Cultural Heritage Cube. A Conceptual Framework for Visual Exhibition Exploration

Cultural heritage exhibitions commonly have to arrange a high amount of diverse artefacts and associated information in architecturally complex facilities. This constellation issues challenges to both: exhibition designers who have to find ways to deal with spatial restrictions and visitors who often experience cognitive overload and museum fatigue due to the high amount of information available. Against this background, the article is focusing on the question, how information visualization can serve as advance organizer, to make the organizing principles of cultural heritage exhibitions (like common topics, themes, geographical or temporal origin) transparent to the visitors. For this purpose, we extend the visualization method of time geography to an interactive visualization framework of time topography, which can support the interactive exploration of conceptual and physical cultural heritage exhibition spaces in parallel.