Why you should listen to him
Museums, archives and libraries have spent the past decade digitising their collections. The result is a rich mountain of cultural data — a digital treasure trove — but when it comes to accessing these collections, we are stuck at search.
Search is like looking at a vast landscape through a powerful telescope: great if you know what you are looking for.
How can we see the “big picture” — understand the scope and structure of these cultural datasets? In projects such as The Visible Archive and commonsExplorer, Mitchell Whitelaw makes visualisations that deliver rich interfaces to cultural datasets, with a focus on exploration and context-building beyond the tight focus of search.