Richard KURDIOVSKY | Julia FORSTER | Christoph HOFFMANN | Elmar SCHMIDINGER | Andreas VOIGT | Herbert WITTINE | Gabriel WURZER
(Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for History of Art and Musicology, Division for history of Art, Vienna, Austria)

Keywords: Three-dimensional archive, spatial presentation of digitized historical documents, cross-border tool for the humanities, re-use of 3D-models

Abstract:
A 3D-modell of the Vienna Hofburg consisting of twelve stages from the 13th century until 1835 was built to make the construction and planning process of this palace easily comprehensible. The basis for this reconstruction was formed by archaeological findings and by the analysis of handwritten and printed historical sources including pictorial sources like architectural drawings. Questions of sustainability of digital models and the responsibility of publicly funded research projects have lead us to believe that 3D-models and the large number of digitized data have the potential for future use. We are aiming at constructing an online-prototype which locates the written and the pictorial sources according to time and space within the 3D-model as a three dimensional archive which allows to analyse the building and the respective sources both synchronically and diachronically.
Our paper will focus on the challenges we face both on the side of IT-technology (e. g. the structure of storing and correlating data, the divergent quality of digitized objects) and on the side of the visualization of a big amount of heterogeneous data within a three-dimensional frame (e. g. the complex situation of written sources which can simultaneously contain a range of information on different topics and dates of diverse character or the problem of visualising uncertainties of text-based data for a spatial context). This new visualisation of data can offer new contextual visions of a built structure and new ways of looking at source materials for different scientific disciplines transcending architectural history towards other text-based disciplines to help interpreting written sources which deal with a spatial situation.

Relevance conference / Relevance session:
Making use of a 3D-reconstruction as a three-dimensional digital archive for written and pictorial sources creates a link for an interdisciplinary approach towards and a transdisciplinary use of digit

Innovation:
The innovative potential of our three-dimensional archive lies in the planned online-based retrieval of historical sources within a spatial context.