Exploring the Biography and Artworks of Picasso with Interactive Calendars and Timelines

Scholars and general users of digital editions face a diffi cult
and problematic scenario when browsing and searching for
resources that are related to time periods or events. Scrolling
continuously through a long list of itemized search results
does not constitute an unusual practice for users when
dealing with this type of situation. The problem with this
searching mechanism is that a notion of the corresponding
dates or keywords associated with the event are required and
constitute a precondition to a successful search.
An ordered list is unable to provide the required affordances
and constraints that users need and desire to conduct scholarly
research properly. It is a common practice among users to
utilize the search mechanism present in most web browsers,
and then perform another search among the obtained results
to “narrow down” or limit the results to a smaller working
set that is easier to manage. The use of an external search
mechanism in a digital edition is a strong indicator that improved
interfaces must be designed, conceived and implemented, just
to achieve the sole purpose of facilitating scholarly research.
Background
The Online Picasso Project (OPP) is a digital collection and
repository maintained by the Center for the Study of Digital
Libraries at Texas A&M University, and the Foreign Languages
Department at Sam Houston State University. As of November
2007, it contains 13704 catalogued artworks, 9440 detailed
biographical entries, a list of references about Picasso’s life
and works, and a collection of articles from various sources
regarding the renowned Spanish artist.
How does the OPP provide its content? Java Servlets are
used to retrieve the documents and metadata from a MySQL
database. As a result, a Apache Tomcat web server outputs a
XML which is linked to XSLTs and CSS. The later are used to
perform a dynamic transformation into standards-compliant
HTML, achieving a clear separation between content and
presentation.
The OPP includes an interface that allows scholars and users
in general to browse through the signifi cant events in his life,
artworks, and a list of museums and collections that hold
ownership to the various art objects created by the artist
during his lifetime. The implemented navigation scheme works
well for experienced scholars who have a deep knowledge of
Picasso’s life and works. The amount of available information can
be overwhelming to the project audience, composed primarily
of art scholars and historians, because of its magnitude and
painstaking detail.
The Humanities rely profoundly on dates to create a strong
relationship between events and documents. It is obvious to
assume that key events infl uenced Picasso in such a way, that
they caused signifi cant changes in artistic style and expression.
The OPP contains a vast amount of information that could be
used in conjunction with the proposed interfaces, in order to
help answer this type of inquiries. The calendars and timelines in
the OPP propose an alternate method for exploring an existing
document collection since they use date-related metadata as
a discriminating factor, instead of an ordering criterion. Dates
are used to provide mechanisms and interfaces that allow rich
exploration of the artist’s legacy in order to get a more whole
and concise understanding of his life
Calendars
The calendar interfaces were developed to provide a timetable
for the creation of artworks and occurrence of events
cataloged in the OPP. Their purpose is to provide with a quick
glance, relevant biographical and artistic dates. Additionally, the
calendars provide means for formulating direct comparisons
between dates within a single year. months and seasons.
The calendar interfaces have 5 display possibilities to fi lter
results, which apply to the artworks and to the narrative:
1. Show start date and end date: used to display “exact
matches”.
2. Show start date or end date:
3. Show start date only:
4. Show End date only
5. Show Ranges of dates
Surrogates are provided in the form of artwork thumbnails
and textual description of the events. Clicking on the specifi ed
date, month or season produces a web page, where detailed
descriptions can be accessed. Colors were added to the dates containing items, to show the
distribution of the artworks and events. The design decision
to include additional stratifi cation schemes relates to the
research goal of providing an enhanced browsing mechanism.
The inclusion of this feature does not implicate any greater
additional processing of the data, but it provides a richer
environment for browsing the document collection. Figure 1: Artwork surrogates – ranges of dates
The use of calendar interfaces provides new possibilities for
scholars and users in general: the discovery of relationships
between documents, which standard HTML interfaces do not
facilitate. The main advantages derived from their use include:
1. The possibility of visualizing an entire year in Picasso’s
biography and artistic career.
Through the use of a Calendar-based interface, artworks can
be visually identifi ed to their specifi c dates of creation. This
provides a visualization mechanism that allows the user to
navigate through a potentially large number of artworks in one
screen. The number of artworks that can be accessed, depends
on how esthetically prolifi c the artist was in that specifi c year.
Figure 2: Event surrogates – start and end dates
Additionally, this interface allows the users of the project to
quickly determine periods where the artist was more prolifi c.
Dates where Picasso was “active” are clearly visible and
identifi able. This data stratifi cation gives users an additional
layer of information.
For the case of biographical events, a similar scenario is
created. Users can navigate through an entire year of events,
and the information is presented in a way that affords quick
navigation and encourages interaction. Visually, periods where
more events occurred in Picasso’s life are easily identifi able.
2. The possibility of moving to specifi c day, month or season
within a year in one single interaction with the interface.
Through the use of information surrogates, users have the
possibility of moving to a specifi c day, month or season within
a year with a single click. The actions produced by scrolling
through multiple screens are eliminated, and users can view the
artifacts produced on a specifi c date with ease. Consequently,
comparisons between artworks can be achieved fl uidly due
to the enhancements in the browsing environment. Similarly,
users can read about the specifi c events in Picasso’s biography
by visually selecting concrete dates.
