Mirador, Images, and the Future of Digital Research on the Web
An International Event at Stanford University
Discover. Zoom. Compare. Analyze. Annotate. Share. The latest Web technologies are transforming digital research using images. New tools such as Mirador are emerging as platforms with radical capabilities to view, manipulate, and mark up digital resources. With the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), they provide unprecedented access to information stores from the world’s greatest research and cultural heritage institutions.
With new capabilities comes the opportunity to fundamentally advance research and scholarship. This three-day event will help define and advance an agenda for research with digital images on the Web. Using Mirador as a focal lens, the meeting will pose and seek to answer key questions:
- How is research transformed via these new capabilities?
- What features and functions are most important?
- How can I find images to analyze?
- What kinds of analytic and annotation capabilities are most useful?
- What is my workspace in a networked world?
- How can one share, selectively, work with others?
- What new features and functions are most needed?
- What is needed to help disseminate these tools and methods to other scholars?
Drawing from different domains and three continents, this event will bring together leaders from the current Mirador community (pioneering users and technical contributors), scholars, curators, institutional directors, and information professionals. Two invitational, strategic round tables will be run as part of the event, to delve into opportunities specific to Museums / Visual Arts and Manuscript studies.
Schedule
Day 1 Case studies in working with digital images. Demonstrations, invited talks and round table discussion showcasing research, teaching, and interactive publishing with digital images in different domains. This will include an introduction to use of Mirador features and functions, and a hands-on lab for invited scholars, curators, and directors to gain experience using the tool in its present state.
Day 2 Requirements & designs for the next generation of tools and practices. Facilitated discussions on features, functions and essential capabilities that need to be developed for digital research with images, in areas such as annotation, discovery, 3D objects, and virtual exhibits. Strategic Roundtables of trends and needs in the domains of Manuscripts and Visual Arts / Museums will take place in parallel with cross-domain discussion. An end of day plenary session will offer report outs from all tracks, so that participants might discuss them and think on them overnight.
Day 3 Developing an agenda and action plan: bringing the future now Synthesis of the previous days’ discussions, including identifying and prioritizing specific activities to accelerate progress and uptake of Mirador and complementary tools. Optional training and implementation consulting for would-be new users.
Objectives and Outcomes
The event will weave together the emerging threads in research with digital images on the Web: pioneering users, senior scholars, curators and institutional leaders, and IT experts from different domains will share their latest progress, needs and next steps. This cross-pollination will produce a more detailed vision of the future of digital research, and inform a plan for progressing Mirador uptake, features and utilty.