VIKUS Viewer is an advanced web-based visualization system that arranges thousands of cultural artifacts on a dynamic canvas and supports the exploration of thematic and temporal patterns of large collections, while providing rapid access to high-resolution imagery.
Cultural collections feature three fundamental facets that are essential to make sense of their contents: time, themes, and texture. The time an artifact was created provides essential context to make sense of the themes it depicts and its visual texture. The VIKUS Viewer offers an interactive environment to explore a wide range of cultural collections along these three aspects.
The images are positioned on a canvas according to their historical dating and are further contextualized by historical events. The zoomable canvas allows the viewer to see the collection as a whole in the form of a histogram comprised of the very items in the collection. Zooming into individual images reveals high-resolution details such as paint artifacts, traces of use, and fine-grained texture of the paper. The keywords associated with collection items are displayed at the top of the interface in an interactive list that indicates the frequency of themes in the collection and allows for flexible filtering. Keyword selections reveal the rich relationships among the themes of a collection.
At the moment, there are six running instances on our server (plus over 15 instances implemented with the source code, see GitHub Repo):
– 1506 coins of Brandenburg-Prussian origin (16th to 19th century)
– 3273 books in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s library (1749–1832)
– 212 multi-page pamphlets from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
– 6905 drawings by Frederick William IV (1795–1861)
– 986 drawings and paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853–90)
– 5949 protest signs of the Boston Women’s March (21 Jan 2017)
VIKUS Viewer is based on the code behind Past Visions, a collaborative effort by Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, and Marian Dörk carried out in the context of the VIKUS project (2014-2017). The software was designed and developed by Christopher Pietsch and is available under an open source license on GitHub.
If you are interested in using it or have any questions, feel free to contact us.
This project was carried out in cooperation with the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation (SPSG), the Research Center Sanssouci (RECS), and Forschungsverbund Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel (MWW).