Bridging academia, archives, museums and society, Narratives From the Long Tail: Transforming Access to Audiovisual Archives takes up the contemporary challenges of public access to the principal mnemonic records of the 20th and 21st centuries: large-scale audiovisual archives. Through computational processes, Narratives sets out to address and resolve the gap between digital archives and the embodied, participatory world of museological experience. This interdisciplinary innovation will be led by four exemplary academics in machine learning, visual analytics, digital museology, and archival science.
Through computational processes, Narratives sets out to address and resolve the gap between digital archives and the embodied, participatory world of museological experience.
Taking a systems thinking approach to incorporate all aspects of its dynamic structure, together we will pioneer ‘computational museology’ through interlocking methods that will allow audiences to meaningfully explore the semantically rich ‘long tail’ of audiovisual memory. Switzerland has made exemplary investments in the digitization and curation of audiovisual cultural heritage; however, outside of domain specialists, the vast majority of these collections remain inaccessible to broader society. To address this grave shortcoming, Narratives transcends state-of-the-art across all its fields to initiate a groundbreaking visualization framework for interactively (re)discovering hundreds of thousands of hours of audiovisual materials.
This is achieved through Narratives’ highly novel 360-degree 3D Narrative Visualization Engine, that will dynamically reveal the spatial, temporal, social, affective and aesthetic patterns, phenomena and processes of archival collections, and ensure ‘narrative coherence’ for audiences as they navigate through them. This scalable and participatory engagement model aims to situate audiences and their experiences at the center of knowledge production while also stimulating innovation in archival practices.
The goal is to situate audiences and their experiences at the center of knowledge production while also stimulating innovation in archival practices.