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Chapter 1
Museums and Web 2.0:
Some Thoughts about Authority, Communication, Participation and Trust Werner Schweibenz University of Konstanz, Germany
ABSTRACT Many museums want to use Web 2.0 applications or feel the pressure to do so. In doing so, they might encounter a significant problem as Web 2.0 is based on the notion of radical trust and unrestricted, equal participation, two concepts that are contrary to the museum’s traditional concepts of authority, communication and participation. Until recently, museums presumed control of their content. The crucial question is how much control of its content the museum can afford to lose, since they depend on their reputation for expertise and trustworthiness. The paper analyses the role of authority, its influence on traditional and future museum communication and its effects on participation and trust. The challenge for museums is to find a way to cede authority and control over content without losing status as trustworthy institutions and to open up for social media and user participation in order to attract new audiences and maintain existing ones.
INTRODUCTION Currently, Web 2.0 is the bandwagon everybody has to jump on. In the museum field, many institutions feel the pressure to join this trend but at the same time they are reluctant to do so because there is still a considerable lack of research about the acceptance of this new phenomenon both DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch001
inside and outside the museum. Nevertheless, cross institutional projects such as the European Digital Library Europeana try out new modes of involving users, for example by providing a community sections for exchange between users and links to Facebook and Twitter. Outside the museum, the audience is expected to wait for Web 2.0 features to be offered by each and every Web site. According to Web 2.0 enthu-
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siasts, the new generation of the Web is supposed to be the medium in which anybody is zealous to participate and to contribute. This might be true for the digital natives among the users – i.e. the generation that grew up in the digital world (cf. Prensky, 2001) – but does this also hold true for the so called digital immigrants – i.e. the generations that adopted information technology later in life – who make up the larger part of the population in many European countries? Is the willingness to participate the same in all strata of society in one country and in all the different cultures all over Europe or even the world? At the moment, there exists little museological research concerning the crucial question of the readiness for participation on the side of virtual visitors from which one could draw substantial conclusions. Inside the museum, there seems to be a considerable lack of enthusiasm on the side of the curators to accept user contributions (Cooper, 2006; Varbanova, 2008, pp. 171-172). Therefore, irrespective of the widespread enthusiasm about Web 2.0, it is important to find out if curators are really willing to accept user contributions to the online information and online exhibitions they create as this may influence their authority as experts. For the institution, this is an issue of major importance as “[m]useums are one of a handful of institutions in our society that hold authority in matters of knowledge” (Roberts, 1993, p. 98); and authority is closely related to trust. According to a 2001 survey of the American Association of Museums on public trust in various sources of information, museums are the most trusted ones, ahead of books and television news (MacArthur, 2007, p. 59). Therefore it is essential for museums to guarantee a high level of online information quality which might be threatened by user generated content of low quality, so called loser generated content. At the same time, the notion of trust is one of the core issues of any Web 2.0 venture. User participation can prosper only in a climate of radical trust (Fichter, 2006; 2007; Chan, Kelly, Russo
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& Watkins, 2008, p. 25). At the same time, the principle of radical trust collides with the legal responsibility of museums for the user generated content displayed on their websites and the fear that digital vandalism and loser generated content on the institutional website might negatively affect the trustworthiness of the whole institution. Considering these issues, it becomes obvious that Web 2.0 poses both interesting and serious questions for the institution museum. Authority and participation are two focus points that reveal the tension museums currently face both in the real and in the digital world. Before looking closer at this issue, it is necessary to take a museological perspective on Web 2.0.
WEB 2.0: A MUSEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE The term Web 2.0 was made popular by media mogul Tim O’Reilly who identified a number of characteristics that describe how software producers – after the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 – began to use new ways of collaboration on the Internet in order to produce software and rich user experiences. Although being the evangelist of the term, O’Reilly (2005) had to admit that “there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom”. Some critics (e.g. Alby, 2008; Kantel, 2009) claim that Web 2.0 is not a new version of the Web as the version number 2.0 may suggest but “a different way of using the Internet“ (Yasko, 2007, p. 42). In addition, the criteria established by O’Reilly are meant for producers of software and therefore do not fit the needs of cultural institutions, especially not those of libraries, archives and museums that are traditionally brick-and-mortar institutions with an emphasis on physical objects and not born-digital objects such as software. Nevertheless, these traditional institutions have
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to adapt to the digital world of the Web – a fact that challenges traditional thinking in this sector (Finnis, 2008, pp. 151-152). At the same time, the traditional physical foundations of this sector are changed by large-scale digitization and online availability of cultural content. This trend sets the stage for a new institution of digital heritage online, the so called memory institution: Archives, libraries and museums are memory institutions: they organize the European cultural and intellectual record. Their collections contain the memory of peoples, communities, institutions and individuals, the scientific and cultural heritage, and the products throughout time of our imagination, craft and learning. They join us to our ancestors and are our legacy to future generations. They are used by the child, the scholar, and the citizen, by the business person, the tourist and the learner. These in turn are creating the heritage of the future. Memory institutions contribute directly and indirectly to prosperity through support for learning, commerce, tourism, and personal fulfillment. (Dempsey, 2000) For memory institutions, online communication with a distant and heterogeneous audience will become more and more important. As communication is primarily a social act, it is important to take a closer look on the social aspects of Web 2.0 which is also called the Social Web emphasizing the ideas of communication and participation (Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, p. 22). The impact of the Social Web is just about to change the cultural sector, some cultural institutions having readily adapted Web 2.0 functionality to their needs while others are more reluctant, the crucial point being the fact that Web services are borndigital, but the cultural sector is not (Finnis, 2008, p. 151). Nevertheless, cultural institutions have to adapt to the Social Web as it is gaining more and more importance due to the rising number of people who grow up becoming so called digital natives, i.e. the generation that grew up using computers, video games and the Internet, in this
way learning the digital language of information technology like native speakers in contrast to the generations before that moved into the world of new technology step by step and later in their lives, the so called digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001). Like for all cultural institutions, it is also eminent for museums to be present on the Web because searching information on the Internet has become part of many people’s patterns of preparing for actions, more and more users consider the Internet as a digital extension of their physical means of action (Wersig, 2001). As a consequence, institutions that are not adequately represented on the Internet or hard to find because they are not participating in national or supranational cultural portals are facing the danger of being ignored or even being considered as nonexistent as far as action planning is concerned. As the majority of Internet users is also interested in museums, these institutions have to be present on the Internet as museum visits do require action planning (Wersig, 2001). But being present on the Internet is not enough, museums have also to adapt to the changing online user behavior that is part of Web 2.0 (Finnis, 2008, pp. 151-153). However, it seems that museums in the English speaking world are opening up more willingly than institutions on the European Continent (for details see the studies of France, the UK and USA, and German speaking countries, respectively, by Crenn & Vidal, 2007; Economou, Nikonanou & Shahani, 2008; Bieber, Kraemer, Lill & Schweibenz, 2009). So the crucial question is why it is so difficult for many museums to embrace the ideas and tools of Web 2.0. Is it really true that “[a]t the heart of any discussion about museum and Web 2.0 lies the issue of authority”, as Matthew MacArthur (2007, p. 59) states? In order to find an answer to this question, one has not only to take into consideration authority but also communication, participation and trust in the institution museum.
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Museums and Web 2.0
AUTHORTY, COMMUNICATION, PARTICIPATION, AND TRUST IN MUSEUMS Authority Authority is a touchy subject for museums that has been discussed controversially since the rising of the movement of new museology in the 1980s (cf. Vergo, 1989, ed.). In this process, museums have been identified as institutions that shape knowledge (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 4) and where curators were in the position of power (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 7; Harrison, 1994, p. 169). At the same time, museums were recognized as being involved in establishing canons, “giving authority to certain texts, figures, ideas, problems, discursive strategies and historical narratives” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 21) in this way empowering the voices of certain communities while silencing or marginalizing those of others. For this reason, the institution museum was blamed for speaking with an “institutional voice” (Coxall, 1997, pp. 107-108) of authority or even with an “unassailable voice” (Walsh, 1997, pp. 69-70) that was present in all media of presentation and guided completely the visitors’ museum experiences. In recent times, this “epistemically privileged museum authority” (Hein, 2000, p. 5) is challenged by museological theory asking the crucial question of who is speaking in an exhibition and by what kind of authority (Jaschke, Martinz-Turek & Sternfeld, 2005). A recent study comparing three museum exhibits in the United States by Kevin Coffee (2006, p. 435) showed that museums, despite of rising criticism, still tend to stick to their dominant voice: “narratives conveyed by museums are generally viewed as definitive and authoritative”. This makes clear that the problem of museum authority is indeed still an issue of trying to control the visitors’ experiences, a right that is claimed by experts in the museum as Nina Simon points out:
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The problem arises when expertise creates a feeling of entitlement to control the entire visitor experience. Power is attractive. Being in control is pleasant. It lets you be the only expert with a voice. But if our expertise is real, then we don’t need to rule content messages with an iron fist. (Simon, 2008) In the context of the discussion about Web 2.0 and museum authority it is important to take into account that the Web is not the reason for the constant questioning of the institution’s authority. Actually, this discussion started independently of information technology as it is a trend of postmodern society towards a more balanced sharing of power between the museum and its visitors, which is described by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill: In the modern age, knowledge is no longer shaped by the secret, enclosed, circulating structures of the Renaissance episteme; nor by the flat classificatory table of difference of the classical episteme; now knowledge is structured through a three-dimensional, holistic experience which is defined through its relationship to people. The act of knowing is shaped through a mix of experience, activity, and pleasure, in an environment where both the ‘learning’ subject and the ‘teaching’ subject have equal powers. (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 214) The Social Web amplifies this process by shifting the power from curators as creators and producers of knowledge to the users. The users are no longer solely passive consumers of information with an information-receiving attitude, they become active participants and collaborators who start to play an eminent role as creators and producers of knowledge (Varbanova, 2008, pp. 169-170). This shift of power challenges the traditional thinking in museums because – instead of being in total control of their content and its interpretation – now museums “must be cautious of how much control they are willing to lose” (Yasko, 2007, p. 46). In this context it is important to include the quite contrasting views of curators on authority and control over content
Museums and Web 2.0
as described by Jonathan Cooper in a study about an online exhibition project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: At one extreme is a belief in the authority of the curator; i.e. that only a professional curator should be allowed to curate exhibitions and interpret artworks in the public arena; this I shall label authoritism. At the other extreme is a belief in the equal validity of everyone’s views: thus, anyone should be allowed to curate and interpret, and share personal contributions with others. This view, which I shall label autonomism, was not represented in its extreme form within the discussion. Not all curators were equally extreme in their authoritist views; however, all those tending towards authoritism were indeed curators. This may be a natural reflection of the necessary, inward focus of the curatorial profession – in contrast to the outward focus of museum education. However, the extreme authoritist view also appears to be a conservative reaction to a perceived liberalism and ‘dumbing-down’ of art. (Cooper, 2006) Although the discussion about authority and autonomism is not new – see for example Susan Pearce (1995) discussion on critical appreciation and objective knowledge – such harsh reactions on the side of curators should be taken into account when dealing with the application of Web 2.0 for museums as authority is a central issue for the self-concept of the institution as museums “have long been considered special places where the authoritative insights of trained experts are shared with members of the public” (Worts, 1995, p. 165). Although the sharing of the museum’s knowledge with the audience was the goal, the way of museum communication used to be traditionally unilateral.
Communication Traditionally, museum communication takes place in the exhibit. In the established museum communication model, the roles were clearly set: the museum broadcasted its interpretation and the
visitors had to listen and to accept it (Maroevic, 1998, p. 268). One of the reasons for this dominating communicative behaviour is the traditional communication model that was cherished for a long time in the museum community. In the late 1960s, the communication model of Claude Shannon und Warren Weaver was introduced in museums, clearly defining the roles of sender, message and receiver (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994, p. 46). The role of the sender, i.e. the curator, was to create a message based on the objects, the role of the receiver, i.e. the visitor, was to (learn to) understand the message, while in practice the feedback loop from receiver to sender was totally neglected. Since the early 1990s this traditional model of communication was criticized for making “the museum […] a place of one-way communication“ (Weil, 1990, p. 78). A major cause for one-way communication seems to be the authority of the museum in interpreting its objects and collections: Authority is derived from the primacy of object collections and the patrimony of the museum in their storage, display and interpretation. It is claimed that the recognized authority which museums possess with the community provides audiences with the means to interpret history and science, which in turn justifies the use of mediated representation of artifacts and cultures […]. As a result, museums have traditionally followed a model of one-to-many communication in which curatorial expertise is ‘broadcast’ to the community via exhibition and publication. (Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, pp. 22-23) Adhering to the broadcast model of communication, museums neglected for a long time the fact, that a successful communication not only requires a sender and a message but also a receiver of this message. This makes communication a two-way affair as Susie Fisher points out: The message goes out from one side but it is not communicated until it is received by the other. This is the aspect of communication that museums often overlook. They neglect to think about
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Museums and Web 2.0
what their visitors will find worthwhile, or how they might approach this subject so that it makes sense to people. The assumption can be that the collections have an obvious story to tell, museum professionals have the expertise required to tell it and that this is what the visitor has come to hear. The visitor’s own agenda is not taken into account. Many museums think that they are doing this, but in the main they are not. (Fisher, 2002, p. 33) This indicates that communication is not only about delivering a message but also includes a certain perspective on a specific object or issue. Therefore effective museum communication has also to take into account the agenda of the visitors and their ways of interpreting things in order to support the visitors’ meaning making as it is suggested by constructivist learning theory (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 6; Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, p. 21). Endeavours such as the British National Museums Online Learning Project show how constructivist approaches can be applied in a digital museum environment and how the agendas of learner-users can be served and their voices included (Bayne, Ross & Williamson, 2009). With the advent of Web 2.0 the social aspect of communication is taking center stage. The model of one-to-many broadcasting in traditional mass media is replaced by many-to-many communication where all senders are receivers at the same time and vice versa. Therefore museums have to adapt their way of communication if they want to be successful because social media are based on participative communication (Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, p. 22).
