Abstract
Abstract. This article presents a spatio-temporal web application dedicated to the co-exploitation of heterogeneous data spatialized in a common 3D environment, providing several paradigms for supporting their co-visualization and interactions within the 3D environment and across time. The relevance of this tool is demonstrated here with two use cases involving historians and sociologists with the common objective of better understanding the formation of the Parisian metropolis. The study focuses on the evolution of the city of Nanterre (Paris area), which underwent many changes in the 1950s, and in particular on shantytown areas. Through census as statistical data and aerial imagery as visual data, a group of historians and sociologists experimented the relevance of the joint exploitation of those heterogeneous data within the proposed spatio-temporal web application.
Highlights
The massive deployment of digitisation technologies and the increasing availability of digital data describing the past have made of those ”big data of the past” a major challenge for research in information science and digital humanities
These data may be very heterogeneous, e.g. statistical data, ancient texts, iconography, 3D objects, etc. They are usually distributed in silos in diverse GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) institutions and poorly interconnected. Their richness, facing their variety, complexity and lack of global structure, makes them interesting and challenging in the digital humanities domain, both for ICT researchers who have the ambition of proposing tools to better organize and develop them, and for SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) researchers who can benefit from explanatory models of historical evidence that may enrich narrative and even lead to new, plausible ones
We present our web-based proposal for spatio-temporal visualization of heterogeneous multi-date data in 3D within section 4, before explaining its exploitation in support of two use cases focused on understanding the formation of the Parisian metropolis in section 5 and concluding in the last section
Summary
The massive deployment of digitisation technologies and the increasing availability of digital data describing the past have made of those ”big data of the past” a major challenge for research in information science and digital humanities. They are usually distributed in silos in diverse GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) institutions and poorly interconnected Their richness, facing their variety, complexity and lack of global structure, makes them interesting and challenging in the digital humanities domain, both for ICT researchers who have the ambition of proposing tools to better organize and develop them, and for SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) researchers who can benefit from explanatory models of historical evidence that may enrich narrative and even lead to new, plausible ones.
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