Olivia Vane. 2017. Visualisation of Cooper Hewitt Museum data by colour: orangered
Olivia’s research explores how interactive timelines can be used to make sense of cultural data (digitised museum, library and archive collections). Cultural institutions have become swamped by digital data. Digitising the objects, images and texts in their collections has resulted in millions of electronic records; the British museum currently has over 900,000 images in its digital collection and is adding 2,000 new ones each week How can they make sense of it all?
The focus of this research is designing visualisations for exploring themes, trends and connections between items in cultural data across and through time. By inventing new visual forms and interaction techniques in the design of novel interfaces, the output of this PhD will aid users in drawing out patterns or highlighting anomalies in collection data.