Browsing by Department "Historical and Cultural Visualization"

This thesis explores the way digital technologies inflect experiences with and meanings of art historical objects. Specifically, it addresses the way digital technologies can change the archiving, exhibiting, and experience of ephemeral art. It does so by 1) providing a discussion of archival theory, museum practices, and the use of photography as a primary means of archiving ephemeral art, and by 2) creating three digital visualizations that focus on the same problematic but leverage different technologies: Palladio, Neatline, and Unity 3d, respectively. These archival exhibits highlight spatial, temporal, and relational details that are often lost in the photographic documentation of ephemeral art. Alone, the archives highlight specific aspects of ephemera, but collectively in the exhibit, a more comprehensive record of ephemera is achieved. This emphasizes digital technologies ability to create widely accessible archives, educational resources, and different archival processes that add meaning to the records.

Decoding Artifacts is a project that explores the ways in which technologies and interactive media enhance the museum visitor’s learning experience with art. The digital components of the project include a website and a mobile application, both hosting historical content, educational videos, images, 3D models, and an augmented reality experience. These virtual tools offer information to the viewer beyond the museum label, and aim to create a multi-sensory learning environment through an interactive dialogue between the public and the work of art. The thesis paper discusses how and why art museums are adapting to modern technological trends and the affordances of digital tools in museum education and outreach. The Decoding Artifacts project will use the example of medieval sculpture and the process of stone carving as case studies which discuss and demonstrate the effectiveness of virtual technologies in museum experiences.

The objective of this thesis is to examine seventeen Venetian church ceiling cycles and to demonstrate how many of them, particularly the ones painted from the 1550s onward, corresponded to Catholic reform and the decrees set forth at the Council of Trent. Demonstrating the importance of the partnership between traditional methodologies and digital applications as an approach to art historical research and presentation, this thesis determines that the subject matter and display of the ceiling cycles after 1550 shifted due to the decrees related to imagery. The first chapter provides an overview of the Catholic Church in Venice and its imagery as well as the controversy over religious imagery in the sixteenth century. Chapter One also provides historical context on the Council of Trent and the decrees laid out on imagery, as well as Venice’s response to the decrees in relation to the ceiling painting cycles. The second chapter focuses on the methodological implementation and implications of digital tools for the art historical analysis. It includes a discussion of the process of building the visualization database in Omeka and constructing three interactive maps in Carto DB that indicate the location of Venetian churches containing the ceiling cycles, where they are placed inside the complex, and the types of iconography depicted. This chapter considers why the exhibitions on the website, Iconography, Placement in the Complex, and Patrons are relevant to the art historical content along with the decisions that guided which tools could best show this content. The chapter also addresses how photographing each church ceiling painting in Venice helped to shape the database and also to reconstruct the experiential mode of viewing these cycles. The third chapter summarizes the findings of this thesis through an analysis of the Overview, Iconography, and Placement in the Complex maps. The digital overview map clearly shows the abundance of church ceiling painting during the sixteenth century, which seems to be a Venetian phenomenon, and a strong affirmation of sixteenth-century Catholic faith in the elaborate decoration of churches. An analysis of the three layers of the Iconography map serves as a synopsis of how the visualization program provides novel, multiple ways of comparing and assessing Catholic reform and Counter Reformation imagery. In addition, an examination of the Placement in the Complex map allows the user to recognize that the decoration of sacristies was probably a direct result of the emphasis on the Blessed Sacrament during the Tridentine period and as such, is an appropriate case study for visualization. The chapter also addresses potential ways to expand this thesis and opportunities for further research.

With the emergence of the computer, the digital image has become one of the most prevalent visual mediums in the 21st century. This paper aims at analyzing the current limitations in interacting with digital image databases in art historical research. In response to the limitations of current image database structures, this paper explores how emerging computer vision technologies can be applied to enrich the ways database users interact with art image databases. While current image databases primarily rely on manually-defined metadata and textual descriptions to associate art images, this digital project demonstrates how deep neural networks can add visual connections between art images through feature extraction algorithms. This thesis documents a digital product that demonstrates how deep neural network models can extract images’ visual features and connect art images by these visual features. Although it offers a new approach to the problem, this digital project is not intended to replace the existed metadata structure and text-based search in existing image database system. Metadata and text-based search have developed over time to assist people in managing data and navigating the digital world in the era of big data. As such, this digital project offers to overlay a visual-driven search path upon the existing database structure in order to provide a more diverse search environment.