Timeline Visualization: Photography Exhibition Catalogues in e-Artexte

I’ve been working with Artexte on the development of e-artexte, a unique open access digital repository for documents in the visual arts in Canada. It is a new on-line service that caters to the needs of museums, galleries, artist-run centres and other publishers/authors in the visual arts community who are looking for ways to make their publications more widely accessible via the Internet.

The open source EPrints platform that powers e-Artexte is highly interoperable. In choosing open source technology that is capable of export of its contents using semantic web standards, a necessary condition for innovation around that content is met. E-Artexte enables researchers to leverage the open metadata exporting capabilities of the EPrints software to create customized visualizations.

As an example of such visualization, I ran an advanced search for all exhibition catalogues with the keyword “photography” or “photographie” (for those items catalogued in French language only). I then exported this result from e-Artexte using the JSON export and customized the Timeline libraries so that they will be able to display this data.

This is the result:
Timeline Visualization: Photography Exhibition Catalogues in Artexte Collection (1960-)
http://www.photographymedia.com/visualizations/artexte/e-artexte-1.html

The interface allows for the browsing of hundreds of photography-related exhibition catalogue metadata through an interface that organizes the display by time. You can move the timeline by using one of two bands: year, and decade. Clicking on an individual title brings up a more detailed view with an abstract, and clicking on the title in that bubble opens a new window/tab with the relevant e-Artexte record. The visualization updates the latest photography exhibition information from e-artexte every 30 days.

Documentation: http://www.photographymedia.com/visualizations/artexte/timeline.html

Source Code: http://github.com/photomedia/SimileTimelineEPrints

[Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Jan 18, 2013 ]