Description
The project »Urban History 4D« focuses on four-dimensional research and communication of urban history. Its aim is to make available a city’s development over time together with related historic sources, especially photographs, through a virtual spatial model.
Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), it is a cooperation project between the Technische Universität Dresden and University of Würzburg. The aim is to investigate and develop methods and technologies to transfer extensive repositories of historical media and their contextual information into a three-dimensional spatial model, with an additional temporal component. This will make content accessible to different target groups, researchers and the general public, via a 4D browser. The data resources available for this research include extensive stock of historical photographs of the city of Dresden, which document the city’s architecture since the 1850s, and digitized map collections of the German Photographic Collection (Deutsche Fotothek) platform.
Using digital content und tools provides a valuable support for researchers especially in art history to investigate how the city was photographed over time, taking into account the photographers’ perspectives, positions, and preferred (parts of) buildings. The large number of photographs call for a suitable quantitative examination using scientific visualizations.
