Jean-Yves Blaise

Concentric time: enabling context + focus visual analysis of architectural changes

In order to acquire and share a better understanding of architectural changes, researchers face the challenge of modelling and representing events (cause and consequences) occurring in space and time, and for which assessments of doubts are vital. This contribution introduces a visualisation designed to facilitate reasoning tasks, in which a focus view on evidence about what happens to artefact λ at time t is a complemented with a context view where successive spatial configurations of neighbouring artefacts, durations of changes, and punctual events are correlated and tagged with uncertainty markers.

Architectural modelling and information interfacing: learning from three case studies

Documentation analysis and organisation are vital to the researcher when trying to understand the evolution of patrimonial edifices and sites. But the documentation that serves as source of evidences is far from being exhaustive or nonambiguous. Its very uncertainty is what really matters for researchers, and is therefore what we really need to represent inside 2D or 3D graphics. What solutions can one base on when trying to generate representations what would not say more about an edifice than what is really known? We present experiences in which, at various scales, we investigate the usability and graphical language of 2D/3D representations. We derive from these experiences remarks on how representations in the field of the architectural heritage can adhere to the notion of uncertainty and in the end really mean something for the researcher or practitioner. In conclusion to the paper we underline lessons we have learnt from these experiences on how to produce and exploit sustainable graphics in the field of the architectural heritage

Handling mouldings in historic architecture: A matter of geometry, a matter of knowledge?

The design and the making of mouldings in historic architecture is a good example of how complex relations of geometric features to semantic ones can be. Can architects who deal with historic artefacts, and who practice with computer solutions from the engineering world, still handle knowledge before handling geometry? This paper presents two very different case studies through which comprehensive analysis/ modelling /representation processes have been implemented. In a converging conclusion, it introduces a visual codification of mouldings. The contribution underlines the benefits of implementing a robust theoretical model of mouldings in the analysis of historic artefacts, notably in order to facilitate comparative dating, survey operations, typology analysis.

How was this done? An attempt at formalising and memorising a digital asset's making-of.

This paper introduces the early results of a research programme called MEMORIA that aims at developing an information system enabling the description, structuring and storage of digital outputs produced in the course of Heritage Architecture studies. Our objective is to memorize not only a given result - i.e. a digital asset - but its making-of - in other words to record and share with future generations a work process rather than solely its outcomes. Digital assets are on the one hand described by a set of “classic” parameters (e.g. format, authors, creation date, etc.) and on the other hand associated with a process (concept that should be understood as a chain of activities). Ultimately, the project investigates how a digital resource resulting from a human-birthed cognitive process can be associated with descriptors ensuring that all actions mobilised to produce the resource are recorded, and therefore ensuring a sort-of scientific traceability of the “final” digital document.

Visualizing alternative scenarios of evolution in heritage architecture

Our objective is to support reasoning tasks in heritage architecture with graphics enabling analysts to visualise and share their understanding of how, from a given set of information, alternative scenarios or evolution can be inferred. The paper comments on the nature of the cognitive processes in historical sciences, and on factors that need to be weighed when interpreting sets of information. Visual solutions are proposed, and illustrated on real cases in Kraków Poland. They help spotting where alternative explanations should be considered in order to avoid unjustified assumptions and certitudes on the evolution of artefacts. The contribution expects to demonstrate that reasoning on uncertainties in historical sciences can be fruitfully backed up by concepts and practices from the infovis community.

Anchoring Unsorted E-Sources About Heritage Artefacts in Space and Time

Thanks to citizen-side contributions, heritage scientists can now quite often gather large amount of spatio-temporal data about heritage artefacts. In the context of minor heritage collections, which often slip through large-scale heritage programs, accessing such data sets may be a decisive turn in uncovering important clues, or significant relationships in and across collections. In other words, the “citizen science” paradigm seemingly opens a whole new range of opportunities at research level (e.g., enrichment of data, comparative analyses, multidisciplinary annotations) and for collection holders (e.g., networking, “intangible” museums).

Can simplicity help

Analysts are today given (or develop) a wide range of powerful visual reasoning tools, of leading-edge platforms where services like high interactivity, high computing capacity, structured knowledge, processing of complex reasoning tasks on massive data, are duly implemented. Classic 18th or 19th century DataViz solutions may then appear as respectable, but deprecated -- far too simple to match todays challenges. In this paper we try to show that the very simplicity of these solutions can still be of help in problem-solving situations. We first revisit some great classics in order to uncover patterns and exceptions inside a data set consisting of incomplete historical evidence on groups of stalls that used to be located on the market square in Cracow. We show that, once reinterpreted and re-implemented, classic visualisations like tableaux poléométriques of Charles De Fourcroy or Munehisa Hommas candlestick chart can be successfully reused to read other types of data than these for which they were designed. We then introduce an online, free to use implementation of these classics that we expect to weigh through a sort-of crowdsourcing approach to which extent they can act as relevant and generic visual formalisms. Finally, we underline the potential contribution of this research in terms of methodology, and discuss in what simplicity proves here helpful.

Dynamic representations for information visualisation and retrieval: a case study on Krakow' s architectural heritage

In the field of the architectural heritage, a comprehensive analysis of the historical documentation concerning sites or edifices is an unavoidable step in their understanding. Yet few solutions exist that would bridge the gap between VR techniques and solutions for documentation. In the history of architectural representation, we observe that representation has since the renaissance been understood as a mean to deliver information. Our proposal investigates possibilities opened today to reapply this vision to information visualisation and retrieval. In this paper we present solutions investigated in order to use the 3D representation of architecture as an interface to a heritage documentation. Elements discussed will be an analysis of the information we deal with, as well as the real-time, Web-based solutions developed in order to visualise objects with regards to domain specific issues such as shape uncertainty or hypothesis justification. This research is experimented on the city of Krakow (Poland) and its architectural evolutions