About the KB Labs presentation of Adams Illustrated Panorama of History, 1878
Background
This piece was dititized by Aarhus University Library, Emdrup, Denmark and is under CC-BY-SA license. More data about the piece are available at galleri.au.dk. The original is 673×70 cm and digitized in 62 DPI, to fit within the technical limitations of the TIFF format. It can be downloaded as a single file:
Technical
The project can be found at GitHub statsbiblioteket/anskuelse.
- The base presentation was created using the excellent tool libvips for image processing and the equally excellent OpenSeadragon for display
- Bookmarking functionality was added using callback-hooks and the zoom & pan-API from OpenSeadragon, with a bit of JavaScript-glue
- The Area Of Interest proof of concept (hover over the globe in the lower left corner) was added by hand, using the overlay-API from OpenSeadragon
Plans
We see the current KB Labs-product as a quick take and would like to extend it.
- One of the interesting properties of the Adams piece is the huge amount of distinct information that it holds. There are thousands of areas of interests, from a 10 horned beast to the cardiovascular system. This calls for an accessible annotation system with a visualization of the areas of interest that does not overwhelm the user. One technical challenge here is that OpenSeadragon overlays does not scale well into thousands of overlays
- The Adams piece is visually impressive and displays well on large screens. Adding a demo-mode where the view is automatically panned & zoomed is one way of keep such a display interesting. It could be a random walk or it could be between pre-selected areas of interest. It would combine well with annotations
Contact
We welcome feedback and ideas for future development.
Back to Adams visualization
