I Feel You: Discovering Collections Through Emotion

Guest blogger: Greer Townshend - 2022 Mittelheuser Scholar in Residence

I have just read your letters again and I feel I can never be grateful enough for them,

wrote prison of war Maurice Delpratt to his sister during WWI, expressing gratitude, love, homesickness, loneliness, desperation - and grief, perhaps the most complex and mercurial of emotions (1). His words encapsulate sentiments expressed across the vast, deeply moving Delpratt Collection in the John Oxley Library.

Maurice was separated from family for almost five years, fighting for his survival and grieving a former life. Could an isolated retiree find strength in this soldier’s courage? Could a natural disaster survivor or a displaced person? Could you? Finding mirrors of our emotions in other people’s stories can be a powerful form of connection. But how do we find Maurice’s story? 

Catalogue searches in Queensland’s GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector and beyond are traditionally not configured to account for emotion. However, over the last two decades, research on the history of emotion has revealed a captivating window into the past.

From the tender to the turbulent, emotions shape our lives. They can affect our mind, body, behaviour and decision making. (3) At a societal level, they can foreshadow, take centre stage, or trail a moment in history for decades, or even centuries, through revolution, war, religion, and intergenerational trauma. (4) History and emotion are inherently intertwined.

Emotional granularity, the ability to recognise and label emotions, (5) helps us better understand ourselves and others. (6) Applied to the categorisation of our collections, it could enable us to view history through a deeply human lens.

However, untangling emotional nuance and its historical or contemporary implications can be challenging, especially when making categorical distinctions.

Throughout history, emotion has been attributed to supernatural forces, automatic bodily responses, evolutionary processes, the psyche and the subconscious. Anthropological studies have revealed the emergence and disappearance of emotions across time and discovered culture-specific feelings, while philosophers have long debated which emotions, if any, are our collective core suite. (7)

Despite these ambiguities, emotion is at the core of human experience and is documented, albeit sometimes implicitly, throughout our collections.

‘I Feel You: Discovering Collections through Emotion’ explores curating searches by emotion for bespoke aesthetically designed results. To explore Queensland’s diverse history in the John Oxley Library, ‘I Feel You’ users will simply need a feeling.

Greer Townshend 

References

1. 28115 Maurice George Delpratt correspondence / Delpratt, Maurice George, 1886-1957 / 1915-1920 / 28115, Maurice George Delpratt Correspondence, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

2. Barclay, K., 2021. State of the field: the history of emotions. History, 106(371), p.457.

3. Mlodinow, L., Emotion: The New Thinking About Feelings, Penguin Random House, London, 2022, pp. 5-9.

4. Firth-Godbehere, R., A Human History of Emotion: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know, 4th Estate, London, 2021.

5. Watt Smith, T., The Book of Human Emotions, Profile Books Ltd, London, 2016, p. 11.

6. Feldman Barrett, L., How Emotions are Made, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2017, p. 106.

7. Ibid., pp. 3-12.

About the author:

Greer Townshend was the 2022 Mittelheuser Scholar in Residence for her project, I Feel You: Discovering Collections Through Emotion.

Read her other blogs

• Loneliness

• Fear

Watch Greer's Research Reveals talk.