The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Author
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Doron Goldfarb, Max Arends, Josef Froschauer, Dieter Merkl, Martin Weingartner
Exploring Artworks on the Web by their Socio-Historical ContextA number of Art Historical resources on the Web offer data whose scope goes well beyond the standard obJect centred annotation that is usually found within data sources about cultural artefacts.
One particular aspect is information about the social relationships of Art Historical actors, being family members, teachers, patrons, sitters etc. The dominant medium for conveying such historical interplay between involved persons has been in the form of text telling stories about their socio-historical context and their biographical progress.
As of today, some data sources do, however, offer information about such relationships in explicit form by providing associative links between related persons, resulting in snapshots of the social network structure of the involved actors in the form of graphs. The recent emergence of online social networks has raised the discussion about the value of such explicitly represented relationships for research and interpretation, as they, of course, cannot fully represent the interwoven complexity of real world relationships between people.
Moreover, in the case of historic events, the available information is limited to - sometimes very biased - biographical sources that have survived the course of history, or to assumptions drawn from indications implicitly embedded in artefacts.
When dealing with dynamic online access to artworks, i.e. queries against image databases, the traditional means of presentation usually consist of image galleries that are dynamically arranged according to specific metadata attributes matched against an initial user query. Thus, the artworks are grouped by attributes such as title, subJect, artist, style, etc., i.e. information that provides only limited socio-historical context to a non-expert audience.
In this respect, and despite of the previously mentioned shortcomings, we believe that explicit facts about the historical relations between artists and other related people can be utilised to provide an intermediate layer of context for the dynamic Web based presentation of works of art, embedding the artwork within a social context that is usually only rarely addressed by traditional means of dynamic presentation.In our paper, we therefore propose a Web based system that combines various semantic data sources within a 3D Information Landscape based on a chronologically ordered graph representation of social relations between important figures of Art History (See Figure 1). The environment is dynamically constructed upon entering the name of an artist, expanding around his or her social relationships, thus allowing visitors to immerse into the flow of history and to explore works of Art in a different way.
Figure 1: Neighbourhood of Isabella d Este
