Event Report: Exploratory Visualizations of Cultural Heritage. Introduction and Hands-on.

Cultural heritage is much more than mere objects placed side by side for isolated viewing in a display case or their digital counterparts presented together in online collections. Their value largely lies in something not directly visible: their relations to each other, mutual influences, tangled origins, and parallel developments. In short, in the stories they tell. The question is, how can one offer viewers adequate access to this history? How does one visualize what cannot be directly seen? The workshop “Explorative Visualisierungen von Kulturgut. Einführung und Hands-on” (Exploratory Visualizations of Cultural Heritage), held on January 14 at the SUB Hamburg, addressed precisely this question.

But first, let’s take a few steps back. Online catalogs as such are already a small revolution. They have enabled cultural participation for all by making countless collections permanently accessible to a wide audience. However, it is the method of isolated object representation that is increasingly subject to criticism. Lack of scale perception, loss of relations between objects, limited contextualization, and often lacking narrative are some points that can affect the interpretation of cultural heritage.

But the good news is that many are already trying to do better. One example was the British Museum with its “Museum of the World” (via Wayback Machine), an animated timeline (developed in collaboration with Weir+Wong and technological support from the Google Cultural Institute), which allowed interactive exploration of collections along parameters of geography and time. Another example is the Museum of Modern Art in New York with its virtual exhibition on abstract art “Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925,” where relationships between individual artists were made tangible through interactive networks. Not only museums themselves but also research institutes are working on innovative solutions. This includes the Fachhochschule Potsdam and the “Vikus Viewer”, a web-based visualization tool developed there, which arranges cultural artifacts on a dynamic canvas and supports the exploration of thematic and temporal patterns in large collections. What connects these approaches is the attempt to unlock cultural heritage in its continuity and interconnectedness and to enable viewers to freely explore this integrity.

This innovative approach is also followed by the project “Restaging Fashion” (ReFa), dedicated to the cultural history of clothing, in which the workshop speaker Dr. Sabine de Günther participates as a research associate. In the project, vestimentary sources are presented in a graph-based visualization that combines narration with exploration, aiming to offer the audience a guided collection entry as well as a freely explorable collection view along the thematic connections.

Building on the experiences gathered in the project, Dr. de Günther accompanied the workshop participants through the process of creating visualizations, from conveying the basic principles and analyzing existing examples to the collaborative design process of their own visualizations. Hundreds of notes with images of historical clothing from the project’s collection were distributed on the tables, a materialized dataset on which the participants could unleash their visualization creativity. Unlike other workshops in the “Digital Humanities – Wie geht das?” series, the tasks were to be tackled analog and without computers, as the focus was on understanding the logic of the visualization process and on the development of creative visualization approaches. Participants were, for example, asked to collage the mock-up visualization of an aspect of the collection that interested them the most or to find their own unique approach to the collection and make it visually understandable for others.

The impressive variety of ideas and approaches clearly demonstrated that there is much potential in unconventional data representation. How can one depict the temporal development of male headwear without losing sight of regional differences? How can one tell the story of a piece of jewelry that appears in several images simultaneously? Or more generally, how does one present a dataset to allow the viewer to freely explore the network of information according to their interests? Even if the answer seems complex, the workshop showed the variety of creative solutions that exploratory visualization of cultural heritage offers.

This contribution was simultaneously published in German on the blog “DH³ – Digital Humanities in der Hansestadt Hamburg” operated by the Referat für Digitale Forschungsdienste of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SUB) Hamburg.

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