Teaching the Craft History of Uzbekistan through Digitised Photographs of the Turkestan Album

Craft history is difficult to teach from text alone, and the Turkestan Album of 1871 to 1872 offers a large photographic resource that has rarely been examined for craft content in a structured way. This study assembled 900 de-duplicated plates from the open digital copies of the album, coded each plate for 11 craft domains and 6 depiction modes with explicit rules, and converted the results into a source-based framework for teaching the craft history of Uzbekistan. Craft was salient in 384 plates (42.7%). Architectural ceramics and ornament (27.7% of the corpus) and calligraphy and inscription (14.4%) were the leading domains, and 97.1% of the 279 craft-salient plates located in Uzbekistan were attributed to Samarkand. The 48 plates that show a craft process or tool carried no plate-specific commentary, whereas 281 of 281 monumental plates carried it (95% interval 98.7% to 100%). Agreement between text rules and cataloguer headings reached Cohen’s κ of 0.74 for ceramics and ornament, 0.81 for inscription and 1.00 for guild customs. A teaching suitability index that combines documentation, domain breadth and place confidence gave a median of 0.70 for archaeological plates and 0.13 for ethnographic and trades plates. A greedy selection of 16 plates covered 21 domain-by-depiction cells, whereas random selection of 16 plates covered 27.1% of them. The framework organises 5 stages (locate, describe, contextualise, trace, transfer) into 6 teaching units and identifies where teachers need to supply context that the catalogue does not provide.