Heritage Landscapes vol.61
Heritage Landscapes is the Promemoria Group newsletter created to observe the contemporary heritage landscape. Twice a month we share the most interesting news and the most innovative projects, investigating those archival stories that turn an object, a brand or an insight, into a legend.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
1. The Long View
Linked Jazz
Can an interview reveal much more than a biography? That’s the challenge taken on by Linked Jazz, a project that uses Linked Open Data technologies to transform the oral histories of jazz musicians into a navigable network of relationships. Starting with over fifty transcripts from major U.S. archives, machine learning algorithms identify people, places, and references, linking them to databases.
The system automatically generates connections between artists, which are then enriched through volunteer contributions: it not only “knows” them but also “has played with,” “has influenced,” “has mentored,” and many other relationships. All this data is integrated into an interactive visualization that displays the social and professional network of jazz, accompanied by images, videos, and short biographies.
The project continues to expand thanks to collaborations with archives such as those at Carnegie Hall and Tulane University, with the goal of integrating new semantic data and highlighting underrepresented aspects—such as the role of women in the history of jazz—thereby breathing new life into stories that have rarely been told.
The project continues to expand thanks to collaborations with archives such as those at Carnegie Hall and Tulane University, with the goal of integrating new semantic data and highlighting underrepresented aspects—such as the role of women in the history of jazz—thereby breathing new life into stories that have rarely been told.
2. Augmented Craft
An Ocean of Books transforms literature into a digital landscape to explore. Over 100,000 authors and 140,000 books from the Google Books collection become islands and cities, organized using a machine learning system. The UMAP algorithm analyzes the relationships between authors and translates them into a map, revealing unexpected connections. This experiment demonstrates how artificial intelligence can transform large amounts of data into new tools for navigating and discovering new “continents.”
3. Seen & Noted
Persol and Olivetti bring the legacy of two giants of Italian design to the world of eyewear, transforming practical everyday objects into aesthetic landmarks destined to stand out. An engraved bridge, rubber tips, red accents, and colors inspired by Olivetti’s Lettera 22 reinterpret its unmistakable elements through Persol’s masterful craftsmanship, because a design that transcends its own time does not remain static: it spans generations, taking on new meanings and continuing to rewrite its own story.
Credits: Linked Jazz, Google Arts & Culture, Persol.
“We travel through space, leaving traces of the time we spend in places, and at the same time we travel through time by anchoring ourselves to a space that takes on, from time to time, finite dimensions—such as physical ones—or unquantifiable ones—such as inner space, desires, and creativity. It is the archive that safeguards this precious treasure, composed of fragments of our experience of the world and of time—the crossroads, the stops along the way, the destinations, and the setbacks.”
- Manuela Iannetti, president and director of Archivissima
- Manuela Iannetti, president and director of Archivissima