Abstracts

David Austin and Susan Augustine

Visualizing Paris in the Past

The central decades of the 19th century brought great changes to Paris. Literature about the period thoroughly documents the changes, but students may not always comprehend the enormous visual impact of them. To this end the University of Illinois at Chicago Digital Library has mounted a project that allows students to see the scope of the changes wrought by Baron Hausmann and other planners and architects of 19th-century France. An original map of Paris from 1860 forms the basis of the project. Digital photographs of it were manipulated in ways that allow a user to virtually wander the streets of Paris online. At this time images of approximately twenty buildings from the period link to their locations on the map, allowing the viewer to click on each historical site and view prints or photographs of them.

The microfiche version of the map in the Courtauld Institute's Conway Library, one of the great architectural photo collections of the world, provides the images for the project. The project managers photocopied individual frames of the microfiche, scanned them and processed the resultant TIFF files with Adobe Photoshop to produce clean, clear and compressed images. Metadata records for the images that employ appropriate controlled vocabulary for subject headings describe the content of the images. Links to more descriptive information, when they exist, may also be found in the metadata. The final product can be used as a teaching tool, allowing students not only to see images of 19th-century architecture, but view the buildings in their urban context.

The paper discusses the software, hardware, access issues inherent in such an undertaking. It also demonstrates the power of metadata as a finding aid for images in a way that allows the user to enter the vernacular as well as variant and alternate names for buildings.

Colin Beardon, Judy Mills and Martin Wright

Using Dramatic Representations to Explain Historical Artefacts on the Web

The MaRSH project is a collaboration between the Corinium Museum, Cirencester and the Exeter School of Arts & Design, University of Plymouth which investigates the possible use of innovative Internet technologies to increase the public's knowledge of, and enthusiasm about, the museum's collection of artefacts. In particular, we wish to visualise the social contexts within which artefacts may have been used and to address examples from history where there is no clearly accepted single narrative.

Interactive software is inherently better suited to modelling processes, so a design approach is adopted that focuses upon working practices rather than the collection of artefacts. The resulting website is not hierarchical, but is best described in terms of several discrete, but interconnected, layers.

• Information: based upon a set of fairly conventional web pages which describe specific artefacts from the museum's collection.
• Activities: the site provides a number of 'active' pages where the user is expected to undertake a simulated process, thus placing the project firmly within the constructivist tradition of learning.
• Characters: eight dramatic characters have been created and represented.
• Dramatic narrative: when a user accesses the project, it is in the context of these personae and an issue they may have faced in their life.
• Virtual world: the site contains an imaginary 3D world - rather like a 4th century film set.

User groups have shown strong support for the project and found that characterisation helped bring the topic to life.

We argue that the Internet needs to provide better integration between 2D and 3D representations. We anticipate more could be done using server-side technologies.

A prototype website which illustrates the major features can be found at www.adr.plym.ac.uk/MaRSH

Stephen Clancy

The Cathedral as a Virtual Encyclopaedia: Reconstructing the 'Texts' of Chartres Cathedral

The project begins with the notion that traditional methods of presentation and study - e.g. the art-historical slide lecture - can only hope to summarize abstractly the dynamism of the Gothic cathedral. The Gothic cathedral functioned as an encyclopaedia of late medieval humanistic and spiritual concerns - a cultural 'text' that was both 'written' and 'read' by its varied users. We attempt to 'read' this encyclopaedia today in order to understand the religious beliefs, cultural values, and secular practices encoded within it. But we view the cathedral and its environment through modern tourist and commercial lenses, instead of reading their significance through the lens of medieval cultural attitudes. In addition, slides and photographs treat the cathedral merely as a series of static, two-dimensional visual compositions, devoid of spatial continuity, and divorced from the urban and social contexts that gave it meaning. These modern images are also unable to recreate the original intended appearances of these walls and spaces, in part because the cathedral's structure, imagery, and furnishings have changed or vanished over time. But just as importantly, there was, in effect, no 'original intended appearance' of the cathedral and its urban environment. Instead, the cathedral acted as constantly changing environment for imagery, devotional ceremonies, and secular practices, adapting itself to the different audiences and occasions it served and the different events that echoed within the bishopric it ruled.

The project uses innovative digital technologies to (1) Simulate the spatial contexts and continuities both outside and inside the present-day cathedral; (2) Simulate the 13th-century physical appearances of Chartres Cathedral and its urban and rural contexts; (3) Provide an interactive means of 'experiencing' both the 21st- and 13th-century appearances and contexts; and (4) Allow the cathedral and its environment to be viewed through the lens of the varied cultural attitudes of 13th-century Chartres. The project uses over 1,600 digital images, QuickTime panoramas, Photoshop reconstructions of these panoramas, and an interactive interface created with Director. Fundamentally, my project seeks to integrate traditional humanities scholarship and teaching with state-of-the-art technologies that are revolutionizing the ways in which a 21st-century population accesses cultural objects.

