Navigational Deep Mapping - Visualisation and Cognition of Cultural Atlases in Museums

Description

This proposal will undertake cutting edge research to resolve the fundamental challenge of creating a narrative driven cognitive and interpretive framework for audiences to engage with digital cultural atlases in museological contexts. The investigation amalgamates the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism – a unique cultural heritage database that documents historical evidence of the maritime journeys of Buddhism from India via the seaports of South East Asia [35]. The research aims to develop a pioneering deep mapping architecture for interactively exploring the narrative patterns, processes and phenomena in the Atlas, which will be implanted in an experimental cultural heritage data browser – an immersive 360-degree 3D visualization environment.This research responds to salient issues regarding public access and interaction with cultural heritage archives. Firstly, while narrative lies at the heart of museum interpretation, it is significantly underdeveloped in information visualisation [20]. Secondly, mapping has become a powerful cultural phenomenon in the public domain (e.g. Google Maps [9] and Open Street Map [25]. If museums are to take advantage of the burgeoning investments in cultural mapping datasets, visualisation tools are needed that allow users to create narrative sense where the data is both spatially and temporally contextualised [4, 28].The Atlas was selected for this study because of its data-rich sources and potential for the development of a narrative-driven deep mapping architecture. Developed and maintained under the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) administered by University of California, Berkeley (UCB) [1], it is of great academic importance because of its pan-Asian maritime focus on Buddhism entrepreneurship in the expansion of trade from 2nd century BC to the 12th century AD. Researchers around the world have contributed to the Atlas, providing geospatial coordinates, gazetteers and visual documentation of hundreds of archaeological sites and artifacts as well as religious and geopolitical empires and zones of influence, inscriptions and transcriptions of Sanskrit texts, historic maps, accounts by Buddhist monks and ambassadors, records of trade, hydrographic data, monsoon records, and shipwreck datasets [3]. Given this tremendous heterogeneity the Atlas requires a new form of visual, cartographic and time-space cognitive strategy that is currently outside traditional forms of interpretation [29]. Unlocking the narratives from the Atlas for museum audiences poses the crucial theoretical and experimental challenges that will be undertaken in this project.