Browsing the content from Information Plus Conference (2016 edition) I bumped into a really interesting presentation regarding the use of graphical user interfaces and data visualization to support the exploration of large-scale digital cultural heritage.
One View is Not Enough: High-level Visualizations of Large Cultural Collections is a contribution by the Urban Complexity Lab, from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Check the talk by Marian Dörk:
As many cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, archives, and libraries, are digitizing their assets, there is a pressing question which is how can we give access to this large-scale and complex inventories? How can we present it in a way to let people can draw meaning from it, get inspired and entertained and maybe even educated?
The Urban Complexity Lab tackle this open problem by investigating and developing graphical user interfaces and different kinds of data visualizations to explore and visualize cultural collections in a way to show high-level patterns and relationships.
In this specific talk, Marian presents two projects conducted at the Lab. The first, DDB visualized, is a project in partnership with the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Four interactive visualizations make the vast extent of the German Digital Library visible and explorable. Periods, places and persons are three of the categories, while keywords provide links to browsable pages of the library itself.
The second, GEI – Digital, is a project in partnership with the Georg Eckert Institute. This data dossier provides multi-faceted perspectives on GEI-Digital, a digital library of historical schoolbooks created and maintained by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research.
