VIKUS: Visualisation of Cultural Collections

Despite shrinking budgets, archives, museums and libraries have invested a lot of resources in the digitisation of their collections in recent years. There is great interest in making these growing digital collections more accessible, but there is a lack of innovative approaches to making the wealth of information spaces available in an inviting way. The project combines technological possibilities with cultural considerations in order to develop visualisations that open up new, interesting and meaningful perspectives on cultural collections. Novel interaction techniques and representations will be designed, implemented in the form of web-based software and evaluated for their suitability for various application scenarios. Visualisation should also be seen as a cultural artefact that needs to be interpreted and designed.

There is a growing interest in using innovative user interfaces and interactive visualisations in the cultural sector, but there is still a lack of experience in implementing these requirements. In order to stimulate innovation in the field of cultural mediation, researchers in information visualisation are investigating the potential of visualising cultural objects in cooperation with users and developers of collection databases. As part of the project, prototypical visualisations will be developed and findings on the visual exploration of digital collections applicable to the creative industries will be sought.