Sarah Kenderdine (EPFL), Alexandre Alahi (EPFL), Renato Pajarola (UZH) and Giovanna Fossati (University of Amsterdam), have received a Sinergia grant of two millions Swiss francs from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The project «Narratives from the long tail: Transforming access to audiovisual archives» is a collaboration between the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (EPFL), Visual Intelligence for Transportation Laboratory (EPFL), Visualization and MultiMedia Laboratory (UZH) and Faculty of Humanities (University of Amsterdam).

The researchers in digital museology, machine learning, visual analytics and archival science will make the Swiss audiovisual archives accessible for the general public. Switzerland has made big investments in the digitalization and curation of audiovisual cultural heritage, but the majority of these collections is unavailable in public. The project «Narratives» will create a novel visualization framework with the aim to (re)discover interactively hundreds of thousands of hours of audiovisual materials. The solutions will be showed with an EPFL ArtLab installation in 2025 and exhibitions and installations shall be organized, for example with the Montreux Jazz Festival and with RTS.

Within the project, Renato Pajarola and his team will research and develop new interactive visual analytics tools specifically for large displays of audiovisual archives within museum settings.