Learning from Many Images

Annotations of Historical Images for Cultural Heritage and Education

The research project at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (University of Salzburg) explores the potential of annotations for historical visual media in the fields of art and cultural education as well as educational institutions. While annotations from citizen science projects, museum collections, and digital humanities research have so far primarily been used for image research or AI-supported annotation systems, this project investigates how they can also enable innovative educational formats in museums, teacher training, and educational institutions.

About the Project

When strolling through museum galleries, visitors can compare images within the same space. Perhaps, while studying one artwork, they might even recall a detail they saw in a different form in an image two rooms earlier. But how can viewers compare content across many images?

Using a case study of over 90 artworks currently housed in the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, the project examines how image annotation and visualization techniques in the context of distant viewing can open up new ways of engaging with artworks. Users can select materials in a frontend and use a visualization to explore in which images these material combinations are depicted and where they appear together. This provides a new way of accessing the set of images. The focus is directed toward the depicted materials and the details they highlight, revealing how objects and their materials contribute to storytelling.

The foundation of the project is annotation data from the REALonline image database, which has been reviewed, revised, and optimized for export into visualization software. The project evaluates existing visualization tools for cultural heritage applications and integrates them into an interface for user interaction.

The results will be published on the Digital Humanities Blog of the University of Salzburg. Additionally, where possible, the developments will be made open source. This project contributes to the Digital Humanities Austria Strategy 2021+, particularly to the goals of collaboration between research institutions and memory organizations and knowledge transfer in teacher training.