John Eakins, A. Jean E. Brown, Margaret Graham, Richard Mulholland, Jonathan Riley, Jonathan Edwards

Evaluating a Shape Retrieval System for Watermark Images

This paper discusses the results of an eighteen-month research project representing a collaboration between The Conservation Unit, School of Humanities, and the Institute for Image Data Research (IIDR) at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle.

The project concerns the design and implementation of shape retrieval system for digital images of historic watermarks from works of art on paper. The intended database, which will become The Northumbria Watermarks Archive, will be published on the web and is intended to provide a freely accessible highly valuable research tool for art and paper historians, forensic scientists and paper conservators. It is intended to draw together and cross-reference existing records in addition to being the starting point for a progressive and interactive collation of new and related information. In addition to the provision of identification information for watermarks and paper, the archive will include extensive data on paper technology, paper history, working methods of artists, artists' materials and preservation/conservation issues.

Current watermark research is hindered by the fact that, in order to match the watermark to its reference image, researchers are required to manually and sequentially search through thousands of similar images. These references are often unreliable, inaccurate, and in many instances have been combined with an arbitrary approach to description and classification.

The Northumbria Watermark Archive will utilize content-based image retrieval (CBIR) software written at the university in order to recognize and search for similar watermark images using their shape characteristics. The software will draw heavily from our existing CBIR system for retrieval of trademark images (ARTISAN), unique in its exploitation of principles from Gestalt psychology.

We believe that this system will improve the accessibility of watermark images and related information and in doing so provide a fresh, interactive approach to art historical and technical research.

Michael Greenhalgh

The Classroom of the Future

The Classroom of the Future will review the use of digital media and the web in learning Art History today, and discuss the various technologies which add more 'context' to artworks than is possible with 'flat' slides. Beginning with the mechanics of teaching using exclusively web-based materials for storage and display, the paper continues with an assessment of panoramas (linked, hot-spotted, or stand-alone), stereo, and VRML and related technologies, linked to image databases. The paper concludes with a question: will the classroom survive, or will it be a computer (or some other display technology) fed by the web?

Michael Hammel

Towards a Yet Newer Laocoon. Or, what we can learn from interacting with computer games

Interactive works of art pose special problems. An interactive artwork can only be interpreted through interaction, either as first-person or as bystander. It is obvious that the experience differs between the two positions: one acts and the other watches the acting. The question is whether it is possible to extract the artwork from the interaction with it, let alone differentiate between two kinds of interaction: the beholders' interaction (first-person and bystanders) with the artwork and the interaction taking place between the beholders.

This leads to further questions, as to how the interactive artwork is to be interpreted when the spectator has left it, or has changed it? Is it possible to interpret interactive artworks without interacting with them? Is it at all possible to interpret artworks through interaction, and thereby accept the interpretation from a distracted interpreter? If you are, for example, given a detailed account of one level of Doom, you will never make it to the end, or will be too busy winning to watch the details.

The answers to the questions, I argue, lie in the addition of an 'interactivity-theory' to traditional aesthetics. The concept of interactivity, based on experiences of computer games and web-design, in many ways counter the Kantian aesthetics. This may equip the art historian with tools to take up the challenge presented by the interactive artworks, as well as contribute to a different view on computer games and electronic visual culture.

Dew Harrison and Suzette Worden

Digital Arts On (the) Line

This paper considers recent trends in the digital arts through an examination of projects associated with the Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, UK.

Electric December, an online advent calendar, is now in its third year and is a project that promotes local interests and explores the ways in which creativity can be part of a community building process in a specific region. In this talk we examine how the project has evolved over three years, technically and through its social agenda.

We also present the outcomes of a call for contributions to an online exhibition of digital arts. Net_Working is an exhibition of web works by national and international artists currently online and on view in Watershed's Digital Café. The call brought a response from over 300 artists. How the work has been chosen and categorised for the user, as well as an indication of the range of work available will be presented. This project will be compared to a previous exhibition, held in November 2000 at the same venue. During the intervening period Watershed has developed new strategies for the presentation and introduction of online work to its visitors. How these examples contribute to our understanding of changes in the curation of digital arts is the subject of the final section of the presentation.

Stefanie Kollmann

Pictura Paedagogica Online. A Picture Archive Not Only for Educational Historians

In the first phase of the project about 14,000 pictures will be included, one half are illustrations from manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages up to 1850, the other half come from a collection of postcards from 1870 to 1918. As diverse as the sources are the subjects of these pictures. The postcards have mostly a political background. The book illustrations include pictures of children's books, illustrations from the Bible as well as scientific diagrams and maps. The original pictures stay with the diverse collectors, just their digital images are included in the picture archive. Information and descriptions of the pictures are indexed in a dedicated database. A pilot database is accessible on the Internet since December 2000, and will be launched officially in May 2001. The address is: http://www.bbf.dipf.de/VirtuellesBildarchiv/. The 75dpi images are free, 300dpi files or alternatively print outs can be ordered for professional use.