Participation and Trust Regarding participation, the institution museum faces a dilemma. On the one hand, participation is the core element of Web 2.0, as users are supposed to contribute equally to and control the quality of the content that is collaboratively created, for example in Wikipedia. On the other
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hand, participation endangers the museum’s notion of control over its content and its authority over its interpretation, the major problem – from the museum’s perspective – being the unpredictability of such user participation. Due to this inherent unpredictability, the museum is neither in control of how users are going to use its content – see for example the phenomenon of image hijacking as described by Finnis (2008, p. 155, pp. 160-161) – nor can it efficiently and effectively control the quality of the content contributed by a large group of users, the so called user generated content. The problem with this kind of content is that it could be of low quality and therefore represent so called loser generated content that might even threaten the reputation of the institution as a whole when placed on the museum’s Web site without quality control which requires a lot of time and effort while resources are often scarce in many institutions. Therefore, the key question is how museums can cope with the problems caused by user participation. In Web 2.0, this predicament is solved by the paradigm of radical trust in the user community. Darlene Fichter defines this concept as follows: Radical trust is about trusting the community. We know that abuse can happen, but we trust (radically) that the community and participation will work. In the real world, we know that vandalism happens but we still put art and sculpture up in our parks. As an online community we come up with safeguards or mechanisms that help keep open contribution and participation working. (Fichter, 2006) A major problem is that user participation can prosper only in a climate of radical trust while at the same time, the principle of radical trust collides both with the legal responsibility of the museum (depending on the local legislation) for the user generated content contributed to its website and the fear that digital vandalism or loser generated content on the museum’s website might negatively affect the trustworthiness of the whole institution. Therefore, “most museums remain slow to recog-
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nize their users as active cultural participants in many-to-many cultural exchanges and therefore social media have yet to make a significant impact on museum communication models, which remains fundamentally one-to-many” (Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, p. 23). This dilemma lingers on and the difficult task of the museum is to strike a balance between a certain degree of trust in the users and a certain amount of control that is low enough to stimulate user participation while it is high enough to permit the institution to maintain the responsibility for the quality of its content. To rely solely on community control might be too daring for an institution such as a museum whose reputation is based on public trust. An interesting field for discussing the pros and cons of user participation is social tagging as it allows us to study both the heated discussion about the supposedly inadequate involvement of amateurs in describing museum objects and the potential advantages such an endeavour might bring for laypersons looking for cultural content. What makes this discussion so controversial is the fact that describing and interpreting the collection – which involves tagging of objects – is one of the core competencies and responsibilities of the institution museum. In addition, it highly affects the authority of the institution if tags for describing objects created by subject experts are given the same weight as tags chosen by anonymous amateurs who do this for their delight – as the Italian verb “dilettarsi” indicates from which the infamous word “dilettante” is derived. Nevertheless, the aspect of authority is hardly mentioned in the discussion about social tagging, usually the prevailing argument is that amateurs’ tags lack to meet the high quality standards of museums. However, social tagging does not necessarily relate to subject expertise, rather it can be applied in order to make cultural materials accessible at all, as Hubertus Kohle (2009) demonstrates in the Artigo project. This university project dealt with huge amounts of digital art images that could not be indexed by art historians as there were not
enough subject experts available for this task. In spite of the concerns of art historians against the “wisdom of crowds,” the images were made accessible by allowing laypersons to tag them (Kohle, 2009, pp. 14-15). In order to make the tagging more attractive and to avoid digital vandalism, Artigo was designed as a game in which two users who do not know each other cooperate online in describing a set of images chosen at random. Each digital image is presented accompanied by a minimal amount of information, for example the text written on the frame of the slide. Then each participant is asked to enter an appropriate tag for the image; if the two tags correspond the term is accepted by the system irrespective of its art historical appropriateness. At the end of the five minute session, all the tagged images and the corresponding terms are presented to motivate the players. Such a mechanism of cooperative tagging is an efficient way to make digital images accessible while avoiding digital vandalism. Another social tagging project is steve.museum: exploring folksonomy in the art museum which examines the potential of social tagging by laypersons in contrast to professional object description by subject experts. The basic idea of this project is that art museum documentation is made by experts for experts which makes the content hardly accessible for laypersons who most often do not know specialist vocabulary but instead use different terminology for describing an object (Trant, 2006, p. 1). An example for this gap of terminology caused by specialist vocabulary is the website of a San Francisco art museum and its use of specialist terminology for describing its content. This museum holds a rich collection of impressionist works of art but the problems of user online access to these works are caused by the fact … that the words the curators used to describe works of paintings in museums were not the same that people used to describe the same paintings. One of their starting points was that searches for the term ‘impressionists’ […] used to come back
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Museums and Web 2.0
with ‘no matches’despite the fact that the museum is well known for its impressionist collection. This was because the term was not a curatorial term, so nothing was marked in their system with this language (Finnis, 2008, p. 164). Just to avoid any misunderstanding, specialist terminology is important for effective and precise information retrieval in an academic or business environment where professional searches – including adequate search terms and efficient search strategies – are applied by subject specialists. However, on the Web the potential audience does not consist of experts only but is rather very heterogeneous. If a museum website targets not only subject specialists but a general audience, the specialist terminology will unquestionably become a major barrier for access to the database content as laypersons usually do neither have much knowledge of specialist terminology nor do they know what content the database contains and as a consequence do not know what to search for and what search terms to use. Therefore Fiona Cameron stated rightfully with regard to searching museum databases: Generally this solution is more useful to specialists who have an interest in fielded data. Without a clear understanding of the information available, the way data is modelled, and the search terminologies used to access material, an approach such as this is of little use to non-specialist users. (Cameron, 2001, p. 309) One could also state that this kind of access is not only of little use to laypersons but can actually hamper access to museum content (Schweibenz, in press). To allow access, additional layers of interpretative information should be added to meet the informational needs of non-specialists as Maria Economou emphasizes: When Web access to the collection’s database is offered without any additional layer of interpretation, great care needs to be placed to the design of the user interface and the paths into the collection offered to non-specialists. For users unfamiliar
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with databases and similar applications and with only a general interest in the subject, the common search box asking them to type in a term can be ineffective and intimidating. (Economou, 2008, p. 146) A potential solution at least for the terminology problem is social tagging for digital museum objects online (Trant, 2008). In this context it is important to stress the word “online”. Social tagging does by no way mean to open up the museum’s collection database to user input. The terms of expert taxonomy and user Folksonomy can be mashed up in a joint database index online. This online index could use different fields for the object description by experts and laypersons in the online database and make these different tags available to the website’s search engine and use them in the online presentation by layering and presenting such metadata according to different needs and interests of the audience (Foo, 2008, pp. 25-27). Such a separation of tag creation and presentation would, as David Bearman points out, profoundly affect the museum’s authority as it … permit[s] people other than museums staff to add data to museum knowledge-bases, they will need to adopt sourcing for all their data. In other words, each piece of information will need to have metadata associated with it to say by whom it was created, when and under what authority (if any) and who owns it, and who can change it. No longer will it be acceptable that the contents of the museum databases speak ‘for the museum’ and with that anonymous authority. Now it will be necessary for individuals to sign contributions to the database and speak with their own authority. By definition this reduces the abstract authority of the museums and brings it closer to the level of other institutions which can then articulate their views more equally. (Bearman, 2008, p. 52) Although museum curators are often sceptic about the quality of ostensibly amateurish tagging, one should consider that amateurs are not
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necessarily dilettantes – a phrase most often used with a derogatory connotation – but often made valuable contributions to science and culture, for example during the Baroque era when so called architect chevaliers were common practice. These persons were noblemen who had to practice a profession adequate to their social position and could therefore deal with architecture only in their spare time, yet often on the level of a connoisseur. But even as hobby architects they made valuable contributions to Baroque architecture, by making new trends known among their peers, by discussing questions with professional architects and even by guiding the actual planning and construction of manors, palaces, and churches. There are also numerous examples of now famous inventors and discoverers who were amateurs in the field where they made their discoveries and contributed to the progress of science and technology, for example the monk Gregor Mendel who discovered the fundamentals of genetics or the business man Heinrich Schliemann who excavated the ancient city of Troy. Often such famous persons were considered to be geniuses in order to put them on the same level as subject specialists and professionals. But apart from the few geniuses that may exist amongst us, there are for sure many enthusiasts who have enormous potentials of knowledge the museum could profit from if they were involved in an adequate way in the institution’s knowledge production process. For example, a recent development is the inclusion of so called community curators in exhibit making. These community curators are acknowledged and knowledgeable members of a targeted community, who give voice to the specific perspectives or traditions of a certain community. An example for the inclusion of community curators was the exhibit Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, starting in September 2004, where respected members of American Indian tribes described the traditional, social, and philosophical meaning of cosmolo-
gies and religious thinking from a indigenous perspective (Kavanagh, 2006). In the same way as museums start to include communities in the real world, they should also consider doing so in the digital realm. Especially in the context of Web 2.0 and participatory social media it seems indispensable to reconsider the role of amateurs and their potential contributions to the museum’s knowledge creation process. Projects such as steve. museum will shed some light on the advantages and disadvantages of amateur social tagging but also on yet unvoiced problems regarding the documentation work of museum professionals such as inter indexer consistency in professional indexing of museum objects, an issue discussed for decades in information and library science, which might negatively affect the credibility of professional quality claims often expressed by museum curators. Terminology and intellectual accessibility of content are definitely the major factors for success on the Web as there is a lot of content available online and cultural content is not as visible as it could be (Finnis, 2008, p. 163). Moreover, search engines become more and more important means of access to digital content as they are the preferred tool for many users (Finnis, 2008, p. 162). Therefore, in order to be found by the users it is becoming indispensible to use the users language and terminology instead of or even better in addition to specialist vocabulary which might be correct from a scientific perspective but is unknown to and incomprehensible for the general public. This can be done effectively by allowing social tagging by users. Nevertheless it is important to unmistakably separate social tags from terms attached by museum professionals in order to make clear the responsibilities and to document the origin of the descriptive terms. In addition, a distinct set of metadata should be used to clearly indicate the origin of and the responsibility for tags attached to museum content. In this way, the responsibility becomes clear and the distinction between museum content and user
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generated content is obvious for everybody. This is also indispensible for copyright and digital rights management, archiving and long-term preservation of both kinds of content, topics that are essential but beyond the scope of this paper.
SOME CONSEQUENCES FOR MUSEUMS REGARDING WEB 2.0 First of all, museums have to reconsider the role of authority as the following statement by Matthew MacArthur (2007, p. 59) is definitely true: “At the heart of any discussion about museum and Web 2.0 lies the issue of authority.” The question of authority is relevant for both the traditional and the virtual museum (cf. Bayne, Ross & Williamson, 2009, p. 118). Therefore it is worthwhile to reassess different models of participation both in exhibitions and on the Internet. Especially Web 2.0 features could be a means to open up museums and allow the audience a look behind the scenes, an aspect that could let museums make their daily work more visible and comprehensible to the general public. In addition, the possibility to gain behind-the-scenes access is fascinating for the public, as Maxwell Anderson (2008, p. 296, p. 299) points out with reference to successful TV series such as “CSI” or hospital dramas and movies such as Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. Anderson’s statement is supported by long-known research into audience needs and expectations such as Melora McDermott’s 1988 study which found that novices to art museums look for a personal connection to the objects (McDermott, 1988, p. 149), that they are particularly interested in the human beings behind the works (McDermott, 1988, p. 153), that they believe that objects in museums are there for a reason, and on the one hand they are curious about those reasons but on the other hand they are not really interested in the object’s art historical significance per se, but rather why someone felt the piece is wonderful (McDermott, 1988, p. 158). To serve such information needs
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and expectations, museums could use Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, videos, and podcasts in order to provide behind-the-scenes access to the public. In addition, community functions can help to establish platforms for the exchange about experiences between different groups of interests. Projects such as the Europeana are offering their users the opportunity to set up different communities in order to serve their interests in exchanging ideas. Europeana maintains communities such as Go Europeana about Semantic Web issues, Genius about logic, and Oscar about cinema. Each community page contains a short introduction into the topic, an info section stating the number of members and the name of the administrator, a tag cloud of assigned terms and the opportunity to share an idea. The members page presents pictures of the members, their names and the possibility to send a message. In this way, users can get in touch with each other, share their opinions, form groups of interest and finally become a stable community that is closely connected to the museum, enjoying its services and content. At the same time it is important not only to broadcast museum information but also to allow a two-way communication between the museum and its audience, be it in physical space or in the digital realm. With regard to the Internet, the institution has to be aware of the different communicative traditions of the museum and the Web: While the museum represents reason and order, the Web is chaotic in its organizational structure. The museum is an organization with clearly established hierarchies, especially over access to information. The Web is available to anyone who has access to a computer and internet connection. The authority of the museum is also emphasized by its rather static nature while the Web is constantly changing. (Witcomb, 2003, p. 120) As Andrea Witcomb emphasizes, the basic ideas of the museum and the Web with regard to order and authority are very different. If the museum wants to be relevant on the Web, the institution has to find new ways of coping with
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its traditional notion of authority; it has to find a mode to share the authority of interpretation with the community of users in the same way it does with community curators in traditional exhibits. By allowing different perspectives on objects and information, the institution can no longer control the interpretation of the content by users but can gain some profile as a provider of reliable information by showing the process in which its information was created and why it is trustworthy. In this way, the voice of the museum is one amongst many; it is no longer unassailable but still carries the institution’s authority of research and expertise. As research indicates, museum visiting is primarily a social experience (Falk & Dierking, 1992, pp. 2-3; Chalmers & Galani, 2008, p. 159). Therefore, it seems obvious that museums should use social media to create a positive online museum experience for virtual visitors. This experience does not necessarily have to be similar to the traditional museum visit, instead it should be considered as an experience in its own right and definitely not as a secondary or surrogate experience to the physical visit (Schweibenz, in press). This aspect is important as research suggests that users who share a co-visiting experience regard a museum website not only as an information space but also as a social place to visit, enjoy and relate to others (Chalmers & Galani, 2008, p. 170). Therefore, understanding the sociality of online visiting should be in the forefront of the research agenda (Chalmers & Galani, 2008, p. 176).
THE ROLE OF THE MUSEUM IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY According to Gernot Wersig (2000, p. 462), in the post-industrial society information is not necessarily equal to meaningful information, i.e. information that is useful and practical. This is due to the ever-increasing amount of available information that leads to an information overflow: the quan-
tity of information is rapidly growing while this information is at the same time becoming more and more specific and fragmented. Therefore the receiver of this information is becoming less and less informed although the amount of available information is greater than ever. The result is that the user has to search for relevant information while being hampered by the overflow of information. Wersig (1996) calls this state the paradox of information, a key condition of the information society which is characterized by growing complexity of life that causes ironically a increasing demand for reduction of intricacy and uncertainty. This demand can only be met by reliable information. This increasing need for reliable information can be served by the institution museum as it is held in high regard for the authenticity and the trustworthiness of its content. The museum can use this reputation to position itself as a trusted partner in the arena of participatory communication on the Web: A survey of educational Web site usage demonstrated that both students and teachers considered the authenticity of Web content a major concern, with teachers reporting that students often had difficulty judging the validity of online content [...]. We argue that it is precisely because of this lack of reliable online information that museums should engage in participatory communication using social media. The cultural authority of the museum is due in large part to the perception that it can provide authentic cultural knowledge. (Chan, Kelly, Russo & Watkins, 2008, p. 23) By allowing multiple perspectives on cultural content by different voices in addition to its own, the museums can earn a reputation for being an honest broker and a reliable source of information for different audiences with their own specific requirements for museum content. The fear of many museum professionals that allowing other voices beside the one of the museum might endanger the institution’s authority is misplaced there will
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always be a safe harbor for the institutional voice, as Maxwell Anderson (2008, p. 294) emphasizes.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS “The history of museums can be written as a history of struggle between scholarly and popular interests. This conflict strikes at the core of the museum enterprise, for it concerns the kinds of meanings held by collections,” as Lisa Roberts (1993, p. 98) points out. In order to be and remain a relevant part of the information society, museums have to be ready to cede authority over and control of content by allowing its audience to contribute its views and opinions on the museum’s content and use it according to its interests and needs. This includes the use of social media on the Internet which does not necessarily mean that each institution does need social media immediately and use the full range of applications at once. It is better to start by trying out various Web 2.0 applications and decide for one or two that meet the needs and fit the mission of the individual institution and its audience. In this process, the balance between authority and control on the one side and participation and trust on the other side can be tested and refined in daily practice. In the meantime, regardless of the efforts of individual museums, further academic research should be conducted into the sociality of online visiting on the one hand and authority, communication, participation and trust in museums on the other hand to better understand how these aspects are related to each other.
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Anderson, M. L. (2008). The future of museums in the information age. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums (pp. 293–299). New York: Routledge. Bayne, S., Ross, J., & Williamson, Z. (2009). Objects, subjects, bits and bytes. Learning from the digital collections of the National Museums. museum and society, 7(2), 110-124. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.le.ac.uk/ ms/m&s/Issue%2020/ bayne.pdf Bearman, D. (2008). Representing museum knowledge. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums (pp. 35–57). New York: Routledge. Bieber, C., Kraemer, H., Lill, J. M., & Schweibenz, W. (2009). Museum 2.0? Web 2.0 und deutschsprachige Museen im Internet. Eine Studie zu partizipativen Elementen von Museumspräsenzen im Web. [Museum 2.0? Web 2.0 and museums on the German Internet: A study about participatory elements on museum websites.] In R. Kuhlen (Ed.), Information: Droge, Ware oder Commons? Wertschöpfungs- und Transformationsprozesse auf den Informationsmärkten (ISI 2009), Konstanz, 1. - 3. April 2009 (pp. 281-296). Konstanz, Germany: UKV. Cameron, F. (2001). Wired collections: The next generation. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(3), 309–315. doi:10.1016/S02604779(01)00052-8 Chalmers, M., & Galani, A. (2008). Blurring boundaries for museum visitors. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums (pp. 157–177). New York: Routledge. Chan, S., Kelly, L., Russo, A., & Watkins, J. (2008). Participatory communication with social media. Curator - The Museum Journal, 51(1), 21-31.
