Novel Approaches to research and discover Urban History

Abstract

Photographs and plans are an essential source for historical research (Münster, Kamposiori, Friedrichs, & Kröber, 2018) and key objects in Digital Humanities (Kwastek, 2014). Numerous digital image archives, containing vast numbers of photographs, have been set up in the context of digitization projects. These extensive repositories of image media are still difficult to search. It is not easy to identify sources relevant for research, analyze and contextualize them, or compare them with the historical original. The eHumanities research group HistStadt4D, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until July 2020 consists of 14 people – including 4 post-doctoral and 5 PhD researchers. Since a focal interest is to comprehensively investigate how to enhance accessibility of large scale image repositories, researchers and research approaches originate from the humanities, geoand information technologies as well as from educational and information studies. In contrast to adjacent projects dealing primarily with large scale linked text data as the Venice Time Machine project (“The Venice Time Machine,” 2017), sources addressed by the junior group are primarily historical photographs and plans. Historical media and their contextual information are being transferred into a 4D – 3D spatial and temporal scaled - model to support research and education on urban history. Content will be made accessible in two ways; via a 4D browser and a location-dependent augmented-reality representation. The prototype database consists of about 200,000 digitized historical photographs and plans of Dresden from the Deutsche Fotothek (“Deutsche Fotothek,”).