Anchoring unsorted e-sources about heritage artefacts in space and time

Résumé En

Thanks to citizen-side contributions, heritage scientists can now quite often gather large amount of spatio-temporal data about heritage artefacts. In the context of minor heritage collections, which often slip through large-scale heritage programs, accessing such data sets may be a decisive turn in uncovering important clues, or significant relationships in and across collections. In other words, the " citizen science " paradigm seemingly opens a whole new range of opportunities at research level (e.g., enrichment of data, comparative analyses, multidisciplinary annotations) and for collection holders (e.g., networking , " intangible " museums). Yet, due to the nature of such data sets (e.g., heterogeneity in the wording, in the precision, verifiability issues, contradictions), these opportunities also raise challenges, in particular when wanting to foster cross examinations by heritage scientists. The global objective of our research is to better weigh how the nature of citizen-side contributions can impact the way information can be recorded, formalized, and visualized. In this paper a clear focus is put on the space and time parameters: geo-visualization, and spatio-temporal data visualization. The paper introduces a series of open-source geo-visualization solutions that have been designed for use in the context of information sets harvested from citizen-side e-sources, and that help document minor heritage assets. The results we present show that hybrid visualizations can act as a basis for comparative reasoning and analysis, but also that the core service we should manage to offer is definitely an infovis one: getting to understand (at last) what we really know (and ignore).