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Coxall, H. (1997). Speaking other voices. In Hooper-Greenhill, E. (Ed.), Cultural diversity: Developing museum audiences in Britain (pp. 99–115). Leicester: Leicester University Press. Crenn, G., & Vidal, G. (2007). Les Musées Français et leurs publics a l’âge du Web 2.0. Nouveaux usages du multimédia et transformations des rapports entre institutions et usagers? [The French museums and their audiences in the age of Web 2.0: New usage of multimedia and the transformation of relations between institutions and users?] In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting 2007, Toronto, Ontario, October 24-26, 2007. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ ichim07/papers/ crenn/ crenn.html Dempsey, L. (2000). Scientific, industrial, and cultural heritage: A shared approach: A research framework for digital libraries, museums and archives. Ariadne. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ issue22/dempsey/ Economou, M. (2008). A world of interactive exhibits. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums (pp. 137–156). New York: Routledge.
Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (1992). The museum experience. Washington, DC: Whalesback Books. Fichter, D. (2006). Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and radical trust: A first take. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://library2.usask.ca/ ~fichter/ blog_on_the_side/ 2006/04/web-2.html Fichter, D. (2007). Radical trust: We’re not doing it enough yet! Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http:// library2.usask.ca/ ~fichter/blog_on_the_side/ 2007/04/radical-trust-were- not-doing-it-enough. html Finnis, J. (2008). Turning cultural websites inside out: Changes in online user behaviour, Web 2.0 and the issues for the cultural sector. In Uzelac, A., & Cvjeticanin, B. (Eds.), Digital culture: The changing dynamics (pp. 151–165). Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for International Relations. Fisher, S. (2002, June). Objects are not enough. Museums Journal (UK), pp. 32-35. Foo, S. (2008). Online virtual exhibitions: Concepts and design considerations. DESIDOC – Journal of Library and Information Technology, 28(4), 22-34. Harrison, J. D. (1994). Ideas of museums in the 1990s. Museum Management and Curatorship, 13(1), 160–176. Hein, H. S. (2000). The museum in transition: A philosophical perspective. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the shaping of knowledge. The heritage: Care - preservation - Management. London: Routledge.
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Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1994). Museums and their visitors. London: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge. Jaschke, B., Martinz-Turek, C., & Sternfeld, N. (Eds.). (2005). Wer spricht? Autorität und Autorschaft in Ausstellungen. [Who is speaking? Authority and authorship in exhibitions.] Wien, Austria: Turia + Kant. Kantel, J. (2009). Per Anhalter durch das Mitmach-Web. Publizieren im Web 2.0: von Social Networks über Weblogs und Wikis zum eigenen Internet-Fernsehsender [[Hitchhiker’s guide to the Social Web. Publishing in Web 2.0 using social networks, weblogs and wikis and Internet TV.]]. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Kavanagh, T. (2006, February 27). Community curators. Archives of
[email protected]. Lsoft.Com [Museum discussion list]. Retrieved April 21, 2007, from http://home.ease.lsoft.com/ scripts/wa.exe?A2= ind0602D&L=museum-l&T =0&F=&S=&P=15233 Kohle, H. (2009). Social tagging von Kunstwerken oder: Wie bringe ich junge Leute dazu, ins Museum zu gehen? [Social tagging of works of art. Or: How to make youngsters visit a museum.] Museum aktuell, 161, 14-15. Lill, J. M., & Schweibenz, W. (2009). Museen und Web 2.0 im deutschsprachigen Internet. Erste Eindrücke und Überlegungen zum Mitmach-Web. [Museums and Web 2.0 on the German Internet. Some impressions and thoughts on the participatory Web.] Elektronischer Tagungsband “museums and the internet 2009” - Fachtagung am 28. und 29. Mai 2009 im LVR-RömerMuseum im Archäologischen Park Xanten. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.mai-tagung.de/ maitagung+2009/lillschweibenz wordmai2009.pdf
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MacArthur, M. (2007). Can museums allow online users to become participants? In Din, H., & Hecht, P. (Eds.), The digital museum: A think guide (pp. 57–66). Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Maroevic, I. (1998). Introduction to museology: The European approach. Munich, Germany: Verlag Dr. Christian Müller-Straten. McDermott, M. (1988). Through their eyes: What novices value in art experiences. In Annual Meeting Sourcebook (pp. 135-162). Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.oreillynet.com/ pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/ 2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Pearce, S. (1995). Authority and anarchy in a museum exhibition: Or, The Sacred Wood revisited. Cultural Dynamics, 7(1), 125–140. doi:10.1177/092137409500700106 Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://pre2005.flexiblelearning. net.au/ projects/resources/ Digital_Natives_Digital_Immigrants.pdf Roberts, L. (1993). Analysing (and intuiting) the affective domain. In Bicknell, S., & Farmelo, G. (Eds.), Museum visitor studies in the 90s (pp. 97–101). London: Science Museum. Schweibenz, W. (in press). How to create the worst online exhibition possible - in the best of intention. In Ramaiah, C. K. (Ed.), Online exhibitions: A handbook to library, archival & museum professionals. Simon, N. (2008, October 8). The future of authority: Platform power. Museum 2.0 Blogspot. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/ 2008/10/future-of-authorityplatform-power.html
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Trant, J. (2006). Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept. Preprint (Draft of 05/13/06) for a publication in The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Applications and Research. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ papers/steve-nrhm- 0605preprint.pdf Trant, J. (2008). Tagging, folksonomy and art museums: Results of steve.museum’s research. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://conference.archimuse.com/ files/trantSteveResearch Report2008.pdf Varbanova, L. (2008). The online power of users and money: Can culture gain? In Uzelac, A., & Cvjeticanin, B. (Eds.), Digital culture. The changing dynamics (pp. 167–180). Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for International Relations. Vergo, P. (Ed.). (1989). The new museology. London: Reaktion Book. Walsh, P. (1997). The unassailable voice. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 1997. Selected Papers from the First International Conference, Los Angeles, CA, March 16-19, 1997 (pp. 69-76). Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Weil, S. E. (1990). Rethinking the museum: An emerging new paradigm. In Anderson, G. (Ed.), Reinventing the museum: Historical and contemporary perspectives on the paradigm shift (pp. 74–79). Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.
Wersig, G. (1996, September 10). The information service of the 21st century. Paper presented at SungKyunKwan University, Seoul, Korea. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://web.archive. org/ web/20070610023037/ www.kommwiss. fu-berlin.de/ 439.html Wersig, G. (2000). Perspektiven der Informationsgesellschaft: Die Zeit des Wandels. [Perspectives of the information society: The time of changes.] nfd - Nachrichten für Dokumentation, 51, 461-465. Wersig, G. (2001, November 29-30). Museumsbesuch und Internet. [Museum visits and Internet.] Paper presented at Fachveranstaltung Akustische Führungen in Museen und Ausstellungen vom Institut für Museumskunde Berlin, Filmmuseum Berlin, Landesverband der Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http:// web.archive.org/ web/20061128152314/ www. kommwiss.fu-berlin.de/ 429.html Witcomb, A. (2003). Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge. Worts, D. (1995). Extending the frame: Forging a new partnership with the public. In Pearce, S. (Ed.), Art in museums (pp. 164–191). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone. Yasko, J. (2007). Coming to the second voming: Museums and Web 2.0. Museum News, 86(4), 42-47, 72.
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Chapter 2
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0 Tzanetos Pomonis University of Patras, Greece Dimitrios A. Koutsomitropoulos University of Patras, Greece Sotiris P. Christodoulou University of Patras, Greece Theodore S. Papatheodorou University of Patras, Greece
ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to help cultural web application developers to benefit from the latest technological achievements in Web research. The authors introduce a 3-tier architecture that combines Web 2.0 principles, especially those that focus on usability, community and collaboration, with the powerful Semantic Web infrastructure, which facilitates the information sharing among applications. Moreover, they present a development methodology, based on this architecture, especially tailored for the cultural heritage domain. Cultural developers can exploit this architecture and methodology in order to construct web2.0-powered cultural applications with rich-content and responsive user-interface. Furthermore, they outline some indicative applications in order to illustrate the features of the proposed architecture and prove that it can be applied today and support modern cultural web applications. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch002 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
INTRODUCTION Although modern cultural web applications increasingly tend to adopt the technologies and trends of web evolution in general, there is still a lot to be done in order to keep up with the latest advancements in web application development. Current trends in Web research and development seem to revolve around two competing, at first sight, approaches: Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Although Semantic Web and Web 2.0 were firstly introduced separately by groups with completely contrary beliefs on the evolution of World Wide Web and even targeting different audiences, they are complementary visions about the evolution of web applications, that can learn from each other in order to overcome their drawbacks, in a way that enables forthcoming web applications to combine Web 2.0 principles, especially those that focus on usability, community and collaboration, with the powerful Semantic Web infrastructure, which facilitates the information sharing among applications. In addition, both Semantic Web and Web 2.0 principles will be the two major technological pillars in next generation’s web applications, often entitled as the Web 3.0 (Lassila & Hendler, 2007; Hendler, 2008). In an attempt to help cultural web application developers to benefit from the latest technological achievements in Semantic Web and Web 2.0 areas, in this work we propose a methodology for cultural web applications development based on a 3-tier architecture. This architecture can support the structuring and development of complicated rich-content cultural web applications that will fit into the Web 3.0. At the lower tier of the architecture, there is an advanced semantic knowledge base infrastructure that can support integration of multiple disparate cultural data sources, without requiring a concrete underlying semantic structure. In addition, the upper tiers of the architecture provide greater flexibility in the user interactions with the underlying
ontological data model. As a result, it supports user collaboration and community-driven evolution, core features of the next generation cultural web applications. This architecture, supported by the respective methodology, gives the developers the ability to build complicated web applications for the cultural heritage domain which combine the philosophy of Web 2.0 applications, and the powerful technical infrastructure of the Semantic Web. The following text is organized in five sections. In section 2 we start by providing some broad definitions and discussing the concepts of Semantic Web and Web 2.0. Furthermore, we discuss the need for their adoption by the cultural web developers. In section 3, we describe some specific cultural web projects that make use of either Semantic Web or Web 2.0 technologies, some of which were developed by our team. In section 4, we describe in detail the proposed architecture, its components, as well as the corresponding methodology for developing web applications for the cultural domain, and we outline some indicative applications in order to illustrate the features of the proposed architecture and prove that it can be applied today and support modern cultural web applications. Finally, we summarize our conclusions.
BACKGROUND A modern cultural web application, because of its specific nature, has to comply, not only with the specific information-structuring and retrieval requirements of the cultural heritage domain, but also with the innovations of web technologies in general. As every human conceivable domain, cultural heritage is hard to be accurately modeled. In addition and due to its nature, cultural heritage information use to be hidden in libraries and museum archives, and when available on-line is usually poorly or not at all structured. In such a
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misty setting, the solution can derive from well known semantic web techniques. The Semantic Web, outlined by Berners-Lee et al. (2001), has become a revolutionary technological approach for organizing and exchanging information in a cross-application dimension. Strongly supported by World Wide Web Consortium and powered by heavy academic and enterprise research, Semantic Web can demonstrate standardized and well-defined approaches in language description, such as RDF (Manola & Miller, 2004), RDF(S) (Brickley & Guha, 2004) and Web Ontology Language OWL (Smith et al., 2004). We strongly believe that semantics and knowledge-discovery capabilities can play a key role in next generation cultural web applications. Metadata is the most common way to express and convey cultural heritage knowledge in Web resources. Usually however, the semantics of metadata descriptions tend to be closer to human-understandable interpretations rather than expressing explicit knowledge structures. This semantic gap between metadata implementations and machine-processable semantics can be considerably alleviated by some well-established standards in the Semantic Web community. These standards tend to form the basic objective for nearly all Semantic Web implementations: •
•
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The Resource Description Framework (RDF) serves as a common data model for integrating metadata from various autonomous and heterogeneous data sources. In particular, RDF, along with its semantic extension RDF(S), can be of great value in representing, unifying and possibly interpreting information hidden in disparate databases, information management systems and portals. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) standardizes the expressiveness levels of the Semantic Web and demonstrates characteristics suitable for its distributed environment. It actually facilitates greater ma-
chine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF(S) by providing additional vocabulary along with formal semantics. Except for the full version of OWL, OWL-DL (Bechhofer et al., 2004) is also a very expressive, albeit decidable sublanguage of OWL, which forms the main requisite for the majority of applications in the Semantic Web domain. One extra motive for transforming current cultural web applications to Semantic Web compliant ones, is the ability to deduce new, un-expressed information that is only implied by existing descriptions. The cultural heritage domain can be considered as a huge, distributed knowledge base, and well-known AI techniques, at least for the parts with sound foundations in logic, can be utilized in order to form the basis for intelligent negotiation and discovery on the Semantic Web. Such techniques may include for example deductive query answering and inference-based reasoning (Luke et al., 1996; Berners-Lee et al., 2001), which are recognized as a prominent feature in Semantic Web scenarios that are necessary in order to enable intelligent services. On the other hand, a nowadays cultural web user is really well informed about all the current trends in web application design and user interface aesthetics (MINERVA EC, 2008). Not only he expects a web application to be extremely user friendly and interactive, but also he is used to contribute in the characterization of any kind of data by adding his own specific knowledge or opinion, i.e. by voting, commenting, tagging, etc. These are some of the main aspects of the philosophy of Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 term, introduced by Tim O’Reilly (2005), represents a widely spread trend of adopting certain technologies and approaches in web development, targeting more flexible and user friendly applications, and easier distributed collaboration. The usability aspect is met by Rich Internet Applications (RIA) (Loosley, 2006) and
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
especially Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), which support the creation of responsive user interfaces as well as more interactive browsing experience. Collaboration conveniences come through the creation of virtual online communities of users that contribute effort and data to a common cause, achieving better results than each individual could do on his own. Finally there is greater flexibility in data handling, enabling the development of hybrid web applications, called Mash-ups, which combine discrete data sources and services from different sites in order to provide a unified and enriched result. Therefore, the Semantic Web can provide a rich and powerful technical infrastructure for any kind of cultural web application, while the paradigm of Web 2.0 applications can be used to provide useful guidelines, focusing on usability and collaboration. Thus, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 principles can be combined as complementary approaches to provide more efficient web applications for the cultural heritage domain. Such applications could be thought to be part of next generation web and seem to fall under the term Web 3.0 (Hendler, 2008), which lately is sort of “talk of the town” (Lassila & Hendler, 2007). All of the above can be exploited, not only in the case of cultural web applications, but also in any data-handling web application, where a knowledge-intensive system is needed. This is especially true for next generation knowledge systems that try to benefit from Web 2.0 approaches and collaborative development in order to build, or more precisely grow, Internet-scale knowledge systems (Tenenbaum, 2006).
SEMANTIC WEB AND WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES IN CULTURAL APPLICATIONS Both Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies have been two great fields of interest, not only for web developers, but also for researchers in the
cultural heritage domain. This fact had as result the development of a large number of cultural web applications that make use of the above technologies.
