GraDiM: Granularities of dispersion and Materiality: Visualisation of a Photo Archive on Diaspora

In his photographic journey spanning four decades and more than 40 countries, Frédéric Brenner has investigated the diverse forms of expression of Jewish life in the diaspora. His archive is a comprehensive visual documentation of the Jewish people from the late 20th to the 21st century. It not only tells the story of Jewish life, but also addresses contemporary debates and challenges to individual and collective identities. The archive, which alternates between documentary and artistic works, comprises over 100,000 black and white and colour negatives as well as digital photographs, 8,000 contact sheets, colour slides, art prints, interviews and diaries.

The GraDiM project is based on recent research in the fields of digital humanities, data visualisation and human-computer interaction. Although great efforts have been made in recent years in the field of digitisation and online publication of cultural collections, the forms of presentation are still based on grids of thumbnail images of the same format, which cannot exploit the diverse potential of digital access. Our research aims to visualise the dimensions of processuality, selection and materiality that have been left as traces in the archive. We want to design, develop and evaluate visualisation and interaction techniques that enable navigation between different levels of granularity in terms of semantics, socio-cultural relationality, photographic processes and visual elements. Our central concern is not to reduce the data in favour of uniformity or clarity, but to make its complexity the visual guiding idea by investigating and using new technological developments such as artificial intelligence for image recognition and data enrichment.

The project focuses on two main research areas: a) the representation of diaspora as dispersion, b) the visualisation of photographic materiality and selection processes. These two thematic strands are complemented by c) methods for visualising and connecting the different levels of granularity, exploring the possibilities of interactive movement between visual, structural, relational and contextual granularities.