GlaViWo
Instructions can be found on the start page of the application.
The University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) have a long tradition of research on ancient South Arabia. The Austrian scholar Eduard Glaser collected a lot of material in Yemen during the 1880s and 1890s. His estate consists of artefacts, squeezes, diaries and other manuscripts, photographs, notes, books, and articles about this fascinating region of the Near East. An important part of this estate is now preserved at the OeAW (where it has been dealt with in two earlier projects).
That said, the artefacts are currently spread all over the world, making it extremely difficult for researchers in South Arabian epigraphy and architecture, ethnology, geography, linguistics, and history to get a full picture of what Glaser has gathered.
GlaViWo seeks to collect all available information on Glaser’s collection, store it in a single database, and present it in the most modern way available, namely in a 3D virtual world which will be created dynamically depending on the users’ requests.
The idea behind the presentation is to use documents, 3D objects and images to create an experience of immersion in Eduard Glaser's world: a museum of ideas that actively responds to the questions and interests of its users, interactively reconstructing each museum room and thus appealing in particular to digital natives. The user is virtually immersed in the scholarly world of the 19th century and the fascinating culture of ancient southern Arabia.
This virtual system, which is freely available, will not only facilitate research work, but also attract young people to the field. We were able to present the project results at the most famous South Arabia conference (24th Rencontres Sabéennes, Berlin) as a prototypical model, as well as at universities.
The project brings together specialists in epigraphy, philology and 3D visualisation, all of whom are currently available in Vienna.
As of June 2023, the virtual GlaViWo collection contains more than 9,600 objects, 3,500 of which in 3D, provided with 200,000 attributes and 6,400 links between the objects.
Copyright CC-BY-4.0 non commercial
The use of GlaViWo with its texts, transcriptions, translations is allowed for non-commercial, personal or scientific purposes.
For publication and other than private and scientific use, images, pdfs, 3D-objects require always the permission of the respective institution.
In case of use of archival material of the Academy of Sciences, Vienna, for publication purposes please contact: petra.aigner(at)oeaw.ac.at.
Please cite: "Austrian Academy of Sciences, Library, Archive & Collections, Project IF2019/27 Glaser Virtual World – All About Glaser, ..." (Short quote: OeAW, BAS:IS, GlaViWo, ... )
Please send a copy of the publication to the Academy of Sciences, Library, Archive & Collections, Bäckerstraße 13, 1010 Vienna (digital copies to bibliothek(@)oeaw.ac.at)
Cooperation agreements / support from individuals
Bringing together the vast scientific estate of Eduard Glaser scattered in museums, archives and libraries worldwide would not have been possible without the generous support of the following institutions and we like to thank them all:
The following institutions provided further archival material:
Online collections
Digital collections of the following institutions were consulted:
Keywords: Virtual reality, Ancient South Arabia, knowledge management, artefacts, Eduard Glaser
Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW)
Library, Archive and Collections: Information & Service
Bäckerstraße 13 / Stiege B
1010 Vienna, Austria
petra.aigner(at)oeaw.ac.at
Petra Aigner
Head of project
Elisabeth Cerny
Research, texts, transcriptions and links
Ronald Ruzicka
Head of technical development
Simutech. e.U.
Technical development, implementation, database, application