Cultural data sculpting

Today we mine data: tomorrow we will sculpt it *

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 create innovative applications for visualizing and interacting with these cultural heritage archives. This course is located at a 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, a 4K fulldome and a 12m long linear navigation system.

Students will work with a curated selection of digital cultural archives each with its own unique materialities and possibilities. Examples from previous years include stereoscopic photo archives, ultra high resolution 360 images, audio-visual archives from music festivals, television archives, ancient maps, photogrammetric 3D scans of cultural objects, digital twins of panoramic paintings, and ballet competition archives. After being introduced to these collections by invited custodians, students will work together in small teams to gain a deep understanding of the archive and design an interactive and immersive installation on one of eM+'s systems for this archive. Teams will implement these designs as prototypes, which will be presented to the concerned custodians at the end of the course.

It is important that students attend theoretical lectures to gain full benefit, and actively participate in the hands-on sessions to properly advance on their projects.

Reading:

• O'Neill, G. 2010. Data Sculpting. Turbulence Ahead.

• Kenderdine, Sarah, and Lily Hibberd. 2025. Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology, Routledge

Course outline

1. Introduction to the course | Introduction to eM+ | Theory of Cultural Data Sculpting | Tour
2. Dataset introductions by archive custodians
3. Dataset introductions by archive custodians
4. Cultural data analysis workshop
5. Fieldwork trip (in 2027: International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent)
6. Group presentations on selected datasets and project prototype proposals
7. Project presentations and midterm feedback
8. Theory/guest lectures and project workshop
9. Theory/guest lectures and project workshop
10. Theory/guest lectures and project workshop
11. Theory/guest lectures and project workshop
12. Feedback presentation of final project to eM+ team
13. Final presentation to custodians