MediaCommons for cultural heritage: Applied mixed media visualization storytelling for high resolution collaborative cyberarchaeological displays

Abstract

Archaeology is a discipline that studies time through an understanding of space and objects in that space; archaeology is ultimately, therefore, an intersection where the visualization of space and the visualization of time meet. Archaeology has long utilized visualization as a technique to analyze and disseminate information; however, comprehensive and collaborative analysis and storytelling with this visual data has always been limited by the capacity of the systems, which create and display it. To present the most complete narrative of the past, one must seek the “big picture” by assembling the disparate pieces of data, which reflect the lives of the humans we study. This paper presents a framework for the visualization of and interaction with rich data collections in high resolution, networked, tiled-display environments, called the MediaCommons Framework.