Cultural Data Sculpting

Cultural Data Sculpting is at the intersection of two dynamic phenomena, the ever-expanding heterogeneous digital archives, in conjunction with their visualization in immersive, interactive display systems. This course will engage novel approaches (with computational challenges) to creating innovative applications for visualizing and interacting with these cultural heritage archives.

This course is located at a new laboratory researching the forefront of experimentation in galleries, libraries, archives and museums (The Laboratory for Experimental Museology eM+). This lab contains large scale immersive, interactive virtual reality and augmented reality systems including a 360-degree 3D panoramic projection screen and a 4K fulldome. Students will have access to these state-of-the-art systems to design and build their applications. Emphasis is on the development of a new approach to digital cultural archives in these omnidirectional and hemispheric systems.

Students will have access to already existing digital cultural archives including structured and unstructured data. These include the CERN archives, a database of photogrammetric Buddhist sculptures (some of the most important in the world) and a subset of the Montreaux Jazz Festival archive. Downloaded datasets also welcome (e.g. API's for METs collections or Cleveland's collections). Students will work together in small teams to focus on specific aspects of the application design and programming, culminating in an interactive installation for 360-degree 3D or fulldome.

Course structure

2018

2019

2020