DARIAH- PL “Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities”
Module I: Audiovisual Archives of the Faculty of Art Studies
Coordinator: dr Kamila Kłudkiewicz
Audiovisual Archive of the Faculty of Art Studies is one of six research units conducting the DARIAH-PL project. We are actively engaged in developing Polish intelligent digital research infrastructure for humanities, aimed at collecting, storing and integrating various types of research data; processing, visualizing and sharing digital resources.
Our main aim is to share the unique, multiformat archival resources that include photographic and phonographic documents, sources with commentaries, prints, and audio-visual recordings. They allow us to obtain metadata concerning various types of documents and form thematic units that enable us to draw complex conclusions (e.g. concerning hundred years of art history in Poznań studied on the basis of the art works’ reproductions used in teaching and research as well as compatible documentation covering a development of art history as an academic discipline).
The project results in the creation of an online database offering a wide access to three rich source collections: 1. photographs (reproductions from the oldest collection of the Institute of Art History’s photo library); 2. archival documents from the Institute of Art History’s archive and 3. phonographic recordings and documentation of ethnomusicological field trips organised by the Institute of Musicology AMU.
Online access to our database allows a collaboration with similar Polish and foreign online collections.
Module II: Laboratory for the analysis of music, speech, and gesture
Coordinator: prof. UAM dr hab. Piotr Podlipniak
The aim of the laboratory is to conduct advanced research both on structural specificities and the perception of music, speech and gesture. Music and natural language, as well as broadly understood sphere of communication by means of gestures, body movements or facial expressions are common in every culture. Modern technology allows us to study multiple aspects of these phenomena on the basis of different types of data ranging from audio- and audiovisual recordings to symbolic scripts. However, regardless of the scope of the phenomenon under consideration and the type of data analysed, the source of music, speech, and gestures in culture is a collective mental activity of people. For this reason, the analysis of any type of data referring to studies on cultural phenomena should relate to a greater or lesser extent to the cognitive sphere of humans. In addition to experimental research, the laboratory's task is to create computational tools, databases and other digital resources that provide a whole spectrum of solutions, enabling interdisciplinary research, linking musicology and linguistics to modern psychology, cognitive science, or neuroscience. The creation of digital information resources, essentially relating to human perception of reality (such as music intervals notated
with MIDI), makes it possible to use them both in experimental studies on the perception of music, speech, gestures, and body movements as well as in the recognition of the characteristics of musical styles and genres, idiolects and polylects, gesture-based culture, and in an attempt to determine the variability of music, language and gesture in historical perspective. The tools used in the laboratory allow for integrated study of cultural reality at different levels of complexity, from people's perceptual skills through intersubjective experiences to the socio-historical level.