The deployment of the Calendar interfaces, produce
visualizations that enable scholars to determine time periods
or specifi c dates in Picasso’s life. They serve as a tool that helps
identify when the artist was more prolifi c, as well the opposite:
when less artworks were produced. This analysis could also
be accomplished by browsing through the artwork collection
but it requires additional interaction from the user, which
at the end equals more time and effort. The interfaces also
constitute a new way of browsing the document collection: visually and in strict correlation to time. They also facilitate
further exploration of artworks and events in certain days,
months, seasons and years.
Timelines
This new browsing mechanism in the OPP, based on the Simile
Timeline, was introduced by placing artworks as markers in
a time frame. It was designed to allow users to examine the
artworks produced, along with the recorded events of a given
year. Further modifi cations were necessary, since the Simile
Timeline was designed to support single events occurring in
one day.
Initially, the timeline was designed to focus only on Picasso’s
artworks. This design choice gave users great freedom to
explore large amounts of information in a manipulatable visual
space. However, the biographical events were being excluded.
These events included in the OPP, are particularly important
since provide a historical framework, which is crucial to the
understanding of the artist’s legacy and are tightly bound to
his work rhythm.
Moreover, some of the artworks produced by Picasso have a
certain degree of uncertainty in their dates of creation, since
their start and end dates were not documented. The timelines
provide a mechanism for dealing with uncertainty, where the
artworks are represented with a time bar with a lower level of
saturation in their color. This gives a visual clue that the start
and end dates are not fi xed, and are subject to speculation.
Additional information such as changes in style and location
were injected to the timeline, which were extracted from the
artist’s biography. Their purpose is to provide an additional
layer of information that can be used to interpret the events
that lead to the creation and mood of certain artifacts, and
thus enhancing the browsing environment.
Figure 3: Exploring artwork - event correlation
The advantages gained through the use of timelines include:
1. The possibility of grasping visually time-extensions in
Picasso’s output.
Picasso worked on several artworks at times, which share a
similar theme. Even though they share common characteristics,
they are not identical. Each of these artworks has variations,
which differentiate them.
On the other hand, the timelines allow users to freely explore
all the artworks and events within a given year, and point
out their similarities and differences, and affords further
examination regarding the evolution of a common and shared
theme.
2. The possibility of visually comparing works ordered in
chronological order.
The timelines provide a mechanism that fi lters artworks
according to their year of creation. The enhanced navigational
scheme provided, allows scholars to view artifacts in
chronological order. The addition of surrogates allows users
to point out a specifi c item, and then compare them in relation
to others through and their time correlation.
3. The possibility of seeing correlations between change of
location and artwork creation.
The deployed timelines allow the exploration of correlations
between location changes and the creation of specifi c artworks.
Changes in location are marked in the timelines, and clearly
denote a point in time where exposure to a new or recurring
context occurred.
Figure 4: Changes in location
4. The possibility of comparing different stylistic periods as
they relate to concrete artworks and specifi c locations. The timelines produce a visualization that puts changes in
thematic periods and in locations in a common context, along
with the artworks that were elaborated in that time span.
This tool is augmented with the navigational ease of clicking
through a series of artworks, to compare their characteristics
and perform a deeper analysis if necessary.
The interfaces have been deployed taking into account that
additional functionality could be introduced with ease. As
a consequence, information regarding Picasso’s writings
and poems will be included into the next iteration of the
timelines and calendars. This will allow a deeper understanding
of his legacy, since it could potentially provide a greater
understanding of his artworks and biography. The writings and
poems constitute a compendium of his thoughts and insights,
extremely valuable because they were written by the artist
himself.
The timeline interfaces in the OPP, narrow the gap and visually
correlate biographical entries with artworks. They provide
scholars a bigger picture of Picasso’s artistic landscape and
how events they could have affected his artworks. The dynamic
nature of the web-accessible interfaces facilitate the insertion
of new documents and metadata and thus altering the graphical
space, which is not feasible on static and printed editions.
References
The Online Picasso Project. Available at http://picasso.tamu.
edu. [Accessed May 17, 2007]
SIMILE Project. Available at http://simile.mit.edu/. [Accessed
on May 24, 2007]
Monroy, R. Furuta, and E. Mallen, “Visualizing and Exploring
Picasso’s World,” in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE-CS joint
conference on Digital Libraries, 2003, IEEE Computer Society,
pp. 173- 175.
Kumar, R. Furuta, and R. Allen, “Metadata visualization for
digital libraries: interactive timeline editing and review,” in
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital Libraries,
1998, ACM Press, pp. 126 – 133.
Monroy, R. Furuta, E. Urbina, and E. Mallen, “Texts, Images,
Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso,” in Proceedings
of the Visual Knowledges Conference, 2003, John Frow, www.
iash.ed.ac.uk/vkpublication/monroy.pdf.
N. Audenaert, U. Karadkar, E. Mallen, R. Furuta, and S. Tonner,
“Viewing Texts: An Art-centered Representation of Picasso’s
Writings,” In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2007, 2007.
C. Monroy, R. Furuta, and E. Mallen, “Creating, Visualizing,
Analyzing, and Comparing Series of Artworks,” 2003,
Unpublished paper.