The digital humanities project What Jane Saw reconstructs two Regency-era London Pall Mall exhibitions: the Shakespeare Gallery of 1796 and the Sir Joshua Reynolds exhibit of 1813. (The building that hosted the exhibitions no longer stands.) In order to create a virtual walk-through space that emulates as closely as possible the historical exhibit space, the web designers tracked down sizing information for each painting believed to be present at the time and pieced together the most likely wall arrangements in every room. In some cases, the designers had to rely upon surviving scraps or prints of paintings that can no longer be located in order to estimate original canvas size. Impressive metadata was added to paintings, including–in the Shakespeare Gallery, at least–reproductions of text that inspired ekphrasis.
The interface* of the site is intuitive enough to be nearly invisible to the viewer; viewers easily navigate through rooms by following directional arrows and examine paintings by clicking on them. The non-invasive imagery associated with the interface complements the minimalist web design. The muted colors and calm architectural spaces created in Google’s SketchUp contrast nicely with the furious color schemes and hyperbolic gestures within the picture frames–a fussier presentation with, say, menus and metadata along the sides of the gallery visuals would be overwhelming. A hint of the large windows running along the gallery’s ceilings is included in every available view and the paintings closest to the ceilings are slightly tilted, as paintings are in real galleries; the combination of a natural, high light source and angled artwork works to both draw the eye upward and encourage the viewer to concentrate on one painting at a time. Wherever the viewer looks on the screen becomes a focal point for the whole room. (Similar use of light and angles is, I believe, used in cathedrals to draw the individual’s attention upward and away from oneself.) These collections could have been displayed online as a simple series of images, but virtually hanging the art in a gallery reconstruction drastically changes user experience by forming a context, allowing the viewer to consider the tangible dimensions of each canvas and its relationship to other famous pieces of the time.
*Is it a stretch to consider the type of user navigation required for WJS an interface?