Harald Kraemer

Fragments and Figments of Knowledge: the Documentation of Contemporary Art

Modern art is open, transient, interdisciplinary, multimedial, progressive, discursive, dependent on concept and context and besides that increasingly interactive. Because modern art is so diverse it is in need of documentation in a wider sense, in case it is, at some point subjected to scholarly enquiry and authentification by those who were not present at its conception and presentation.

The main aim of the research project Art history and Museum Informatics: Methodology and Documentation of Contemporary Art at the University of Cologne, which was initiated in 1999 by Hubertus Kohle and Harald Kraemer, is to make a practical contribution to the methodology for the documentation and archiving of modern and contemporary art by establishing specific strategies and procedures. The aim is to demonstrate by the means of the specific traits of modern art the need for new documentation procedures and the novel applications of digital technologies.

Contemporary art requires rethinking and a strategic procedure in its documentation. Documentation as a work of art is a process, navigation, interpretation and a tool for communication and discussion. The instruments of digital and multimedia technology require specific art efforts. This cannot be carried out by the present database management systems or at best only minimally. With this changed role of documentation, there is an entire set of problems and questions to cope with. This new situation will have consequences for the questions asked by later generations of researchers. Due to the increasing presence of digital media in museums,the viewing habits of visitors to the museums as well as those of researchers will also change.

My paper introduces the problems pertaining to the documentation of contemporary art, such as quality of information, research, reality, future of the museum. It shows the results of the Cologne research project and suggests possible strategies and perspectives for the future use of digital technologies.

More information about the project on www.uni-koeln.de/inter-fak/fk-427/

Sylvia Lahav, Mac Campeanu and Jean Kerrigan

An Introduction to Tate Modern

Tate Modern and the City Literary Institute have jointly devised, developed and produced an online distance learning course about Tate Modern. The course takes as its focus the theme of Landscape, looking first at Tate Modern within the London landscape and then at works on display in the Landscape/Matter/ Environment suite.

The course is eight weeks long and is intended for those for whom a gallery visit may be difficult or even impossible as well as in preparation for a future visit. So far, participants have been based in countries as far apart as Brazil and the Czech Republic.

The course is based around 8 weekly projects delivered on CD-ROM, making extensive use of specially prepared 360 degree QTVR virtual gallery views, video (with BSL interpretation), audio of curators and artists, and web links. Students then go online for seminars with other students and tutorials with Tate curators, and City Lit and Tate tutors. The project is currently in a pilot phase. It uses the internet, email and delivers its contents on a CD-ROM, through a web browser format.

This paper examines the process of creating and running an online course. It analyses the experience of students who have so far participated and poses questions about the potential successes and failures of this type of distance learning. In particular it raises the following questions:

1. What makes this type of learning experience different and what are the benefits and disadvantages?
2. Are online students any different from those who attend conventional courses?
3. What new skills do tutors need?
4. What effect do the higher cost implications have?
5. What of the future for online and web based courses?

Wlodek Witek

With Camera to India, Iran and Afghanistan: Access to Multimedia Sources of the Explorer, Professor Dr. Morgenstierne (1892-1975)

This project is concerned with the archive of the Norwegian linguist and explorer Professor Georg Morgenstierne (1892-1978). The digitised archive has been made available at the National Library of Norway's website and an English translation is under development. This concludes nearly four years of research by a small team from the University of Oslo and the National Library. The material comprises over 3000 items (photographs, moving images, audio and a selection of drawings, sketches and notes) from Morgenstierne's travels to South Asia: Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

The uniqueness of this archive lies in the audio-visual records, especially those from 1929, of the previously undocumented culture of the tribes living in the secluded valleys of what is today Pakistan, the area of Chitral, near the border with Afghanistan. Some of these tribes retained the ancient religion and for centuries resisted (also through armed struggle) Islamisation from both Afghanistan and India (Pakistan). The once large area of Kafiristan was suppressed by the Emir of Afghanistan following his invasion of 1896 which also wiped out most artistic symbols that the people there made over centuries.

What prompted our project in 1998 was the fact that there was only one person left in Norway who knew the content and value of the archive and was concerned about the future of this heritage. This person is no longer with us today, but we have managed to finish the work on time to save these important records from oblivion. Not only has the archive been digitised and preserved, but also analysed, the content of individual records, exact dates and places identified and classified. Researchers have free access to this material. We hope that one day the indigenous people will also gain access.

Website: www.nb.no/baser/morgenstierne/