Tech Project

Description of the challenges faced by the Tech Project

Traditional browse and search discovery methods employed by Digital Repositories are limiting and users may not engage deeply with the resources. This challenge is to imagine new ways to discover and interact with materials from Digital Repositories based on online narrative experiences. These will combine materials from multiple Digital Repositories and will include a range of multimedia resources; audio, video, text and images. These should be woven into a creative narrative and presented via a IIIF viewer. The artist will choose the theme and develop the narrative, and design how the materials will be presented and the interactions possible.

Brief description of technology

The Digital Repository of Ireland uses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to serve high resolution digitised images of resources within the Repository. IIIF is a set of standards for providing access to images that provides great flexibility in how the images can be served and displayed. It enables deep zooming, image cropping, colour manipulation, annotation and many other features. It also facilitates the sharing of digital resources allowing materials from different sources to be combined for display. Although originally developed for images, IIIF has expanded to work with various different media types. Recently there has been some work on using IIIF as a tool for creating narratives, for example the Storiiies project (http://storiiies.cogapp.com/). This project hopes to create one or more online narratives inspired by and using multi-media materials from the Digital Repository of Ireland, combined with materials from other repositories in Ireland and abroad which support the IIIF standard.

What the project is looking to gain from the collaboration and what kind of artist would be suitable

We hope that this will provide new and innovative ways to interact with Digital Repository collections, using narratives to guide the user to experience the Repository holdings. It will showcase the materials from the DRI Repository in a novel way, and allow us to present materials from our Repository in a context of other digital collections held in Ireland and abroad. The ideal artist would have an interest in digital media and have some experience in digital authoring and creating narratives using diverse digital media. They will be responsible for developing the theme and concept and designing the experience. Technical staff will be available to assist in the implementation, but some familiarity with computer languages and coding, in particular structured data formats such as JSON, would be beneficial.

Resources available to the artist

DRI will provide office space, internet access and access to the Repository and software tools. A laptop can be provided if required. There would be some budget for travel to IIIF workshops or other events both to learn the technologies and to showcase the results of the project. Existing DRI staff will be available for technology training and to collaborate and provide support on the technical implementation, as well as to provide guidance on suitable materials from the Repository to include. The finished work will be hosted online with a public launch event at which the artist will be invited to speak.