Visualizing Uncertainty in Cultural Heritage Collections

Abstract

Visualizations of cultural heritage collections play an increasing role in supporting the sensemaking processes of visitors and researchers. While many visualization systems provide overview and exploration options for non-expert audiences or casual users, others support the in-depth analysis of collection experts like curators or art historians. These visualizations often rely on object metadata, which have been generated from historical catalogs or textual sources, each with their own standards of precision, certainty, and data quality. To make these levels of data quality transparent, the visualization of uncertainty poses a vital challenge for interfaces across the board. We introduce the PolyCube system as a visualization framework which provides four different perspectives on the geo-temporal origins of cultural collection data, including coordinated multiple views, animation, color coding, and a space-time cube representation. With specific regard to this multi-perspective framework we develop options to visualize spatio-temporal uncertainty and discuss ways and means of their coherent implementation.