Semantic Web Cultural Applications The use of ontologies for the promotion and exploitation of cultural heritage consists nowadays an active research field. However, most of these efforts are purely research-oriented, since only recently the Semantic Web technologies stack has begun to grow mature. CIDOC-CRM (http:// cidoc.ics.forth.gr) plays a major role towards this purpose. CIDOC-CRM is a reference ontology for the interchange and representation of cultural heritage information, and is an official ISO standard since 2006 (ISO 21127). Among the CIDOC-CRM applications, its use by the Artequakt system appears to be the most relevant to our work. Artequakt (Alani et al., 2003) tries to alleviate the task of knowledge base maintenance by following an automated knowledge extraction approach. Artequakt applies natural language processing on Web documents in order to extract information about artists and the artistic world and populate its knowledge base. Stored knowledge is then used for the automatic production of personalised biographies for artists. The CIDOC-CRM is used as the “conceptual schema” for the information that needs to be extracted from the documents and stored in the knowledge base. Nevertheless, it should be noted that no inference - and thus knowledge discovery - takes place. The Sculpteur project (http://www.sculpteurweb.org) aims also at creating a semantic layer on top of a digital library of 3D cultural objects. Object properties and characteristics are organized based again on the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Reasoning takes place within classifying agents that, when properly trained, are able to classify the objects in the ontology structure.
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In (García-Barriocanal & Sicilia, 2008) the notion of “cultural spaces” is introduced and their interaction with tourism information through ontologies is proposed. The authors present and implement a system were ontologies are used for the dynamic creation of cultural-touristic paths. Finally, (Lin et al., 2008) proposed the use of CIDOC-CRM in cultural collections. The authors argue that one can achieve knowledge discovery in such collections, by taking advantage of ontology languages and reasoning. An important effort towards the exploitation of Semantic Web technologies in cultural heritage domain is described in (Koutsomitropoulos & Papatheodorou, 2007). This work builds upon the idea of employing SW (Semantic Web) techniques around the CIDOC-CRM model (Crofts et al., 2003), in an attempt to enable reasoning on and discovery of cultural heritage information over distributed knowledge resources. Following a formal procedure, CIDOC-CRM is transformed into an OWL ontology including constructs that put it in the OWL-DL level. The CIDOC-CRM augmented form is further processed by a web based tool that employs a reasoning module and serves as an interface for querying the ontology. Consequently, the extraction of new, useful Figure 1. Knowledge discovery scenario
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knowledge, not previously expressed in the ontology was possible, through intelligent queries that the end-users were able to pose to the produced OWL document. Figure 1 depicts an indicative knowledge discovery scenario using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Kostis Palamas is a well-known Greek poet and the author of the Olympic Hymn. In CIDOC-CRM term, Kostis Palamas is an “E21 Person” individual. In addition, Kostis Palamas is known to be a notable member of the famous literature movement “Parnassus” that existed in Greece during the late 19th century. However, “Parnassus” is also a mountain in central Greece, at the foot of which lies the archaeological site of Delphi. Given the range restriction on the “P107 is current or former member of” property, the term “Parnassus” can now be correctly disambiguated and it is inferred to be of type “E94 Group” instead of anything else (e.g. “E53 Place”). The momentum of Semantic Web into the Cultural Heritage field is further stressed by the fact that many current European and international projects employ these technologies in order to integrate and facilitate access to and discovery of resources in their digitized collections. For example, the European Digital Library Europeana
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
(http://www.europeana.eu) is investing significantly in creating a semantic search prototype that would allow faceted browsing and intelligent discovery among Europeana artifacts (http://www. europeana.eu/portal/thought-lab.html). In addition, the STERNA project bases its information architecture in Semantic Web standards, such as RDF and SKOS (Geser, 2009). And these are only some examples of a significant number of projects that are increasingly considering the underlying semantics of their content as a means to achieve integrated access and improve user interaction with their collections.
Web 2.0 Cultural Applications Nowadays there is only a small, but increasing, number of cultural heritage organizations publishing websites, that use some Web 2.0 technologies. Most museums, cultural sites, libraries, and other educational and cultural websites are not following the Web 2.0 philosophy. Usually they just provide content, whereas users are only consumers. However there are some pioneering cultural heritage organizations and some educational institutions that have introduced Web 2.0 technologies in their websites, indicating and accentuating that these technologies are of great use in the cultural heritage domain. “Steve” (http://www.steve.museum) is a collaborative research project of a group of American art museums that follow a folksonomic approach to their online collections, exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of artworks and providing a good model for the implementation of tagging and folksonomies in the heritage sector. Steve is based on a collaboration of museum professionals and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access cultural heritage collections and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects. Their activities include researching social tagging and museum collections; developing open source software tools for tagging collections and
managing tags; and discussing and outreaching with members of the community who are interested in allowing social tagging for their own collections. Folksonomies can be important for cultural heritage organizations because allowing users to describe collections – using their own vernacular or language – may help other users find things that interest them. This may improve access to and encourage engagement with cultural content. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (http://www.metmuseum.org) has compared the terms assigned by trained and untrained catalogers to existing museum documentation. They explored the potential of social tagging to improve access to their museum collections. Preliminary results showed the potential of social tagging and folksonomies for opening museum collections to new, more personal meanings. Untrained catalogers identified content elements not described in formal museum documentation (Trant, 2006). This is an example that tags assigned by users might help to bridge the semantic gap between the professional language of the curator and the popular language of the museum visitor. In another user-centric approach, Brooklyn Museum site (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ community) has a Community section with blogs, podcasts, forums, and a Flickr-based photos sharing service, where users can upload photos from their visit of the museum, while Brooklyn College Library (http://www.myspace.com/brooklyncollegelibrary) uses MySpace to give participants the opportunity to post personal profiles containing their favorite books, movies, photos, and videos. From our part we were involved in “Diazoma” project (http://www.diazoma.gr), where we were asked to design, deploy and support a digital repository storing cataloged information for the ancient theaters and odeons in the Greek territory. As a small Web 2.0 step, we initially made possible for a large group of archaeologists, architects and other ancient theater experts, to add information through a web application about their area of expertise. With their contribution we managed
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Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
to populate this digital repository in a really brief time interval, and to maintain until nowadays a really active community in this field. Finally, after beholding the continuously growing information in the respective repository, we decided to make it available to every visitor of the “Diazoma” website through a friendly and interactive user interface, by developing a Google maps (http://maps.google.com) based navigational application, as shown on Figure 2. Through this project, not only we succeeded in supporting a really important collaborative scientific research effort in the cultural heritage domain, but also, by providing the collective knowledge to the enduser through a primitive mash-up application, we managed to raise the public interest and have a great impact.
AN ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB 3.0 CULTURAL APPLICATIONS As presented in the previous section, the usage of both web semantics and Web 2.0 technologies is of great importance in developing and supporting web applications for the cultural domain. It is our firm belief, though, that Semantic Web and Web Figure 2. The “Diazoma” mash-up
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2.0 are not two competitive visions for cultural web applications, but rather complementary and can work together in order to provide more solutions for developing cultural applications for next generation web (Web 3.0) (Hendler, 2008). In this context, we decided to focus on designing and developing Web 3.0 cultural applications as we have considered the respective technologies to be mature enough for our purpose. To support such applications we decided to have an architecture following the 3-tier paradigm (presented in figure 3), as extended by Pomonis et al. (2009) in order to comply with the requirements of Web 3.0. The respective architecture has the advantage of providing the desired physical and logical independence between the discrete Web 2.0 (interface) and semantic (knowledge infrastructure) components, which are handled by separate tiers. A middle tier is responsible for the interconnection functions and also handles the advanced logical operations. In addition, such an architecture can be really helpful in supporting future extensions of the target web application, by providing a great level of flexibility, thus making possible the further adoption of distributed and/or scalable solutions, especially for the knowledge management components.
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
Figure 3. Our 3-tier architecture
Typically, the lower part of this 3-tier implementation, would be a database server. Rather than we use a knowledge base system, since a traditional DBMS lacks the necessary features and functions for managing and utilizing ontological knowledge. This knowledge management tier integrates and administers data sources that may be disparate in nature: ontology documents, metadata, feeds and other information with underlying semantic structure of variable density ranging from semantic data to plain text (zero density). As a result, this tier acts as a semantic mash-up that aligns information to a common, mediating ontology; at the same time this tier performs the low-level reasoning functions that are required in order to deduce implied information. Such an implemen-
tation can load Semantic Web Knowledge bases (OWL documents) that are available either on the local file system, or on the Internet. A temporary copy of every document is stored locally and is then loaded by the knowledge base server. The latter can be an inference engine like Pellet (http:// clarkparsia.com/pellet) or FaCT++ (http://owl. man.ac.uk/factplusplus), which are currently the only two DL-based engines that appear to have full OWL DL support. User requests, queries, additions and other interventions to the ontological model are being interpreted through the application logic tier. This is responsible for the ontological information loading, proper rendering / presentation of it to the user and the decomposition of the user requests to 23
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
low-level functions of the knowledge management system. Ontological data and reasoning results (Koutsomitropoulos et al., 2005) are fetched by interacting with knowledge management system, which could physically be located in another machine, e.g. over the TCP/IP protocol. This interaction is served by a customized distributed version of OWL-API, which overcomes the disadvantages of both DIG 1.1 protocol (lack of full OWL DL support) and the original OWL-API (only direct in-memory implementation). The front-end tier is mainly comprised by a web server which projects the underlying information to the end-users through web pages, either static ((X)HTML), or dynamic implementing rich interfaces, where, for example, the user experience is enhanced by the AJAX paradigm in PHP-scripted pages. In addition, individual users or users being part of a specific group-of-experts may interact with the underlying knowledge base on a reciprocal basis: this means that they are not confined to the mere ingestion of data sources; rather, they are also enabled to fully interact with them, by adding, commenting and incrementing on the underlying ontological data model. Finally, communication with the application tier can be conducted over the HTTP protocol using forms, through XML-based web services, or even by using specific XML-based network protocols like the PHP/Java Bridge implementation.
Methodology The methodology we used in order to build applications based on this 3-tier architecture consists of the following steps: Step 1: Firstly, we had to decide the physical distribution of the respective 3 tiers, as well as of the specific protocols and tools for their interconnection. Mainly we used our customized distributed version of OWL-API for communication between the lower and middle tier, and XMLbased network protocols like the PHP/Java Bridge for communication between the top and middle
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tier. In addition, in this step we had to make the decision of Web 2.0 aspects that could affect all tiers of our implementation, like the adoption of mash-up technologies or the possibility of user interference not only with the stored information, but also with the ontology schema itself. Step 2: After that we started building the discrete application portions intended for each tier. These portions have a great number of distinctness thus can be developed almost in parallel: •
•
In order to design and implement a knowledge base system in the knowledge management tier: a) we carefully designed the best-suited ontology schema for our content and application, probably based on a preexisting metadata schema. Depending on the specific content, we mainly focused on CIDOC-CRM or even Dublin Core based ontologies, b) we builded the corresponding ontology using relevant tools like the Protege Ontology Editor (http://protege.stanford.edu/), based on specific reasoning solutions like Pellet and FaCT++, c) we populated the ontology with data, and d) we made sure that there could be a flawless interaction of this tier with the interconnection tool selected in step 1. Regarding the development of the frontend tier: a) depending on the decisions of step 1, we had to make use of specific programming techniques in case of mash-ups, or develop specific interfaces in order to implement the desired degree of end-user or community interaction, b) we developed an AJAX-powered rich interface for our application, usually scripted in PHP or JSP, and c) we had to make sure that all the communication with the middle tier was
Combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Technologies to Support Cultural Applications for Web 3.0
•
delivered through the predetermined interconnection interface. As for the middle tier all we had to do was to develop the specific programming portions that should handle the application’s logic features, usually in Java language, keeping in mind the inter-tier communication requirements.
Step 3: Finally, we tested our application with several test usage examples and real world scenarios, fine tuning it where needed, in order to provide a more complete and reliable final product for the end-users.
Indicative Applications Based on the above technological infrastructure and methodology, we were actually able to develop a number of web applications that make use of both Semantic Web and Web 2.0 characteristics. Such an indicative application is a semantic movie portal, where information for movies is collected from Internet Movie Database (http:// www.imdb.com) using ordinary web scraping techniques, while information about respective DVD releases is collected from the Amazon website (http://www.amazon.com) using its API. There are specific PHP scripts that parse the required IMDB pages, scraping the desired fields of information (i.e. Title, Genre, Plot, Director, Cast etc.). Other scripts connect to the Amazon API and retrieve additional information for the DVD releases of the specified movies (matched on the Title field). The combined information is then used to populate a single ontology, based on our site’s purpose. For each user’s search, the relevant results are generated by querying the underlying reasoner, and are presented through a user friendly interface, providing complete information for each result and single-point access to it. Another such application is a semantic book portal, where a user can search for any kind of book coming from Amazon, through its API, and
also get informed about relevant eBay entries, fetched through the Half eBay API (http://www. half.ebay.com). For each user-triggered search, the desired functionality is provided by real-time searching (based on PHP scripts) firstly through the Amazon API and then, for each intermediate result, through the Half eBay API. The retrieved information is used to create specific instances against a unifying ontology schema that we have constructed in OWL 2. This ontology includes also a series of custom SWRL rules, which model a predefined set of user preferences. These rules are fired against the ontological instances, resulting in the further narrowing and classification of results. The final outcome is an AJAXised interface which provides complete information for each book, enriched with relevant eBay offers, that is highly customized and adjusted to each user. Both applications unify retrieved information into an ontology, each time suitable for the particular content characteristics. In this manner, semantically enabled mash-ups have been established, for the movie and the book domain respectively. Thus, an ordinary user of these portals, not only has all the information he needs in a single site, but additionally he benefits from advanced features of semantic personalization (Tziviskou & Brambilla, 2007; Ankolekar & Vrandecic, 2006) and intelligent querying support. In a more advanced quest, we are currently developing a next generation version of the “Diazoma” web application. We have designed a CIDOC-CRM based ontology for our knowledge base infrastructure, in order to handle all the information about the ancient theaters. In addition, this semantic information can be combined automatically with additional information from other dispersed sources, i.e. with bibliographical references from JSTOR digital archive (http:// www.jstor.org). The user interface has been redesigned in order to provide a more advanced experience to the end-user. We kept the original idea of map-based information presentation and browsing, and enriched it with more filtering and
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searching options, powered by the semantic infrastructure. Finally, we provide additional textual information for each place of interest, originated from third-party websites like Wikipedia (http:// www.wikipedia.org), having a complete and efficient multilevel mash-up.
CONCLUSION In this work we have shown that both Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies can be of great use in the development of web applications for the cultural domain. In addition, we argued that such cultural applications could combine the philosophy of Web 2.0, and the powerful technical infrastructure of the Semantic Web, and we have shown that Semantic Web and Web 2.0 are not two competitive visions for cultural web applications, but rather complementary and can work together in order to provide more solutions for developing next generation cultural applications. This was done by the proposal of a unifying architecture, which can be used to support any data-handling web application in the cultural domain, and by presenting a suitable development methodology. Cultural applications with such features are considered to be part of next generation web, or Web 3.0. Overall, the proposed architecture is a step towards supporting the development of intelligent semantic web cultural applications of the near future as well as supporting the user collaboration and community-driven evolution of these applications in the cultural domain.
