Latent Archive: Immersive Storytelling Platform for Examining Spatial History

The Transmedia Storytelling Initiative at MIT is pleased to announce that together with MIT’s Virtual Experience Design Lab, Professor Caroline A. Jones and Dr. Cagri Hakan Zaman have been awarded a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the project Latent Archive: Immersive Storytelling Platform for Examining Spatial History.

Principle Investigators: Dr. Cagri Hakan Zaman & Prof. Caroline Jones
Team: Deniz Tortum, Adriana Giorgis, Laruen Gideonse, Rohit Sanatani

A significant part of history is stored in newsreels, educational, documentary, fiction films, and even home movies. Moving images constitute one of the richest sources of information for a wide range of disciplines grounded in visual literacy including art and architectural history, archeology and museology, film and media studies, as well as history in general. This vivid archive is poised to reveal significant historical and creative information through tools that can be developed and combined to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. Previously, extracting information from moving images has been challenging and time consuming, requiring historians and film scholars to access footage by manually reviewing sequences over and over to parse the setting, the rituals, camera angle, narratives, and the material cultures involved. Now, developments in computer vision and spatial analysis technologies have opened up exciting possibilities for these scholarly processes, with direct implications for improved public access and future translational tools for disabled communities. The “latent archive” that has always been embedded in moving images can now be captured via machine-enabled analysis: locating the urban or architectural setting, producing 3D spatial reconstructions, and allowing fine-grained examination of point-of-view and shot sequence. P.I.s Cagri Zaman (Lecturer in Architecture) and Caroline Jones (Professor, HTC Architecture) aim to combine and develop technologies to produce a single prototype platform for translating moving image archives into spatial formats that can be examined in immersive media (i.e. Virtual & Augmented Reality). By the end of phase 1 of the grant period, Jones and Zaman intend to post publicly available software, along with moving image training sets on a publicly available website, that will help humanists such as media theorists, historians, and urban planners to utilize moving images’ spatialized 3D historical information. Latent Archive will open exciting new opportunities for studying material history and producing new spatially informed narratives about the past.