve been able to not just solidify my understanding of tools that I had only just been scratching the surface of, but try my hand at creative writing, graphic design, texturing, animation, rendering and a whole load of other tools and techniques that have now become a familiar part of my workflows. But beyond that, despite some maddening moments like spending over an hour having to add the small ceramic houses to over thirty scenes by hand because they were just too good not to include, this kind of project is something I’m eager to do again. However, this project feels uniquely personal; as opposed to creating content for someone else or simply scanning objects as I had done before, this project has been driven by my vision alone. While I am capable of being my own harshest critic (and there is already a long mental list of minor mistakes that no one else but me would notice or things I would change if I were to do this again), it’s something else entirely to pour your creativity into something that’s meant to be engaging and funny all the while hoping that it lands as intended. The fact that other people would look at my work hadn’t really occurred to me until it was finished and it’s both exciting and terrifying in equal measure. It’s really given me an appreciation of the time and effort that goes into the entire creative process, and I’m thrilled to have been able to make my own contribution. And while I’m under no illusion that anyone but me is likely to explore the experience in full, I hope I have given people the chance to experience this fascinating collection as I had, through diving headfirst into whatever weird or wonderful object that catches the eye. Perhaps they might skim through a few objects and learn something new. Perhaps they might find one of my jokes funny (my wife said she did though I think she might be slightly biased…) Or perhaps it might lead people to reflect on how mundane objects have a story to tell about a building and institution that has been at the heart of the University since almost the very beginning.

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