REFERENCES Alani, H., Kim, S., Millard, D. E., Weal, M. J., Hall, W., Lewis, P. H., & Shadbolt, N. R. (2003). Automated ontology-based knowledge extraction from Web documents. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(1), 14–21. doi:10.1109/MIS.2003.1179189
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Ankolekar, A., & Vrandecic, D. (2006). Personalizing Web surfing with semantically enriched personal profiles. In M. Bouzid & and N. Henze (Ed.), Proceedings of Semantic Web Personalization Workshop, Budva, Montenegro. Bechhofer, S., Harmelen, V. F., Hendler, J., Horrocks, I., McGuinness, D., Patel-Schneider, P., & Stein, L. (2004). OWL Web ontology language: Reference. W3C Recommendation. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/ Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001, May). The semantic Web. Scientific American. Brickley, D., & Guha, R. V. (2004). RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema. W3C Recommendation. Retrieved February 10, 2004, from http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ Crofts, N., Doerr, M., & Gill, T. (2003). The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model: A standard for communicating cultural contents. Cultivate Interactive, 9.http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/ chios/ García-Barriocanal, E., & Sicilia, M. A. (2008). On linking cultural spaces and e-tourism: An ontology-based approach. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 19, 694–701. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-87783-7_88 Geser, G. (2009). STERNA technology watch report, part A: Knowledge organization systems for leveraging access to cultural and scientific heritage. Retrieved from http://www.sterna-net. eu/index.php/downloads#prmaterial Hendler, J. (2008). Web 3.0: Chicken farms on the semantic Web. Computer, 41(1), 106–108. doi:10.1109/MC.2008.34
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Koutsomitropoulos, D. A., Fragakis, M. F., & Papatheodorou, T. S. (2005). A methodology for conducting knowledge discovery on the semantic Web. In Proceedings of 16th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2005), International Workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Semantic Web, Salzburg, Austria. New York: ACM. Koutsomitropoulos, D. A., & Papatheodorou, T. S. (2007). Expressive reasoning about cultural heritage knowledge using Web ontologies. In Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2007), WIA track (pp.276-281). Lassila, O., & Hendler, J. (2007). Embracing “Web 3.0”. IEEE Internet Computing, 11(3), 90–93. doi:10.1109/MIC.2007.52 Lin, C., Hong, J., & Doerr, M. (2008). Issues in an inference platform for generating deductive knowledge: A case study in cultural heritage digital libraries using the CIDOC CRM. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 8(2), 115–132. doi:10.1007/s00799-008-0034-0 Loosley, C. (2006). Rich internet applications: Design, measurement, and management challenges [White paper]. San Mateo, CA: Keynote Systems. Luke, S., Spector, L., & Rager, D. (1996). Ontology-based knowledge discovery on the World-Wide Web. In A. Franz & H. Kitano (Eds.), Working Notes of the Workshop on Internet-Based Information Systems at the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ‘96) (pp. 96-102). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Manola, F., & Miller, E. (2004). Resource Description Framework (RDF) primer. W3C Recommendation. Retrieved February 10, 2004, from http:// www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
Minerva EC Working Group. “Quality, Accessibility and Usability” (Ed.). (2008). Handbook on cultural web user interaction. Europe: Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation – eContentplus. Retrieved from http://www. minervaeurope.org/ O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved September 30, 2005, from http://www.oreillynet.com/ pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/ what-is-web-20.html Pomonis, T., Koutsomitropoulos, D. A., Christodoulou, S. P., & Papatheodorou, T. S. (2009). Towards Web 3.0: A unifying architecture for next generation web applications. In Murugesan, S. (Ed.), Handbook of research on Web 2.0, 3.0 and X.0: Technologies, business and social applications (pp. 192–204). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Smith, M. K., Welty, C., & McGuinness, D. (2004). OWL Web Ontology Language Guide. W3C Recommendation. Retrieved February 10, 2004, from http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/ Tenenbaum, J. M. (2006). AI meets Web 2.0: Building the Web of tomorrow, today. AI Magazine, 27(4), 47–68. Trant, J. (2006). Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 12(1), 83–105. doi:10.1080/13614560600802940 Tziviskou, C., & Brambilla, M. (2007). Semantic personalization of web portal contents. In WWW ‘07: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 1245-1246). New York: ACM Press.
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS 3-Tier Architecture: 3-tier architecture is a client-server architecture in which the user interface, functional process logic (“business rules”), computer data storage and data access are developed and maintained as independent modules, most often on separate platforms. Cultural Heritage: Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past of a group or society that are selected from the past, and inherited, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. Physical or “tangible cultural heritage” includes buildings and historic places, monuments, artifacts, etc., that are considered worthy of preservation for the future. These include objects significant to the archaeology, architecture, science or technology of a specific culture. Knowledge System: A knowledge system (a.k.a. knowledge-based system) is a program for extending and/or querying a knowledge base. A knowledge base is a collection of knowledge expressed using some formal knowledge representation language. Mash-Up: A mash-up is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.
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Ontology: An ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain. Ontologies are used as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. Web 3.0: Web 3.0 is a term used to describe the future of the World Wide Web. Following the introduction of the phrase “Web 2.0” as a description of the recent evolution of the Web, many technologists, journalists, and industry leaders have used the term “Web 3.0” to hypothesize about a future wave of Internet innovation.
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Chapter 3
Web 2.0 and Interactive Systems:
Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment Francisco V. Cipolla Ficarra ALAIPO – AINCI, Spain & Italy
ABSTRACT This chapter addresses the evolution of state of the art interactive systems aimed at the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean area in Europe, especially Spain and Italy. It covers the last two decades of advances in design and considers the human and technological factors in the effective use and assessment of hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia. The chapter introduces basic concepts to eliminate ambiguities and to (re)acquaint readers with the main components of audiovisual technologies that have been vital to the (r)evolution of on-line and off-line cultural heritage material. It goes on to analyze quality in the communication process between potential users and interactive systems by drawing upon essential concepts in software engineering, human-computer interaction, semiotics, interface design and communicability. The main goal is to establish metrics for the heuristic evaluation of the quality attributes that make up an interactive system, taking as a reference the intersection of the formal sciences and the factual sciences. The chapter mainly focuses on dynamic and static audiovisual media, including digital photography, video, and computer animation. Consequently, this process of diachronic study of interactive systems has allowed the author to generate a methodology—Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment (ACHCA)—for evaluating communicability in dynamic and static cultural heritage media. The chapter also includes a table for the heuristic analysis of on-line and off-line systems, based on design categories addressing content, presentation, structure, navigation, panchronism and conection of the interactive system. Finally the chapter presents the results of a study of on-line and off-line systems from the 1990s to 2010. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch003 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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INTRODUCTION What we now regard as cultural heritage has been taking shape over centuries, and is a part of our collective memory. The notion of cultural heritage in Europe is a relatively recent one since until the middle of the twentieth century it was referred to variously as ‘treasures’ or the art wealth of the states. It used to be considered as a collection of ancient objects, with financial value and most of these were stored in museums or other places where they would eventually be exhibited. In 1982, the UNESCO world conference on cultural heritage which took place in Mexico defined the concept of cultural heritage in the following way: The cultural heritage of a people includes the works of its artists, architects, musicians, writers and scientists and also the work of anonymous artists/ expressions of the people’s spirituality, and the body of values which give meaning to life. It includes both tangible and intangible works through which the creativity of that people finds expression: languages, rites, beliefs, historic places and monuments, literature, works of art, archives and libraries (UNESCO, 1982). Another factor of evaluation of the heritage is the development of cultural tourism during the last decades and especially with the interactive hypermedia/ multimedia systems since then they become financially exploitable goods (Tierney, 2000). The online and off-line interactive systems have made it possible in the last decade to spread this cultural heritage in a variety of ways, thanks to the different dynamic and static means used for the hypermedia contents and which have taken into account the different kinds of users (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2007a; Cipolla-Ficarra, Nicol & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010; Sharp, Rogers & Preece, 2007). Now in the new millenium some people responsible for the main international museums claimed mistakenly that inserting the cultural heritage of their museums in hypermedia systems would cut down the numbers of real visits to them. We can still find this mistaken view in the
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management of cultural heritage in rural areas, for instance (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2007b). However, the truth has been the opposite, since the visits have grown exponentially in the main museums, thanks to the new technologies (Hirose, 2006). That is to say, the bigger the number of virtual visits to the websites about cultural heritage, for instance, the bigger will be the number of real visitors. In our days there is a tendency to revamp the exhibit halls through virtual reality and/or bidimensional or three-dimensional visualization, such as can be the case of the so-called “mixed reality” (Kratky, 2009). We are exploring several design strategies to explore the question of how to communicate historic information outside of the scope of traditional classroom didactics and supporting resources such as libraries and museum collections. In this process of transferring the cultural heritage to the new generations, the communicative aspect is essential. The communicability of interactive systems entails the highest level of qualitative communication of the contents in an intensive and extensive way (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008a). It is not only that the objects of the cultural heritage are presented or the information is provided, it is also that the interactive systems foster human knowledge (Veltman, 2006; Ozkaya, 2008; Kumar et al., 2009). Starting from the different design categories and means that make up a multimedia system, the user interested in cultural heritage is not only invited to watch and examine contents, but additionally he/she can open up a way in the acquisition of knowledge, through the analysis of the components, their comparison and the final interpretation of the conclusions. That is, the user can switch from a merely informative role to the formative one, reaching one of the main goals of the hypermedia, where every user is not simply a reader of contents, but rather an editor. It is here where the typical resources of computer graphics and audiovisual communication can be included, for instance in the extensive exploitation of the hypermedia language: the recreation of spaces
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that have disappeared or filling in of gaps with bidimensional and three-dimensional computer graphics, virtual visits, the virtual placement of a cultural object in the context where it was created, additional information about the elements exhibited in the museums, in several languages, matched to the sounds and music of the period, etc. In the current work is analyzed the presence of communicability in the cultural heritage inside the off-line multimedia systems and Web 2.0 especially in the static and dynamic images, such as: digital photography, video and 2D and 3D animations. In the last decade, the recent breakthroughs in hardware and software aimed at the net have allowed us to improve the quality of the images in the hypermedia interactive systems. The cultural heritage in multimedia systems has switched from off-line to the online support using to the latest developments in telecommunications and computer science (Murugesan, 2009; Kleinberg, 2008; Charlon & O’Brien, 2001; Nielsen & Mack, 1994; Fenton, 1997). The greater speed in the transmission of binary information has permitted the use of video and full screen animations for the promotion of the cultural heritage in the internet. In the 90s the first multimedia interactive systems aimed at the spread of cultural heritage virtually did not use the dynamic means (music, sounds, 2D and 3D animations, video, mainly), with a prevalence of static images of pictures, drawings, graphics, sketches, etc. There were three main motives of that reality: first, they took a lot of storage room in the files and the databases and hyperbases, which were stored in hypermedia off-line supports; second, the slowness of the algorithms of the files with dynamic information; third, the scarce quality of the movement of the images (frequent cuts in their sequencing). In order to partially solve these problems, it was usually resorted to the emission of the dynamic means –video and computer animations– in small frames, no bigger than 15x12 centimeters inside the screens, whose resolution was 800x 600 pixels. Currently with broadband connections in the homes, Wi-Fi in
public places, the quality of the sound and video cards, the speed of the processors of the personal computers, the new small size computer devices (PDA, Laptop, iPod, etc.), the advent of Web 2.0, etc. (Murugesan, 2009), allow to millions of users the free access to high quality visual information of the cultural heritage. However, in many cases the potentialities deriving from the new technologies, especially those of the software and the hardware are not profited from to the utmost because of design and interactive information architecture questions. In the off-line multimedia the limitations of the quality stemmed from the information support and the high costs for the production of computer animations, especially the three-dimensional ones. Currently, the limitation derives from the lack of attributes and quality metrics at the moment of designing an interactive system aimed at the diffusion of cultural heritage. To this effect we propose an analysis methodology called ACHCA: Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment. We relate the term aesthetics to the notion of beauty and the concept of quality, since quality, the same as beauty in a work of art, are easy to detect in their absence. In the current work aesthetics is a critical reflection on art, cultural heritage and ecology/nature. The heuristic assessment that we suggest allows to increase the communicability of cultural heritage in the social network of the interactive systems online and off-line. Besides, we present the main elements of every measurement (scales), empirical operations and examples in statistics. The advantage of the current methodology is the possibility of dividing the design categories into presentation or layout, architecture of contents, dynamism in the navigation and metamorphism of the structure. We start with a qualitative diachronic analysis of a selection of interactive off-line works related to cultural heritage. Later on, we analyze the Web deployment, in order to know what elements or qualitative components have been maintained of
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the off-line supports, such as the CD-ROMs and the DVDs. Finally, the obtained results allow to establish a series of qualitative criteria for the Web 2.0, whose content is related to cultural heritage. We think it fits in the current work to introduce some elementary notions of computing to eradicate the linguistic ambiguities that exist between software and hardware in the American and European context. Some of them may be obvious to some readers, because they have lived through the evolution process of the multimedia sector. However, those readers belonging to the new multimedia generations (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2007a) do not know the semantic differences between some concepts which have been historic landmarks in the international progress of software and hardware. These two last notions have influenced directly and indirectly the interactive design of the contents in off-line and on-line information supports, and equally the way of perceiving the communicability of an interactive system.
