Relational perspectives as situated visualizations of art collections

Abstract

Abstract With relational perspectives, we examine the potential of traversing cultural collections along the richness of individual facets and relations through the process of developing an exploration-centered visualization. Cultural collections can contain thousands of artifacts, of which each typically possesses a diverse set of properties and individual facets constituting a unique relationship to the rest of the collection. Therefore, to create an appropriate representation of the complex data of each underlying artifact, oftentimes, it is not only interesting to get an overview of the entire collection from one perspective, but to explore the specific context of an artifact and the various relations it may have to other items. To investigate the potential of relational perspectives, we selected an art collection as a particularly promising case study. By following and reporting from a collaborative and iterative design process with an art museum, we developed a web interface that contrasts a collection overview with three situated visualizations each exposing a different kind of relational perspective on the art collection from an artifact.