Visualizing Cultural Heritage and Resources
Two projects which were recently created at the third annual Medialab Prado (Madrid, Spain) Visualizer workshop have generated new methods by which to visualize cultural information.
‘What do they have? Alternate Visualizations of Museum Collections’ presents data from several art museums around the world. Inspired by the release of APIs for cultural repositories, including Brooklyn Museum’s API, V&A, Science Museum in London and the release of full datasets like that of the Powerhouse collection, the project aims to motivate the release of cultural heritage data by showing how engaging presentations of already available information can increase the audience’s understanding of Museum content.
The cultural heritage data contains large portions of descriptive text and references to an object’s time, geography, and materials. Some of these lend themselves to established visual metaphors – but the Initially, the focus will be on the production of static and minimally interactive desktop-scale visualizations.
The second project, Kultur-o-meter (pictured above) illustrates the amount of resources that is allocated to each cultural niche of the city of Madrid. By zooming into the graphic it is possible to see, for example, that the Medialab Prado corresponds to less than 0,5% of the total cultural budget of Madrid City Hall.
http://medialab-prado.es/visualizar
http://wiki.medialab-prado.es/index.php/%C2%BFQu%C3%A9_tienen%3F_Visualizaciones_de_las_colecciones_de_los_museos
http://kulturometer.org
Via Infosthetics