SOFTWARE, HARDWARE AND INTERACTIVE DESIGN: A DIACHRONICAL EVOLUTION One of the main problems when designing an interactive system whose contents are related directly or indirectly with cultural heritage is the duration of the technological support in time. That is, the possibility of interacting with these contents over years (Kroeker, 2009). The problem lies both in the software support as well as in the hardware support that is to be used for the fruition of those contents. The first of these problems is the one which is hardest to solve, especially concerning the operating system with which these cultural interactive systems work. For instance, an interactive system related to the works of Maurits Cornelis Escher (Abrams, 1996) carried out in the mid-nineties, entailed the decision of the team of designers, programmers, etc. who had to choose between Windows or Macintosh
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as operating system. As a rule, the productions in Southern Europe, excepting France and Portugal, were aimed at the Windows operating system. The programmers always forecast the functioning for the former versions of this operating system, that is, Windows 3.1 or later Windows 95 compatible. This last word, compatibility, is one of the quality attributes of software engineering. However, in the commercial context of the software used for the creation of the first hypertextual, multimedial and hypermedial works related to cultural heritage, for instance Travel through the Nile (EMME, 1996a) or The Museum of Orsay (BMG, 1996), made most of these early multimedia interactive products incompatible with other great platforms such as Macintosh OS and Linux. In this regard this division in the design of the multimedia interactive systems is directly related to the aspect of the presentation of the information on the computer screen, which in some countries in Southern Europe referred to the English word: computer graphics (Spain, Portugal and Italy, for instance), and on the other side the French word “infographie”, with an indirect reference to the Macintosh to carry out a quality design of the interfaces. Whereas in Spain the word “infographie” is usually used as a synonym of computer animated images, in other countries it is more related to explanation graphics and illustrations in general, such images may appear published in a digital paper. Now with the graphic arts (one of the main cornerstones for the proper design of the interactive systems aimed at cultural heritage) both uses are correct. In contrast, in some countries in Latin America and in several European countries, at the beginning infographic was synonymous with computer graphics (static point of view of the computer made image) but which includes an animation and emulation of 3D. Currently these would be the animations made with the Flash commercial programme to explain in several stages static information. Since the 90s, the graphic arts are in transition in the era of digital
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communication, boosted by the Internet. Hence it is necessary to speak of infographic arts: info (because of informatics) and graphics (computer made images in 2D and/or 3D). Here the term infographics is used as a synonym of infographie or infography. Besides, in such area the factors of originality and creativity of a work of graphic arts are set, which in more than one occasion may become the Achilles heel of a graphic production. In infography not only the technological aspect is usually important, but also the creative factor, which is vital for the correct promotion of cultural heritage with the on-line and off-line interactive systems. Now one should also not leave aside that the main activity of the of the graphical designer in the first interactive systems was textual communication, that is to say, “a visual communicator through letters” (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2005). Furthermore, the workers of the current sector must be professionals in setting texts. Texts which may be accompanied by static and/or dynamic images with sound means, such as can be in the case of hypermedia. Therefore, in the second decade of the current century typography will remain one of the most important subjects of graphical design for the interactive systems. The French designers of the first interfaces preferred to work with the Macintosh computers to create their interactive systems related to cultural heritage, resorting to commercial programmes such as Macromind Director. In the systems made with MMDirector (Macro Media Director was the evolution of the name in relation to the first versions), the designers and programmers had a tendency to insert the first animations and video in the CD-ROMs. Whereas several designers of Spain, Portugal and Italy used the Toolbook (Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft created ToolBook at Asymetrix in 1990). In both cases the operating systems kept on making the difference among the potential users. Until the day when MMDirector launches a first commercial version of its product which is compatible for both hardware platforms, that is, Windows and Macintosh
(1993). In the dawn of these multimedia systems, many were the programmers of interactive systems who worked in both platforms. Later on, a clear-cut differentiation would be made between programmers and designers, the first aimed at Windows and the latter at Macintosh. Implicitly, these divisions between terms and use of several platforms are also the result of such factors as: 1. The conception of the computer as a work tool or pastime. For instance, in Spain the acronym PC was related from the start with a work tool. The influence of this two letters did not only hail from the US, but also from the main countries in Latin America which in the 70s and 80s had a certain prevalence in computer issues for historical or geographical reasons. In the American continent several state or public universities knew how to combine positively the faculties of mathematics, physics, engineering in general terms, for instance, with the social sciences. That is to say, conceptually or theoretically they were forerunners of what we may call today interdisciplinarity or transdiciplinarity of the sciences to carry forward a multimedia project. In this sense, the north-south and south-north bidirectional axis was the vanguard in America, if we compare it with the Iberian computer context, for instance, at that time. In France the Atari computers, for instance, were programmed for video games, besides, conceptually speaking, the acronym PC was synonymous with video games. Later on the appearance of the first Macintosh had a wider circulation in France than in Spain, for instance, because of the graphic quality of the interface. Here is one of the historical reasons because of which the first multimedia interactive systems related to the cultural heritage in France have a better presentation of the contents in the interface than in Spain. However, in Spain we can see a better volume of information
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in the multimedia systems thanks to the design of the hyperbase (Tompa, 1989) of the interactive information. 2. Heterogeneity of professionals and homogeneity of the goals to be reached inside the computer project. The formation of team work to carry out multimedia projects related to cultural heritage cut a strong division in several countries in Southern Europe between programmers and designers. The former knew the Windows environment and the latter were familiar with the Macintosh content, a particular situation which exerted a strong influence between the human factor and the development of the software (Grudin, 2006). There it was necessary to insert one or several coordinators to establish a kind of bridge between both groups. In the countries of northern Europe, the groups were made up by a higher number of members and the roles were more specialized. In some cases, as in the testing area, the specialists of the programming environment worked jointly with the design specialists. The coordinators only had the task of assessing the obtained results. Besides, each one of the quality premises of the software was respected in the best way. In the first teams a vertical or authoritarian structure could be seen, whereas in the second there was a more horizontal or democratic working structure, where every specialist saw to his/her own responsibility. 3. The switch of the traditional graphic arts to the digital support. The graphic arts professionals in paper support started to use the first commercial applications for the Macintosh. First for static illustrations in vector format, for instance, CorelDraw was used or for bitmap files, Photoshop was the common tool. Later on the first multimedia products started to be made with the MMDirector. The important thing in this digitalization process was the transfer of knowledge about
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typography, colours, static images and typography, etc. from the paper support to the computer screen. Those who carried out this transfer were real masters of the profession with decades of previous experience in the 2D design environment. Simultaneously, there was another process, which was to transfer analogical images in paper support, for instance, from the museums, libraries, etc. to digital images. In this case, most of the computers operating scanners were PCs which worked with a Windows operative system. The reason for this reality had to be sought in the costs factor among those brands that were compatible with IBM PC and those which were not. 4. Images in movement. One of the ways to avoid all the issues related to the copyright or reproduction rights of buildings, sculptures, etc. is through the bidimensional or threedimensional reconstruction of those works. Obviously the costs are high as compared with the possibility of introducing a video or a guided tour with pictures. The problem lies in the fact that there are still countries in the EU in the Mediterranean basin which still uphold laws from the World War II period, which were not abolished with the arrival of democracy. These laws forced many producers of multimedia contents related to cultural heritage to spend huge amounts of money to get permits at the moment of digital reproduction. In these cases, in the face of the impossibility of using pictures or video, it is usual to resort to 2D and/or 3D animation. In the 90s the commercial applications to carry out these animations in the Macintosh were inferior to those of the PCs with the Windows operative system. In this regard, the Autodesk firm, with its products Autocad, 3DStudio, Animator, etc. which used PCs of a much lower cost compared with the Softimage or Maya, slowly covered
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the needs of the productions for cultural heritage. Besides, these latter applications and software required specialized technicians, full-time devoted to 3D activity. Later on, some graphic software firms started to make applications for Macintosh. However, these were 2D productions or 3D emulators. 5. The ethical role of the national and international marketing in the acquisition of hardware and software. One of the reasons why a given population may plump for a given type of use of software and acquisition of multimedia computer equipment is the cost factor and the fashions prevailing in certain communities. The cost factor, for instance, has influenced many developing countries or, in Spain and Portugal, where assembled computers were bought, that is, unbranded computers. That was possible in the framework of those computers compatible with IBM PC in the late 80s and early 90s, whereas the Macintosh did not fit into this category of assembled computers, and the user who bought them was a professional of the graphic arts, for instance. In the early nineties a new horizon was starting to be seen to facilitate the development of the multimedia systems. It was so, for instance, that with the Power PC –short for Performance Optimization With Enhanced Risc (Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC), is a Risc architecture created by the 1991 Apple-IBM Motorola alliances known as AIM, the first intersection and solution of compatibility was sought before the eruption of the multimedia phenomenon in the commercial framework. An eruption which for marketing reasons had several negative or positive consequences in the local and international spread of the internet phenomenon, for instance. In Spain the term “multimedia” was quickly associated to the interactive information support that
was the CD-ROM, to such extent that that CD-ROM was a synonymous for multimedia among a great part of the population. This commercial picaresque prompted the making of endless series of commercial products in this support aimed at the cultural heritage. It is so that in the museum bookshops CDROMs containing interactive catalogues of the visited or exhibited works were sold / piled up. It was the moment in which the PCs were sold not only with speakers, but also with readers and/or recorders of Cd-ROMs. Using the interactive information support as a multimedia notion in the view of a marketing strategy that knew no bounds to business profit damaged the research and development sector of the interactive systems in many faculties of fine arts, computing, audiovisual, etc. The multimedia products of this time were very simple and often sold enclosed to publications at newsstands of cities like Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid, etc. Within a short time, the interest of the users in off-line multimedia disappeared because many interactive systems which were distirbuted enclosed with the magazines or newspapers had a huge number of flaws in the usability and quality of the interactive design, understanding under design at that time the following categories: presentation, content, navigation and structure. The CDROM was used as an information support or backup. Now simultaneously in the mid 90s and with the apogee of the Internet many museums feared that the number of visitors would decrease because their contents were at the disposal of millions of users in practically the whole world. This false fear faded when it was seen that the number of visitors increased when there is accessibility for all. The Internet closed the gap between the fruition of the multimedia contents of cultural heritage from the several operating systems
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or hardware. Consequently, the wild marketing of the 90s and the lack of knowledge of the multimedia systems mainly responsible for the spread of cultural heritage slowed down the confluence of solutions between the two great groups of users and producers of software and hardware multimedia. With the passing of time, the great commercial firms of software and hardware have evolved to face the new demands of the potential users. That is to say, the era’s cycle in software engineering has been respected as Basile and Musa said, that is functional era –1960, diffusion era –1970, costs era –1980, quality era –1990 (Basili & Musa, 1991) and communicability era –2000 (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008a). In the last two decades we have gone from the learning of the use of PCs where usability engineering has played an important role, to the current decade of expansion of communicability. The era of communicability requires that one of its categories in the design of the interactive systems is compatibility or connectability. This is due to the continuous evolution of many on-line and offline information supports, where the dimensions have been considerably reduced, from occupying a whole desk in the 90s to being contained within a single hand. However, for those multimedia systems whose content is related to the cultural heritage and which are not video games, the screens usually have a bigger size than a classical video console (Murray et al., 2006). Besides, the IPads, the tablet PCs, Laptops, etc. have a greater acceptance among the adult public, when it comes to interacting with contents related to the cultural and/or natural heritage in blogspace, for instance (Kumar et al., 2004; Weaver & Morrison, 2008; Resnick, 2009). To a great extent this is due to the fact that they are generations influenced by the tv screen and who have used in some cases these same screens to carry out the first BASIC programmes through a Commodore 64.
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QUALITY FACTORS AND MULTIMEDIA: MEASURES The quality of a multimedia hypermedia system depends basically on internal factors, such as: the different kinds of access to the database, or the organization of the contents; and external, such as the use of certain colours in the user-computer interface, the ease of use of a system or the communicability of the interactive contents. However, in the particular case of the heuristic assessment of the multimedia/hypermedia systems and the communicability it is necessary to add the temporal subfactor context. For instance, over two decades ago the time of response between the user and the computer in the search of a register in a database could surpass a minute without this being considered as a problem of the usability of the system. Currently, with the speed of the existing processors, there are some who see it as a failure of the system, since the user-computer interaction tends to cut down to fractions of thousands of a second. Hence the need of considering that subfactor known as temporal context. Therefore, a way of depicting the quality of a system of multimedia/hypermedia is like an island where there is a visible part (external factors), another submerged (internal factors) the water and the air that surrounds it which changes with the passing of time in the temporal context. All these elements make up an interrelated unit as it can be seen in the Figure1. Figure 1. Graphical representation of the quality in interactive systems
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A strategy followed at the moment of shaping our universe of analysis or study cases consisted in starting the study with products of the year 90 in order to homogenize as far as possible the different CD-Roms. Later on a common data was established for the DVDs (1998-2005) and several dates for the online interactive systems, since each of them is grouped Web 0.0 (the dawn of the Internet in the universities, i.e., Mosaic), the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, that is, 70 CD-ROM and DVD’s and 70 portals (Web 0.0, 1.0 and 2.0). In our universe of study we do not consider the hypertextual, multimedia or hypermedia systems of the 80s and 90s which work exclusively in Macintosh computers.
Definition and Components One of the problems of quality consists in measuring it, and the resistance to measure certain quality attributes of the interactive software, when some new notions were established such as usability in the 90s. Later on there is a tendency to believe that certain activities carried out in the context of the social sciences must be extrapolated to the whole of the formal sciences. Consequently, what is defined with words in the factual sciences requires complex formulas and algorithms to determine whether a system is qualitatively good or not. Furthermore, it is usual to add the term “engineering” to the quality attribute, following to some extent the experience of usability, for instance. However, this fashion may end up in absurd situations such as is an engineering of semiotics (Cipolla-Ficarra, Nicol & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010). Once the shapes of the sets of the factual and the formal sciences are broken, in the environment of computing and systems engineering we have an endless number of professionals of the factual sciences, especially of mathematics in Europe, who try to quantify every human and technological element in the human-computer interaction aimed at the museums, cultural heritage, tourism, etc. They will try to generate new qualitative at-
tributes and formulas for aspects which belong to pedagogy or sociology, social communication, etc., such as even a children’s game, interactive under the playability bill. We see how in less than a decade aspects which supposedly could not be measured in the social sciences because of their abstract character, such as the quality or usability of a service or product, now in the context of the formal sciences are very easy to measure and there are endless theories, guides, formulas, etc. Moreover, it is necessary to return to the origins of the notion of measuring and all the variables that this entails directly or indirectly. The action of measuring consists of allotting a numerical value or a dimension to an object or objects through the use of specific procedures. From the methodological standpoint, measuring consists basically in a quantitative observation, thus allocating a number to certain characteristics or features in which it is observed. Hence that measurement in a wide sense is regarded as a systematic process of allocation of symbols (scale values) to the observation. In a strict sense, measurement is but an observation (one of the techniques used in the generation of the assessment method). Fenton defines measurement as a procedure by which numbers or symbols are allocated to the attributes of the entities in the real world thus following some given rules (Fenton, 1997). The four main elements of every measurement are (Bunge, 1981): 1. Mesurandum, or the property of the specific system that has to be measured. 2. The metric concept of mesurandum, that is, the magnitude that depicts the objective property. As far as possible, this concept has to be related to some scientific theory. 3. A unit of measure that belongs to some system of coherent units. 4. A scale to depict nominal magnitude or the classification, ordinal or of a hierarchical order, interval or of equal distances, reason or quotients.
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Scales The scale is made up of a set of different numbers and a set of modalities which are also different but which are interrelated in a bidirectional way (the scales of measurement are called as synonymous levels of measure). There are four levels of measurement which give rise to four types of scales (Fenton, 1997; Pressman, 2005): 1. Ordinal or hierarchic: used to establish relative positions among objects in regard to a given characteristic, without there being expressed any distance among them. Their main features are: ◦◦ Ordination, which entails several levels of possession of an attribute. An ordination which entails the use of a numeration to generate the relationship among the components, but does not distance the intervals, for instance, the distance between 8 and 9 may be greater, lesser or equal than between 1 and 2. They are generally used to establish an order of preference. ◦◦ Among the ordered objects there is the relationship of a greater, lesser or equal plus the logical relationships of asymmetry and transitivity. 2. Nominal or classifying scale: they allow for the classification of real objects in regard to some given characteristics, typologies of entities, indicating for them a symbol or a denomination. Such an operation does not mean the establishment of a concomitance of distance, order or proportion among the objects. Their common denominators are: ◦◦ The components of the whole are ordered in regard to an equality or equivalence of an aspect or feature. ◦◦ The elements of the whole hold among themselves a relationship of equivalence or non-equivalence.
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◦◦
The use of numbers sets an order of positions in certain categories, but does not generate a mathematical relationship among the numbered objects. For instance, the numerical code of customers of a database does not establish among them any difference from the semantic point of view. 3. A scale of equal intervals or of distances: they establish a level of measurement of greater accuracy than the two previous, since they allow to establish an order in the relative positions of the objects by measuring the distance among the intervals and the differences among categories. Their main qualities are: ◦◦ The scale has a quantitative shape ◦◦ The point of origin or zero is arbitrary, besides it is necessary to define them previously when several scales are compared among themselves. ◦◦ The use of numbers signals the relationships among the components and distance among the intervals. In the case that they are numerically equal, they directly entail equal distances in the measured attribute. For instance, the distance between 1 and 7 is the same between 10 and 17. 4. Scale of quotients or of reasons: It admits not only the distance, the order and the distinction but besides in what proportion a category is bigger in one scale than in another. It has a zero absolute value. Its main attributes are: ◦◦ The used numbers are real. ◦◦ The origin or zero of the real numbers which by being natural are inalterable. ◦◦ Among the ordered components there is a hierarchical order quality, and equalities of intervals and ratios. The reference to the zero of the metrical scales completes a properly said scale. Without an ori-
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gin it is not possible to establish the beginning of the quantifiable process, and consequently other assessors could not carry out the tasks of comparison and verification of the results. In the same way as in the pattern model of the decimal metric system in which the length of a meter is established by convention, the zero can also be the result of an international agreement. Hence the relative zeros exist out of convention and for practical reasons, such as the case of the start of a process of updating the information in a hyperbase, whereas in the absolute numbers these can not be changed, since they are subject to theories and they do not allow negative values, for instance the distance between two cities. In the method used we work with new kinds of zeros, although the absolute zeros prevail. The scales in function of their differences and applying some examples of the descriptive statistics can be depicted in the following way: With the previously presented notions it is not necessary to work with an expert in mathematics to carry out measurements of quality in the interactive systems aimed at cultural heritage. This is an area of computing that is included inside the subset of software engineering. In order to guarantee quality in the software, aside from creating the measurement techniques (direct and indirect) it is necessary to determine a control of errors of observation and measurement (systematic errors in the carrying out of the measurement and random errors). Because they are more complex, the current systems are more prone to failings, where the design requires special attention, bearing in
mind the costs that they can reach to remedy these failings. Therefore, it is interesting to differentiate the different types of existing errors in accordance with those stated by Kit at the moment of the assessment, that is, among mistake, fault, failure and error (Kit, 1995). Besides, the in the evaluation task the main conditions must be present regardless of the kind of sciences to which they are referred, these are: •
•
•
Validity: it is understood that the measurement fulfils such requirements when it measures in some demonstrable way that which it is intended to measure, free from mathematical distortions. Reliability: that is, that if it is applied several times over the object of study, similar results are obtained. The determination of reliability consists in establishing whether the differences from the results are due to inconsistencies in the measurement. Accuracy: when it is found accurately in relation to the purpose with which it is sought, the place of the phenomenon that is being studied.
