The tools that the digital archive provide give visitors of the site a way to interact and arrange art works form the site in different ways and make new connections. These tool directly relate to the Digital humanities value of contextual understanding. No piece of art is completely removed from the rest of the art world and always contains references to other works and forms of media. One tool that exemplifies this connection is the Thesaurus.
Thesaurus – The Thesaurus provides a way for users to search for related works using admin assigned tags and find work realting to the certain ideas or themes of a work. The thesaurus uses a hierarchy system with sub categories that branch off from larger ideas. Creating these connections through the tags system and allowing the viewer to explore these relationships creates a contextual understanding of a piece and the ways it relates to the larger fine art industry. This understanding promotes collaboration by inviting artists to draw influence from similar works and use others work as inspiration.
Serendipity – The Serendipity tool suspends the contents of the archive in 3D space allowing the viewer to click through the procedurally generated space. Infinity looping and expanding the tool allows for happenstantial discovery of new works of art. Serendipity allowed artists to find works outside of thier own immediate visual taste and collaborate with artists they usually would not interact with when drawing inspiration.
Mnemosyne – Mnemosyne is a multi-image viewing portal that allows for the adding and rearranging of images from the archives database. The proximity and manuveurablity of the space allows for visual and contextual comparassions to be made. Mnemosyne creates a collaborative space by allowing works to be visually paired in the same workspace and for different connections to be made betweeen them.
Visualizations – Visualizations displays the archives metadata in different formats and layouts. The geographic origin of pieces are displayed as well as the gender of contributing artists and the year of release. This tool helps visualize the trends that arise within the archive. This tool is a well of knowledge for artists and reaschers to access data about digital artists to fuel other projects. Providing this information allows others to study trends and figures in the data and come to conclusions about the state of the art world.
