ArchiMediaL. Developing Post-Colonial Interpretations of Built Form through Heterogeneous Linked Digital Media

Project participants: Beate Löffler (IN-EAST), Carola Hein (TU Delft), Jan van Gemert (TU Delft), Victor de Boer (VU Amsterdam), Dirk Schubert (HCU Hamburg)

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Funded by Volkswagen-Stiftung
Funding period: 2017–2020

The availability of extensive digital media creates important new challenges. The World Wide Web offers huge amounts of image material, that opens up new avenues for innovative investigation, including in the field of post-colonial and global studies. However, between repositories, big data, Wikipedia or Flickr, the connections between materials are getting lost. Metadata have to be added painstakingly and manually into the system – otherwise numerous sources will remain unexplored and closed to research. This is where the Dutch-German project starts: In cooperation between historians of architecture and urban form and computer scientists the project aims to develop new tools for automatic building recognition of architectures and their parts as available in inherently diverse digital media (plans, photos, models, etc.) and on the web. The computer side includes image recognition, deep learning, computer vision research, actual 3D datasets. Three interconnected pilot studies will be carried out: Global Ports and Waterfronts; Colonial Architecture; Japanese Architecture.