HEURISTIC ATTRIBUTES Traditionally, the purpose of the heuristic assessment of usability of a multimedia/hypermedia system is to find the problems of the design of the interface to improve its usage. In order to reach such a goal several evaluators examine the
Table 1. Different types of scales Scale
Establishes
Empirical operations
Examples in statistics
Ordinal
Order and distinction
Determination from major to minor
Average, percentage
Nominal
Distinction
Determination of equality
Frequency or number of cases, mode
Interval
Distance, order and distinction
Determination of equality or difference of intervals
Average, standard deviation
Ratio
Comparison, order, distinction and distance
Determination of equality of the ratio
Geometrical average, variation quotient
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interface and gauge its conformity in regard to a set of principles of usability also called criteria or heuristic attributes (in the current chapter the term “attribute” is used instead of criteria, but stressing the relationship with quality). Some of these heuristic attributes have been suggested by Nielsen and Molich, who claim that the heuristic assessment is a systematic assessment of the usability of a user interface (Nielsen & Mack, 1994). Among the most important attributes we can mention the use of a natural and simple dialogue, of a same language of the user, of exit marks, of good error messages, of help and documentation messages, etc. These attributes were called by Nielsen and Molich “heuristic” (Nielsen & Mack, 1994). Jakob Nielsen, contends that usability is a property of the user interface, that it possesses multiple components and is linked to five attributes, which are ease to learn, efficient to use, few errors, easy to remember and subjectively pleasing (Nielsen, 1993). In the evaluation methodology for communicability we have started with usability, but bearing in mind the long tradition of evaluation of the social sciences and computing in a special way human-computer interaction, semiotics, software engineering, development of the interfaces and hypertext, multimedia/hypermedia design models.
Interdependence among the Heuristic Attributes After the establishment of the set of quality attributes for the communicability of interactive systems there is a set of them which are related with a greater intensity of interdependence or “subordination” among them. For instance, the orientation is inside or derives from naturalness of the metaphor, isomorphism, inference, or the motivation and empathy depends on the orientation and others attributes. A group of such attributes is to be found in the Figure2 –the interested reader will find a wide definition with example in the following references (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010; Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008a; Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996a).
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Figure 2. Orientation and some attributes with a higher level of interdependence among themselves
The use of heuristics for the generation of the current attributes is due to the fact that they respond to factors stated by Nielsen, swiftness, ease of use and low cost (Nielsen, 1990). Although there are nominally some of them on software literature (Madison, 2010; Balasubramaniam, 2008), the here presented attributes are aimed at the multimedia system. The heuristic attributes that have been presented are not orthogonal among themselves but they are based on models of multimedia or hypermedia design, use the notions or primitives of the interactive systems and rely on a procedure that has been in constant definition, correction and verification. The use of terminology stemming from the first historical notions of the hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia established by the pioneers in interactive systems, such as: Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Robert Taylor, Larry Roberts, Joseph Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Wesley Clark, Tim Berners-Lee, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte, etc. (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2005) allows one to hone in the definitions although sometimes one resorts to a wide terminology. For instance, in the notion of wealth it is necessary to establish the boundaries of its scope. The establishment of the exact limit of the meanings is not easy, especially when one is working with techniques which derive from the social sciences such as is the case of heuristic assessment. However, with such attributes it is intended to establish the basis for an unprecedented
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methodology in the assessment of the interface of a multimedia system. The importance of this is even greater because there is yet no “guide” to achieve a 100% success upon designing an application. The solutions that are proposed still require high investments, such as the creation of laboratories and counting on plentiful human resources. The attributes that have been described are aimed at the off-line multimedia/hypermedia systems but it is feasible to adjust them to other on-line applications or new information supports in devices such as: PDA, iPod, iPhone, E-book, etc. The current attributes do not exclude the fact that in some future works other areas of the formal and factual sciences can be inserted (Bunge, 1981). All these heuristic attributes have been constantly updated through a continuous process of analysis over a random sample of on-line and off-line interactive systems which are listed in the annex #1 and through the experience in the realization of successful multimedia systems since 1995 until today (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1995; Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996b; Cipolla-Ficarra, 2005a; Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008a & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008b). In the current chapter has been presented the first listing of the communicability attributes for the interactive systems related to cultural heritage with the purpose of achieving a greater acceptance of a hypermedia system and the heuristic attributes for the assessment mainly of communicability and in some cases for usability. In this first listing there can be some connections which are presented a priori with a loose level of “solidity”. Nevertheless, in future works with the definition of new quality attributes for other interactive systems which work in the context of mobile computing these relationships can still be consolidated.
Software Attributes According to Fenton a product of the software is a set of qualities or attributes (the constituents of an object are qualities or attrbitutes: color,
shape, size, etc., here both notions are regarded as synonymous) that make reference to the entities (Fenton, 1997). The entities may be an object such as a user or a computer, or an event such as a virtual visit to a museum or the evaluation stage of a software project for tangible interaction (Baskinger & Gross, 2010). The attributes are the characteristics or the properties in which one is interested, such as the age of a user, the previous knowledge in computer science, the model of the computer, the peripherals used for the virtual visit to a museum, or the time of the evaluation stage. The entities found in nature may be tangible or intangible, but in both cases they can be quantified. Starting from such entities, a classification can be made for the measurement of the software –also known as metrics in software engineering (Fenton, 1997). These measurements of the physical world make up two kinds of categories of the measures to be used both in the formal sciences as in the factual ones. •
•
Direct Measurements (as criterion to determine the dimension of a programme is seen the volume that the executable part occupies in Megabytes, for instance. Indirect measurements (the quality of a programmer’s work is evaluated by the percentage of failings detected in the compilation of a programme).
As a rule there are several times to measure in regard to the goals to be achieved (Dieter, 1990; Fenton, 1997; Pressman, 2005), whether it is focused on the object or the effects on the object. The purpose of a measurement in software engineering may be the process, the product, the language, the methods and the tools. The intention may be passive (simply the understanding of the object is sought) or active (when one wants to predict, control and improve the object). To carry out such purposes a first non-excluding classification of the different kinds of measure are:
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• • • •
Abstract and specific. Process and product. Direct and indirect. Objective and subjective.
For instance, the direct measurements seek to quantify some aspects of the quality (the number of hours that is paid to the employees for the design is a direct measure over the cost of the design or the number of lines of code). With the indirect messages of some quality aspects it is intended to predict such quality based on another information which may be derived (the number of requirements of a product can be an indirect measurement to predict the number of hours that is planned to spend on design). Two people would reach the same result considering the object independently. Subjective measures (such as the experience in the direction of projects) are registered on the basis of subjective estimations (Carey, 1996). The objective measurements are easier to automate than the subjective ones. Similar to other products, also the software for an interactive system aimed at cultural heritage entails an elaboration process. The method and the techniques developed for the evaluation of the communicability aimed at the interactive contents of the cultural heritage can be applied in several stages of the production process, with the purpose of maintaining and raising the quality of the multimedia/hypermedia products or virtual reality. The costs of the eventual modifications of the design of an application (due to the errors detected with the evaluation method) will be fewer Figure 3. Outline of the different moments to carry out an evaluation with the presented method
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in the design stage and in the elaboration of the prototype, for instance, inside the production cycle. Besides, it is advisable to carry out an evaluation of the communicability of the product when it is foreseen to make a new version of it. In the same way, the qualities are in direct relationship (Pieper, Paul & Schulte, 2007). In the different stages of development there are several subjects who take part in the design phase, until its fruition, and into the production stage (Al-Ani & Redmiles, 2009). Each one of the agents has a special interest to a set of attributes: the final user wants the final product to be efficient and easy to use: whereas the manufacturer will be more interested in the portability of the interactive system to new platforms, the maintenance and the verification of the application. Whereas the director of the project will be more occupied with ease of control. Therefore, the qualities may be divided in regard to the role of the participating agents into external and internal. The internal ones have to do with the developers of the systems: programmers, systems analysts, systems engineers, etc., whereas the externals are the users of the applications. Although the attributes of an application are given essentially by the quality of the process, where a staff and technology under a direction intervene (Dunn, 1990), there are also axioms which are false in the multimedia environment such as: •
• •
The external qualities are those that have a greater importance compared to the internal when it comes to the final product. A good internal structure yields as a result a good external quality (Fenton, 1997). The more economic resources the higher will be the final quality and vice versa. At the moment of carrying out the evaluation of certain commercial products inside the historical evolution of the hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia, whose contents are aimed at the cultural or natural heritage (about some of which are known the exact
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figures of the economic resources) with the methodology that is presented here, there were CD-ROMs which had larger structural and content failures with lower budgets as compared to others (among the latter, the number of inconsistencies was over 50% in relation to the former).
•
In short, it is necessary to avoid the simple confrontation between the internal and external attributes as Pressman contend, since there is between both a bidirectional relationship in the quality of the software (Pressman, 2005).
•
A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR INTERACTIVE DESIGN AND STRATEGIES FOR A METHOLOGY OF EVALUATION
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The advantage of working with the notions of models for the generation of multimedia systems, in accordance with communicability, has allowed to establish a common language among the several agents who take part in the generation, evaluation and use process of the interactive system. Some of the main design models in the hypertext/hypermedia systems are (Garg, 1988; Tompa, 1989; Stotts & Furuta, 1989; Nanard & Nanard, 1991; Leggett & Schnase, 1994; Hardman, 1994; Isakowitz, et al., 1995): •
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The Garg model is aimed at the creation of multimedia documents. It allows for several degrees of abstraction, therefore it is possible to make a more detailed research of the parts that make up the document. The Tompa model uses hypergraphs aimed and labelled for the design of hypertextual networks. It has a finite set of nodes and edges, and it is possible to differentiate between the content and the structure. The Statechart is an extension of the hypergraphs. It allows to depict the structure
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and the navigation semantics of the hypertextual systems. The Trellis model uses Petri’s networks to depict the navigation semantics in the hypertext system. Petri’s networks are made up by positions (nodes and elements of content) and transitions (buttons) to depict a hierarchical hypertextual system. The HBI model is a system of semantic databases management. The notion of hyperbase, which refers in the hypermedia systems to the database derives from this model. The structure of the model contains primitives such as: entity, property, interrelations and subtypes. The Dexter model (Dexter Hypertext Reference Model) is based on the analysis of the most relevant primitives of the following systems: Augment, HyperCard, Concordia, KMS, Intermedia and NoteCards. In this model the hypermedia system is made up of three levels: activation, storage and internal component. The AHM model (Amsterdam Hypermedia Model) is an extension of the Dexter model, which deepens in the temporal aspect and in navigation semantics. The MacWeb model is based on the concepts of the orientation to objects in which the types (classes) are used to understand the hypertext, and the instances to maintain the information of the hypertext (content). The RMM model (Relationship Management Methodology) resorts to the model of the RMDM (Relationship Management Data Model) for the design of the information and the links inside the hypermedia system. The RMDM is based on two dominion primitives such as “entity” and “relationships” among the entities, and five primitives of access to the data: unidirectional links, bidirectional links, indexes, guided links and collection.
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In our case we have chosen to use the notions or primitives of the hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia, some of which are already present in the previous models (Horn, 1989; Nelson, 1992). Aside from the semiotic notions they can convey they also allow a very detailed analysis of each of the design categories of the interactive systems (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1995). This system has allowed us to elaborate in a fast and satisfactory way a series of heuristic instruments for the assessment of usability and communicability of the interactive systems along time. Our experience in the heuristic evaluation of usability and currently of communicability through the years in several projects related to cultural heritage, tourism, etc. in on-line and off-line interactive systems allows us to establish a work method representative or partial of the universe to be evaluated. This method is based on the experience we have gained in the realization of evaluation instruments and through the participation of a specialist in communicability, whose training and experience is described for the interested reader in the following bibliography (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2005, Cipolla-Ficarra, 2007b; Cipolla-Ficarra, Nicol & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010). Now in order to obtain reliable results of the components of an interactive system inside the “partiality” of the universe of study or work, one resorts to the statistics deriving from descriptive statistics. In this regard it is necessary to explain that these are simple notions and besides they do not require a great training in mathematics, for instance. In our case, the random selection over the universe of study (sample) depends on: • •
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Descriptive statistics The first notions about hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia and the use of certain models of design of interactive systems reduces the ambiguities and indirectly the waste of time. The totals of the metrics of binary presence in the table of heuristic evaluation or the
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disc used for the design of the interactive systems called HEDCDEH: A Heuristic Evaluation Disk for Communication and Design in Hypermedia (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2005a). The concept of metrics is related to the notion of measurement presented by Fenton. An analyist in communicability (CipollaFicarra, Nicol & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010).
In the representative modality some of the primitives used in the metrics have a number allocated, that is 10 nodes, 15 links, 20 guided links, etc. The number is what is defined as mode. In descriptive statistics. In order to calculate the mode in this case we had to resort to the totals reached through the table of heuristic evaluation, that is, the execution of the binary presence metrics in the universe of study of on-line and off-line interactive systems. However, if the evaluated constituent is as wide as the amount of nodes which make up the whole system, it is usual to plump for random sample of them. The number of that sample represents the average of absolute frequencies found in the universe of study. Consequently, the use of statistics has been essential to determine the metrics. The metrics which are next enumerated refer to descriptive statistics (central tendencies, dispersion, minimum-maximum, frequency) belonging to the set which Ross calls lineal or sequential metrics (Ross, 2009): •
The dispersion metrics establish the measure in which a set of values focuses around a certain central index. In this case, dispersion is synonymous of heterogeneity or diversity of the observed values. The set encompasses: the deviation (average, medium, standard), variance and route. In our research works are usually broken down in the following way: ◦◦ Biunivocal metrics: They show the interdependence relationship between the deviation (average, medium and
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standard) and variance. If the deviation is not previously calculated, it is not possible to know the variance. ◦◦ Range metrics: They establish the number of units on the scale of measurement that there is between lowest level and the highest one, including both. Metrics of minimum and maximum to know the minimal values and maximum of that set of elements which is being examined. Frequency metrics establishing absolute and relative frequency.
There is also a special metrics known as binary presence (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996). Its importance lies in the fact that in the case of those applications which do not have for example a guided link (manual or automatic) it is possible to resort to the collections of nodes and links. Hence that in certain procedures it is usual to choose a collection or rather a guided link, maintaining in both cases the same number of constituents to be evaluated (for instance the screens or the nodes). Next is made a brief description of the steps taken to apply the metrics which refer to the quality attributes stated and oriented at cultural heritage: •
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Determine what primitives or components of the design of interactive systems are being used. The main purpose is to eradicate the eventual lexical ambiguity of the concepts, with which one gains in speed among the eventual participants of the evaluation process of the reached results, cutting down the costs because of the time used. Establish the categories of the design to be evaluated. To explain the objects to be covered with the measurement, for instance, the elements that draw the attention of the users in relation to their training and previous
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experience in the use of the different kinds of computers, reasons for the which they are interacting with the system, etc. Establishing the steps to be followed to reach the previously set goals (procedure). In the section “procedure”, the verbs “choose” and “select” refer to a random process of the constituent of the evaluated interactive system.
