Gugelmann Galaxy: An Unexpected Journey through a collection of Schweizer Kleinmeister

Abstract

GLAM institutions all over the world are digitizing their collections. As the number of items in such a collection amounts to tens or even hundreds of thousands, providing comprehensible access and presentation becomes increasingly difficult. At the same time, a steadily growing amount of this data is openly available. This gives rise to various projects approaching the hidden treasures in these collections with computational tools. The project presented here, Gugelmann Galaxy, lets the user explore an entire collection of digitized images and their textual metadata in an immersive three-dimensional cloud, whose configuration can be rearranged according to different criteria. The project questions traditional models of categorization and curating and implements alternative approaches prototypically.