Countdown to the Opening of the Digital Scholarship Lab – A large digital display wall to transform scholarship

The first ever Digital Scholarship Lab in Hong Kong is going to be established at CUHK Library at G/F, University Library, on March 17, 2016... thumbnail 1 summary
The first ever Digital Scholarship Lab in Hong Kong is going to be established at CUHK Library at G/F, University Library, on March 17, 2016. There are only a few more days to go. Please stay tuned with our updates.



The Digital Scholarship Lab is established to support e-Research at the University by leveraging the latest digital technologies. One of its key features is a huge 6.4 (H) x 15.9 (W) foot digital display wall that is built from twelve nos. of 55-inch high-resolution LED TV screens to provide an extremely high resolution of 24,883,200 pixels (7,680 pixels x 3240 pixels) in the following configuration.



There are 12 inputs for displaying your sources simultaneously from different devices such as tablets, notebooks, smart phones, etc. on the TV screens in different layouts such as one input source across all 12 TV screens or 2 inputs, each occupying 6 TV screens. You can easily select the screen layouts from a control panel installed on an iPad mounted on the wall of the Lab. Other inputs provided are Apple TV, blu-ray, an interactive white-board and a wireless presenter. You can easily plug in your device to the socket on the table top.    

How can the display wall help your research?

The purpose of installing this huge display wall is to offer a new perspective for research that is not possible with a normal desktop computer. The following is a few ways the display wall can help transform scholarship.
  • The display wall is ideal for visualizing large images and exploring big data. With ultra-narrow bezels of 3.5 mm, the 12 TV screens can be linked together with nearly invisible edges to form one single display for showing high resolution images in much greater detail to maximize the visual impact. It can also support the display of high-definition 4K images on a 2 x 2 configuration. Take for example; these high-definition TV screens can be used to display genomics data or brain images more clearly than a standard computer. By zooming in and out of the images, you will be able to visualize large-scale microarray data to facilitate discovery of more patterns and trends, and to enable more detailed analysis of relationship between patterns. The big data which can be dense and hard to identify on a desktop display is more visible on a large display, making the digital information more visual. This feature of the wall will make research more accessible.  

  • By showing your sources of data on the TV screens simultaneously in different layouts, you are be able to view either two images side-by-side for more detailed comparison or several images together for discussion. In this website (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=84833), you can easily spot the change in landscape by viewing the images side-by-side in a large display wall. Again, this is not possible in a standard computer with a much smaller screen. The overall vision is improved and your spatial memory is also enhanced.

  • The display wall is able to support multiple video and audio inputs from DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI, DisplayPort and VGA independent of the devices. By bringing in your own devices, you can display any information on the wall to immerse in your research.

  • The display wall also breeds experimental and collaborative work. By being able to display sources from different devices simultaneously on the giant screen, researchers can work collaboratively in a team in the Lab to share screens and work on the research data together. You are able to build not only a community of scholars but also can collaborate better. Postgraduates can also make use of the display wall to do group research projects. They are able to experiment with the technology, learn from messing around the images on their own and may be able find innovative way of making use of the display wall.

  • Collaborative teaching and learning can also take place in the Lab. The display wall allows students and professors to share information from their own laptops. Professors can easily comment on the students’ work by routing students’ displays and students can learn from each other collaboratively.

There are a lot of possibilities in using the display wall. Academic work, collaborative sessions, teaching, seminars and even thesis defenses are also feasible. Please do not hesitate to reserve the Lab, details of which will be announced later.