DH Seminar: "Shapely Profusion"
Event details
| Date | 02.03.2023 |
| Hour | 15:30 › 16:30 |
| Speaker | Jeffrey Schnapp, founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract:
My talk is concerned with one of the defining challenges within the field of Knowledge Design: the shaping of both meaningful experiences and new knowledge forms when working with large image corpora. The talk will concern itself with two metaLAB (at) Harvard projects, one completed six years ago (the Lightbox Gallery), one more recent (A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze). Both tackle the question of how to devise on-site museum experiences of digital images at scale in ways that diverge from but complement the artwork-by-artwork experience of their conventionally displayed analog counterparts. Both work with portions of the museum database--the scale varies between 1,800 and 8,500 artworks--and leverage the distinctive ontology of digital images by building experiences of them as user-recombinable networks: in one case (the Lightbox Gallery) they reframe the visitor's experience of every artwork that he or she has experienced before reaching the gallery; in the other case (A Flitting Atlas) they provide an AI-assisted experiment in art historical mapping and storytelling.
Bio:
Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Societyat Harvard University. He holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (his principal appointment) but is also on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.
My talk is concerned with one of the defining challenges within the field of Knowledge Design: the shaping of both meaningful experiences and new knowledge forms when working with large image corpora. The talk will concern itself with two metaLAB (at) Harvard projects, one completed six years ago (the Lightbox Gallery), one more recent (A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze). Both tackle the question of how to devise on-site museum experiences of digital images at scale in ways that diverge from but complement the artwork-by-artwork experience of their conventionally displayed analog counterparts. Both work with portions of the museum database--the scale varies between 1,800 and 8,500 artworks--and leverage the distinctive ontology of digital images by building experiences of them as user-recombinable networks: in one case (the Lightbox Gallery) they reframe the visitor's experience of every artwork that he or she has experienced before reaching the gallery; in the other case (A Flitting Atlas) they provide an AI-assisted experiment in art historical mapping and storytelling.
Bio:
Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Societyat Harvard University. He holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (his principal appointment) but is also on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.
Practical information
- General public
- Free