Town and Again (Monta kertaa
kaupunkiin), realized at the Finnish National Gallery in 2002-2006,
is the most extensive web project ever carried out by museums
in Finland. The Art Museum Development Department Kehys was
responsible for the planning and implementation of the project
together with the Central Art Archives. The project was financed
from the Information Society Programme of the Finnish Ministry
of Education. The Finnish and English language website was
opened in February 2006 and closed in December 2007.
The goals of the project are to promote digitalization and
accessibility of cultural heritage and to study the possibilities
of semantic web technology in content production. The website
features artworks from eleven different museums, through which
users can explore Finnish urban environments from the perspective
of visual arts. The site is made up of two scripted journeys
(Towns in Time and Routes Through the Town), a digital archive
(Search and Find) and a pedagogic section (Town of My Own)
for which the users themselves are invited to create contents.
The art museums engaged in the project take part in the content
production by producing the texts.
The user interface of the site has been designed to resemble
an experience of the city. It is a combination of order and
chance, control and chaos.
The website has received a great deal of attention at domestic
and international competitions and events. It has been awarded
the Special Mention of the Jury at the Möbius Nordica
competition (2007) and an Honorary Mention at the Finnish
Grand One webmedia competition (2006, public services series).
The website has also fared well at the Mindtrek 2005 competition
(finalist) and the Nodem 06 new media competition for Nordic
museums (finalist). The website has been presented at the
seminars Museums and the Web (2006, Albuquerque) and Digital
Semantic Content Across Cultures (2006, Paris, Louvre).
The project is especially characterized by the technological
and content solutions that have been realized on the website:
1. Data model based on topic maps
The material on the Town and Again website consists of artwork
images, documentary photographs, different texts, literature
quotes, maps, sounds and the student works of the pedagogic
section. The data management of the digital archives has been
realized with a Wandora software tool, which was developed
within the project. The Wandora application is a knowledge
management environment for digital media based on topic maps
where all the material connected with the project was entered
all the way up to the user interface texts. Apart from the
mass transfers of data from the museums’ information
systems, separate texts and image contents were also entered
in it. The internal relations between the data, such as those
between the contents of the scripted journeys and semantic
ontologies, were developed through the Wandora edit interface.
Topic maps are one of the technologies of the semantic web.
Topic map technology produces a dense interconnection of paths
between the topics for the end-users where they can browse
around associatively by clicking the links. Due to the topic
map technology, the contents on the website come across more
intensively than on an ordinary website: even those who are
less familiar with the arts can easily enter a browsing path.
Users need not suffer from “empty search field phobia”.
The Wandora application is introduced and freely downloadable
at http://www.wandora.net >>
2. Dialogue between art and urbanization
On the Town and Again website art is examined both from the
perspectives of the history of urbanization and of experiences
of urban citizenship. Bringing the town to central stage challenges
the long tradition of perceiving the foundations of Finnish
identity and Finnish art more from the perspective of nature
and rural living than from that of towns. However, ever since
the 1960s a majority of Finns have lived in towns and the
art institution has always been strongly connected to urban
living. The theoretic bases of the contents are both in discussions
on modernity and modernization and in urban studies.
The Town and Again website is not meant to serve as an encyclopedia
of urbanization in Finland but rather wishes to highlight
the processes of mutual interaction between urbanization and
art. The purpose of the scripted journeys is to offer the
users of the site “urban eyeglasses”, an urban
perspective which can be focused on the entire contents while
independently browsing the material.
The linearly proceeding Towns in Time section sketches a
picture of how the processes of urbanization in Finland have
occurred at different periods, with different emphases, time
and again. Artworks and documentary photographs are used as
historical illustration and to provoke thoughts about the
relationship between historical events and the development
of visual arts. Routes Through the Town History in turn is
a journey built in the shape of a subway map, associatively
combining artworks and brief texts. The dialogue between the
images and the texts builds atmospheric pictures of the urban
experience.
3. Democratic content production
Town of My Own is the pedagogic section of the website, where
users can freely enter photographs of places that are important
to them. The section is mainly targeted at school students
carrying out photography projects as part of a school class.
The photographs are entered into the site independently and
supplemented with information on the photographer and the
subject. The keywords are selected from a keyword list.
The student works blend in with the artworks and other material
on the site, apparently as a first of its kind on the Web.
When journeying on the site, the student works are featured
equally with the other material. The search can be limited
to include or exclude the student works.
4. Keywording and ontologies
The content descriptions were realized all in the same way,
regardless of the type of data. Locations, persons and times
were picked out of the data and keywords were chosen. Iconclass
software was applied in the keywording. In the project aimed
at the general public it was decided to hide the number-based
hierarchic structure of Iconclass which mainly serves to support
art historic research. Expressed in the vocabulary of topic
map technology, the base names of the Iconclass topics were
kept in original form but the display names in view on the
website are adapted translations. The actual Iconclass keywording
is utilized in the artwork database, collections browser and
other future web projects of the Finnish National Gallery.
The Iconclass hierarchy was adjusted in Wandora into a “town
ontology” to better serve the contextual goals of the
project. It opens to the users through the theme search in
the Search and Find section. Unlike in the natural historic
taxonomy applied by Iconclass, the animals are classified
under such subclasses as e.g. pets and domestic animals.
The Town and Again project took part in a research project
on Finnish national ontologies on the semantic web, but the
ontologizing work (e.g. location ontology) carried out within
the project could not yet be put to use in realizing the website.
In addition to its “town ontology”, the Town and
Again project also created its own location and time ontologies.
For more details on the subject-specific classification system
for artworks, see http://www.iconclass.nl >>
For more details on the semantic web and the FinnOnto research
project, see http://www.seco.tkk.fi
>>
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