Shapes of Time: Visualizing Set Changes Over Time in Cultural Heritage Collections

Abstract

In cultural heritage collections, categorization is a central technique used to distinguish cultural movements, styles, or genres. For that end, objects are tagged with set-typed metadata and other information, such as time of origin. Visualizations can communicate how such sets organize a collection - and how they change over time. But existing interfaces fall short of a) representing an overview of temporal set-developments in an integrated fashion and b) of representing the set elements (i.e., the cultural objects) themselves to be contemplated on demand. Against this background, we introduce two integrated visualization techniques - a superimposition and a space-time cube view - depicting the development of sets and their elements over time. We share first results from a qualitative evaluation with casual users and outline open challenges for future research.