DH@Ryerson: Tangible Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage Research: Exploring the Use of Jewish and Holocaust Ephemera

Hosted by Ali Mazalek (Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Innovation & Director, Synlab, Ryerson) & Ravit David (U of Toronto Libraries)

Existing cultural heritage digitization and archival methods lack the richness and versatility that is necessary for using library memorabilia and ephemera. At the same time, emerging interaction technologies that bridge the physical and digital worlds offer opportunities to provide users with rich sensory experiences. Our research brings these two domains together to investigate how tangible and augmented reality interaction design can help to address some of the challenges that scholars face when working with ephemera and memorabilia collections. Our first use case focuses on a collection of Jewish and Holocaust ephemera and memorabilia. In this presentation, we describe our ongoing research in this area, including a formative study that we conducted to better understand current practices and challenges in cultural heritage research, as well as prototype designs for the Tangible Augmented Reality Archives (TARA) application that supports discoverability and use of library and archival artifacts.