Knowledge and Culture: Capture, Access, and Re-Presentation

Digital Library Testbed for Endangered Cultural Knowledge
This project will develop new, innovative technology for the preservation of endangered cultural knowledge. It will make use of infrastructure and interface tools developed in the ArtsLab. It seeks to gather and make accessible the vast, and extremely diverse, elements of human culture that are not otherwise easily preserved. A great deal of human knowledge lies outside the bounds of what is readily preserved in books. Such knowledge requires alternate means of representation and access such as through dynamic video or sound representations as opposed to static images or text. Its initial focus will be on applications of knowledge about building arts (architecture) and movement arts (dance idioms, sign schools of India, and Native American culture).

Tools for the Creation of Multimedia Works of Art and Scholarship
This Seedbed project takes as its principal concern the technological empowerment of artists and humanists. To bridge the widening gap between potential and actual practice, we seek to develop tools to support rich, interactive pedagogy, performance, and scholarship in conjunction with intelligent building spaces, sometimes called "smart rooms." Using this tool kit, non-technical artists and humanists could, for example, generate sophisticated storyboards detailing relations among all kinds of digital objects, data that could then be manipulated interactively in performance settings ranging from the stage to the classroom. A literary scholar might produce an exploration of Romanticism, following several conceptual paths through the music, art, and industrial history of an era. A performance artist could implement several mutually contingent multimedia threads that would branch in unexpected ways, depending upon audience response. The resulting toolkit would give artisans, teachers, and researchers new ways to visualize and present complex, branching narrative relations among wide sets of varying kinds of data, fundamentally altering both their own understanding and the understanding of their audience and their students. (Richard Powers)