Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 29, 2014

Cooper Hewitt, Color Interface

Filed under: Indexing,Library,Museums — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

From the about page:

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum presents compelling perspectives on the impact of design on daily life through active educational and curatorial programming.

It is the mission of Cooper Hewitt’s staff and Board of Trustees to advance the public understanding of design across the thirty centuries of human creativity represented by the Museum’s collection. The Museum was founded in 1897 by Amy, Eleanor, and Sarah Hewitt—granddaughters of industrialist Peter Cooper—as part of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A branch of the Smithsonian since 1967, Cooper-Hewitt is housed in the landmark Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

I thought some background might be helpful because the Cooper Hewitt has a new interface:

COLORS

Color, or colour, is one of the attributes we’re interested in exploring for collection browsing. Bearing in mind that only a fraction of our collection currently has images, here’s a first pass.

Objects with images now have up to five representative colors attached to them. The colors have been selected by our robotic eye machines who scour each image in small chunks to create color averages. These have then been harvested and “snapped” to the grid of 120 different colors — derived from the CSS3 palette and naming conventions — below to make navigation a little easier.

My initial reaction was to recall the old library joke where a patron comes to the circulation desk and doesn’t know a book’s title or author, but does remember it had a blue cover. 😉 At which point you wish Basil from Faulty Towers was manning the circulation desk. 😉

It may be a good idea with physical artifacts because color/colour is a fixed attribute that may be associated with a particular artifact.

If you know the collection, you can amuse yourself by trying to guess what objects will be returned for particular colors.

BTW, the collection is interlinked by people, roles, periods, types, countries. Very impressive!

Don’t miss the resources for developers at: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/developers/ and their GitHub account.

I first saw this in a tweet by Lyn Marie B.

PS: The use of people, roles, objects, etc. for browsing has a topic map-like feel. Since their data and other resources are downloadable, more investigation will follow.

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