ArsTraverse

A visualization archive tool for traversing the universe of relationships

Visualize, co-edit, and archive the context of arts and culture for the future

ArsTraverse is a visualization archive tool that helps researchers and curators in arts and culture discover connections (context) among people, works, ideas, and concepts from literature such as papers and books, organize them clearly in diagrams, add their own thoughts, deepen knowledge, and share and discuss together.

Try ArsTraverse

What is a "knowledge graph" that expresses connections?

In ArsTraverse, the "knowledge graph" is central to research, organizing thoughts, and sharing and collaborating with other users in arts and culture. A knowledge graph is a form of data that expresses seemingly complex information and relationships as "Artist A" points and "Work X" points connected by "created" edges, visually expressing the relationship "Artist A created Work X".

This makes it intuitive to grasp how people, works, concepts, and events described in literature relate to each other. By organizing contextual information written as narrative into this knowledge graph, it becomes easier to grasp the big picture and focus on specific relationships.

Features

Automatic knowledge graph construction and visualization from literature

Simply upload your literature (PDF or manual input) and AI automatically extracts relationships among artists, concepts, and works, visualizing them as a knowledge graph. By integrating knowledge graphs generated from multiple sources, you can visually grasp connections across literature.

Detailed filtering and explanation generation

For created knowledge graphs, you can filter nodes and edges to examine detailed connections. You can also use AI to generate explanations and outlines of those connections.

Intuitive information editing

For automatically built knowledge graphs, you can directly add your own insights, hypotheses, and unique claims.

Collaborative editing in the community

Digital archive features are also in development. You can share knowledge graphs with other users and collaboratively manage archives through discussion.

Use cases

Exhibition and article planning

You can summarize exhibition and article content while generating draft explanations and outlines from edited knowledge graphs. Installing knowledge graph diagrams in exhibitions enables a more interactive viewing experience.

Exhibition example

Dragon Sleeping in the Sea — What Hataraki Left Behind: Tadashi Hataraki and Echoes of Kyushu-ha

Based on ArsTraverse, we developed an interactive diagram that visually captures relationships surrounding "Hataraki Tadashi" and "Kyushu-ha," the themes of the exhibition. The diagram visually expresses contemporaneous interactions, relationships, exchanges, and points of contact that are hard to imagine in a chronological format.

Literature research

From knowledge graphs generated by importing multiple papers and books into ArsTraverse, you can efficiently grasp complex relationships among people, works, concepts, and organizations. Exploring information while filtering by keywords and relationships leads to deeper research themes and new discoveries.

Digital archive projects

For topics of interest such as specific art movements, artists, or regional culture, you can collaboratively create, edit, and publish knowledge graphs with other researchers and curators. You can structure broad knowledge that is difficult to cover individually and preserve it as a mutual archive.

Development vision

Why develop ArsTraverse?

When we encounter artworks, we can understand and enjoy them more deeply not only by their appearance but also by learning the background in which the work was created and its relationships with other works, artists, and society. For works where concept is especially important, such as contemporary art, understanding this "context" is crucial.

Curators at museums and researchers at research institutions play the role of interpreting this complex context and communicating it clearly to viewers and readers. They survey vast literature, edit information, and present exhibitions, articles, and papers to discover new value in specific artists and art trends.

However, this process has several challenges:

Great effort is required to organize relationships from literature research
Effective visualization requires specialized knowledge and skills in visualization
Digitized and structured data is insufficient in arts and culture

Even when existing AI tools can extract information, it remains difficult to freely edit visualization afterward and smoothly reflect the planner's own knowledge and perspectives.

We believe a digital environment is needed where context for valuing arts and culture is actively edited, communicated to viewers and readers, and archived for the future.

What ArsTraverse aims for

Through ArsTraverse, we want to create an environment that invigorates discussion and archiving of context in arts and culture by streamlining the process from literature research to visualization editing and presentation, while appropriately storing and reusing the data generated.

The ultimate vision for ArsTraverse is a "GitHub-like bidirectional archive" platform for arts and culture. By actively editing and sharing context, we aim to discover previously overlooked relationships and assign new meaning from fresh perspectives. We believe this project can bring new value to arts and culture itself.

* GitHub is a system for collaboratively managing source code for software development.

Developer

松野仁志 | Design Engineer (Software)