Museum as an integrated imaging device: visualization of ancient Kyoto cityscape from folding screen artifact

Abstract

Museums hold cultural resources such as artworks, historical artifacts, and folklore materials. The National Museum of Japanese History holds over 200,000 of the cultural resources. A role of museum is to exhibit the cultural resources, therefore a museum could be referred to as a visualization device for the information society. In this research, visualization of a history image from cultural resources with interactive user interface will be mentioned. The material focused on is the oldest extant version of a genre of folding screen paintings that depict the thriving city of Kyoto in the four seasons, named Rekihaku's "Scenes In and Around Kyoto" designated as a nationally important cultural property in Japan. Over 1,400 people and a lot of residences, temples, and houses are drawn, and those are also information resource telling us about city scenes and people's life in Kyoto at that time. Historical researches were done by using a high resolution digital image obtained by a large scaled scanner, and scanned images are used for computer programs to visualize a history image of ancient Kyoto. Combinations between real materials and information provided by using the computer programs are also described in this research.