Digital Representation of Urban History and Notes from an Exhibition, Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative

Abstract

Architecture, urban planning and design professions use new information technologies, established with a set of tools for digitization and visualization of design solutions and proposals. Next to this operational function, new types of data representation and visualization in different media formats including drawing materials, maps, photographs, graphics, animations, video content and other hypertext materials, enhance the communication and interaction abilities as well. With the use of data visualization tools in urban and architectural history, perception of exhibited materials in digital collections, similarly increases the skills on narrating history via graphical and visual expressions for related professions. This paper aims to discuss digital representation and multimedia uses in narrating urban and architectural history through an exhibition case, which enlarges such opportunities with a methodological experiment for interpreting historical context of four different cities, individually. Narrating urban history by overlaying different media formats from selected archives, this exhibition “Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative” presents its experiment in a methodology of combining professional practices from architecture, urban studies, and graphical design. Media used in the exhibition and entire information content may help visitors to follow urban, social, political and ecological processes through changes in professional networks, crucial for understanding with their historical background.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.21.2018.17