The achievement of each one of these steps can be divided among several analysts of communicability and users, using some of the heuristic evaluation techniques. However, in this case the costs would surpass the optimal results which an analyst of interactive systems for communicability can reach. Besides, it has been seen how the use of statistics can be very positive in some given contexts of the Web 2.0 when there are no parochialism or star enunciator phenomena involved (Cipolla-Ficarra & Ficarra, 2010). Apart from those negative factors which destroy horizontality in the access to information, the democratization in the evolution of the interactive systems, the credibility of the contents in the public and private institutions, the transparency and veracity of on-line information, etc. (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2010), all of this obviously affects in a negative way the diffusion of natural history and cultural heritage. In this context we come across an element of the design which has remained unchanged along the evolution of the on-line and off-line multimedia/hypermedia systems: the information structure maps. These maps are partially independent from the star enunciator or parochialism if they are considered in an autonomous way but obviously with the Web 2.0 and considering the referential links, for instance, it is necessary to analyze them in detail.
Structure Map In the 90s the off-line multimedia systems had in some way to improve communicability among the
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potential users of these commercial interactive systems with international circulation, for which it was customary to resort in the design stage of the system to carry out a structure map. A structure map is a graphic that indicates how the components of a multimedia system are organized. Through the structure map are pinpointed the entities which can be consulted. The first structure maps of the multimedia/hypermedia system can be classified in the following way: • • •
Type of consultation: static or dynamic. Area of consultation: Total or partial. Content: historical, geographical and architectonical. ◦◦ Static consultation: These maps show the places which can be consulted but do not admit the access to the information from them. The screens of the multimedia systems Region of Murcía (Procoinsa, 1993) and Aquarium of Geneva (Editel, 1995) are two examples of this (Figures 4 and 5).
Figure 4. Cities in the Region of Murcía
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Dynamic consultation. In the map are shown the nodes and the means to which the user has access. These maps are generally divided into several areas which can be activated from the keyboard. When these areas are activated, some visual means are used, such as a box, the change of colour in the background of the selected area, etc. The Figure 6 of the multimedia system, the Medici (EMME, 1996), and the Figure 7 of the multimedia system Travel Through Egypt (EMME, 1996) are two examples of this kind of consultation. In both examples there are also the static and dynamic means which have the entities (see icons of the videotape, picture camera, etc., on the screens). Total consultation: It is that map which is in a single interface and allows access to all the entities and components of the multimedia system, such as is the case of the Medici.
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In this multimedia system the structure map has the shape of a tree. Partial consultation: With the structure map it is possible to consult and have access to a part of the structure
of the system as in the case of the multimedia system Travel Through Egypt (EMME, 1996a) or the different levels or floors of the Geneva Aquarium (Editel, 1995) or World
Figure 5. Halls of the Aquarium of Geneva
Figure 6. The user has an overall view of the structure and the possibility of having access to it
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Digital Library (www.wdl.org –see map in Figure 8). Content: In the systems analyzed inside our universe of diachronic study and which have one or more structure maps available, it has been observed that the main content belongs to history, geography and architecture. In the multimedia systems with historical contents the structure maps divide stages or periods of time, such as can be the biography of a scientist with his corresponding research work. In the examples presented in this section there are also occurences of structure maps in geographical and architectonical systems.
The structure map of a multimedia system serves to ease the orientation of the user at the moment of navigation. Besides, with a structure map one helps to convey a sense for the size and the different areas of the system thus favouring the continuity in the interaction with the system.
The orientation examines the user’s skill to understand which is his/her current location, where he/she can go in the surrounding context and the possibility of going back to a visited node. Next are broken down the components of a quality attribute such as is orientation and which stands in direct relationship with the structuring of interactive information, the motivation of the user to keep on interacting with the system and the elements of the interface which can boost or decrease the user’s orientation among the dynamic and static means of a multimedia/hypermedia system, which has been conceived for the diffusion of cultural heritage. Without any doubt in the orientation several of the design categories intervene: presentation or layout, content, navigation and structure for a correct communicability, made up by the interrelationship with other quality attributes such as the naturalness of the metaphor, isomorphism, motivation, inference and empathy. Next we present briefly the steps to be followed to evaluate the orientation in the hypermedial systems in a representative way: Determine:
Figure 7. Visualization of an area selected in the map of the structure of the left margin
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Figure 8. Map of the World Digital Library and areas of access
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The constant possibility of navigating in a bidirectional or unidirectional way. The establishment of the different levels inside a tree, and whether there is the constant possibility of going to the root (home) or to a branch of it. The use of a map or active listings (hot maps). Setting down marks. The access to the history of the consulted nodes. The presence of an icon or “orientation” option. (for instance, a structure map or a compass) Procedure:
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Choose a main sample set (for instance, the sculptures or the paintings of a same artist, the architectonical evolution of a historical building, which can be classified by decades), and determine the navigation options in their components, for instance, forward or backward.
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Select ten guided links of different sample sets and carry out the same navigation operations: forward, backwards, forward and backwards. Add to these operations the possibility of going to the start of the guided link. Determine the passive or active function of the map, that is, whether it fulfils the function of a visual element (sememe) for orientation or whether there is the possibility of going straight to one of the indicated points. Detect the presence of an orientation icon (or node) in different sample sets of the system. Establish the total of sites which can be consulted again inside a sample set (history). Look for signalling marks and hot maps (active list) for the access to the textual elements inside a sample set.
Some of the best multimedia/hypermedia systems aimed at cultural heritage belong to the off-line multimedia, where the naturalness of the
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metaphor, the isomorphism in the distribution of the components, the inference of the contents in the several interfaces favour the users’ motivation and empathy. It can be seen next, for instance, how in the Renoir CD-ROM (DeAgostini, 2001), the icons do not need a long explanatory text (see Figure 9). This is a constant problem in the Web 2.0 systems where iconography is ambiguous and not mnemonic. Consequently, the image of the icons must always be accompanied by explanatory texts.
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO AND COMPUTER ANIMATION In the Web 2.0 version images have been a key element for the development of the virtual communities. The use of the images currently for the diffusion of cultural heritage has an endless number of applications which go from tourism such as can be the panoramic landscapes until the virtual museum and mixed reality (Kratky, 2008). However, in the first hypertextual interactive systems drawings with didactic purposes started to be
inserted. Later on it was the photographs where 2D animations were combined with the pictures or other illustrations to contextualize the pieces of the cultural heritage, such as the real dimensions of a painting or the shape of a sculpture through a three dimensional rotoscopy. In Web 2.0 the static images served to establish links among the participants whereas the dynamic images, especially the video, serve to draw the user’s attention. However, some concepts between video and photography have not changed along time, regardless of the fact whether we are in off-line or on-line multimedia systems. For instance, the use of different takes and the movement of the camera in the dynamic means of the system has several meanings from the point of view of communication. A zoom out is equal to a distancing of the user from the observed object, whereas with the zoom-in the incorporation of the user in the context is intended. The movements of the camera and the different takes have an influence on the acceptance or rejection of the set of elements that make up an interface or visual effects in computer games (Yang, Yip & Xu, 2009). The movement
Figure 9. An excellent example of the communicability for multimedia system off-line
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of closing-in or going-away of the observer on an object is made from the “z” coordinate,. The takes used in the first multimedia systems aimed at cultural patrimony were three: overall, medium and detail (close-up). Besides, the dimension of the box where the video was projected was small to disguise the synchronism problems between audio and image such as the quality of the images, due to the speed of the decompression of the information stored in supports like a floppy or CD-ROM, for instance. That is to say, there were few examples where there was an optimal quality full-screen, as it can be seen in the contents of the Web 2.0. Photography and video can achieve that the content of the multimedia system has a greater historical value and veracity if both are in black and white. However, to reach this goal it is necessary that the projection of the video images is made in a constant way in all those screens in which it is. In many commercial off-line interactive systems of the 90s related to cultural heritage it was easy to find intermissions or interruptions which can be seen in the shape of vertical lines or fade into black. The interruptions in the projection of the video and the constant change of takes damages the fruition of the content (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996b). The documentary value of the picture in black and white as opposed to colour is important to boost the interest to visit places. For instance, by inserting pictures of what a place used to be like and what it is like now. This comparison draws the user’s attention and motivates the potential tourists to visit those places. It was usual to resort to the make-up of panoramic views of photographs that allowed horizontal, vertical and angular movements in photograph-generated spaces (Meadows, 2002; Hays & Efros, 2008). In the late nineties and early 2000s, with Apple’s QuicktimeVR –VR stands for Virtual Reality, Apple appended these letters to its multimedia container software Quicktime to emphasize the possibility of viewing a real environment inside a digital window, where the user can interact in a virtual world. In fact, back in 1994, Apple developed a concept and a software
capable of assembling photos captured around an axis (panoramas), showing and manipulating the resulting image in a single file. Although also the user must also wait some seconds until the decompression of the file takes place, the waiting time is not so long as in the case of the animations or videos in CD-ROM support. Currently this waiting time exists in the Internet, and it is usual to resort to a counter to warn the user when it is possible to navigate through that virtual space generated by the photographs, for example: www. world-heritage-tour.org (see Figure 10) The result was a new way to look into a photograph, exploring interactively the full environment, rather than simple looking to the same limited area the traditional photo allows. In addition, the software can include hot spots, clickable areas in the image that can be linked to other panoramas creating a set a various points of view, and virtual tours on any place (Hays & Efros, 2008; Woeste, 2009) or merging real and virtual worlds (Leihg & Brown, 2008). This technology opened a new world for multimedia projects, where tourism and culture soon became one of the best targets. Without any doubt it is an economical resource as compared with the three dimensional reconstructions of the computer animations and with a great use of the off-line multimedia in the late 90s. In the Internet, it was developed during the first five years of the new century. Panoramic photography can be used in virtual tours of museums, cultural institutions, endangered monuments, architectural and real estate marketing, nature parks and most of tourism places. Virtual reality allows participants to interactively explore and examine environments, three-dimensional virtual worlds, from any computer. Tours can be exhibited on the Internet, as a CD-ROM insert in exhibition catalogs or standalone products, or used on a variety of media (Gonçalves, 2007): •
CD/DVD-ROM –interactive virtual tours, along with text and photos, video and
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Figure 10. Downloading process of a panoramic photography related to the cultural heritage in Vittala’s temple –India
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sound, either naturally captured sounds of each point of view, as well as narration or music. DVD, either DVD-ROM for larger interactive projects including video clips, or DVD for television viewing. Websites, with all their unlimited capacity for linking to other websites, pages, content, and different kinds of media, and, most of all, its capacity for continuous updating of content.
Let’s considerer for example, an exhibition of works of art. An exhibition is a time limited display of works of art or other special interest products. Public can attend it in that period of time at the place where the exhibition takes place. But if we do a virtual tour with panoramic photos of the exhibition, it can be viewed through the internet anywhere in the world. And if printed in a CD-ROM, it can be archived as an invaluable document, which would last for a long period of
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time, long after the real exhibition would end, and it would be visible any time anywhere. Later on several strategies started to be developed to achieve important results from the point of view of the quality of the results, in short lapses of time and with low budgets. In such a virtual visit to the exhibition, the photographer would capture the exhibition rooms, in strategic points where all works of art would be visible. Each of them could be photographed separately in high definition, and additional information, such as author, title, date, history, and whatever more, could be stored. We could also record the audio of a narrator for a guided tour. If some of the pieces are sculptures or three-dimensional objects, it would be possible to capture each of them as QuicktimeVR objects. With regard to the figure of the voiceover and the tourist guide inside the cultural heritage contents it has had a very positive influence to favour the navigation through the content of the on-line and off-line systems, especially in the first multimedia systems related to museums and
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education (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996b). Assembling the photos and information would result in a set of panoramas corresponding to the tour in the exhibition. On the screen, the visitor could explore the room, zoom in the paintings and sculptures, moving to other points of view. Each work of art can have a layer with an icon of sound, which would switch the narration about the particular object. Clicking on a painting, or other fixed display, could jump to the high resolution photo and additional information about that particular work of art. This could be a screen, a web page or other multimedia document, with no limitations. If the object is a sculpture, clicking on it would let one rotate it. The advantages of such a virtual tour are obvious as a multimedia document and as tourism and cultural promotion. Panoramic photography, virtual tours, and all the possibilities quicktime and other special software offer, along with the increase of hardware and communications capabilities, make it possible to create even more sophisticated multimedia projects, where experiencing the visual contact with remote places will be the next level challenge. Since 2002-03 it has been seen how the interaction of professionals has yielded excellent results. Photographers, together with multimedia programmers, are exploring new concepts and techniques, like the amazing Chinese –ChinaVR floating panoramas (www. chinavr.net) and the aerial panorama experiences, or cultural and tourism projects such as the World Heritage Tour (www.world-heritage-tour.org) which covers the full planet with virtual tours, with the collaboration of photographers from all over the world, or the Full-Screen Project from panoramas.dk, an ever growing community around panoramic photography. Now these reconstructions of spaces through photographs can come across legal limits in the case of the cultural heritage, such as the permission to make them and insert them in the interactive systems (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2008b). In some cases, it is not allowed, and in others it is necessary to pay the permissions to photograph the outside
of public buildings to the town councils. The solution is a virtual reconstruction of the objects, monuments, parks, etc. The three-dimensionality of an object is due to the presence of the “z” coordinate. There are multimedia systems which have the whole content of the hyperbase in 3D, especially in some interactive projects which explore the cultural heritage such as Van Gogh’s paintings. However, this content can be presented or visualized in several ways. The use or not of the “z” coordinate in the presentation of the content of the system is related to the greater or lesser realism of the image, the quality criteria richness, and the notion of perspective or polytopes of semiotics. Mission Van Gogh (L’Espresso, 2000) is an off-line multimedia system which offers a virtual trip in 3D in the best-known paintings. In the Internet many works in the 90s have been adapted to Web 2.0 (see Figure 11 in YouTube) by copying partially or wholly the idea or script of the original videogame. Many of the small and medium-size multimedia businesses of the 90s that were devoted to cultural heritage with either educational, entertainment or tourism purposes, etc., in Southern Europe, have not survived until today to claim the copyright of those interactive systems, for instance. Obviously, an editor of interactive systems can resort to the reusability of the information and even the designer, by using the notion of perspective to present the same content in several ways. However in Web 2.0 and the Web 3.0 there is no organization or entity which can warrant the originality and authenticity of the contents 100% (Lassila, & Hendler, 2007). Only the diachronic studies can guarantee to what extent there is no plagiarism in the systems that are billed as novel in the on-line and off-line interactive systems (Cipolla-Ficarra & CipollaFicarra, 2008) or the identification of cultural heritage, for example (Kampel, Huber-Mörk & Zaharieva, 2009). However, in the case of the cultural heritage works, this task is made easier because one starts from a beforehand knowledge of the works of the artists, for instance, and which
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Figure 11. YouTube –Second Life Van Gogh
have been digitalized, and thus can be visualized in 2D and/or 3D. The two previous Figures 11 and 12 have a perfect rendering of the objects that make up the interface. The rendering is achieved through a set of techniques and procedures belonging to graphic computing which calculate lighting, colour, the texture of the objects, etc. of each one of the pixels that make up a screen or picture. For instance, in the painting “Las Meninas”, from the off-line multimedia Velázquez (DR-Multimedia, 1993), the heads of the characters light up as the cursor shifts over the interface, and in a box appears the explanation. In the Figure 13 the head of Diego Velázquez has lit up, and in the upper margin there is a brief bibliographical reference. It is a combination of two elements such as lighting and the triangle. Nonetheless, on both sides of the painting two black rectangles can be seen. This means that the painting does not occupy the whole interface. In the 90s this was considered a failing of the design presentation category. In the Web 2.0 the information of the portals tends to occupy the centre of the screen, therefore it would not be a design mistake. The goals of these techniques and procedures is to achieve the highest possible level of realism 54
in the image. Now when the temporal variable is incorporated ino the three dimensional objects they become animations. These animations may have the same ways of visualization as the objects, that is to say, with or without rendering, in the wire format, in 2D, etc. The animations in a multimedia system can be classified in the following way: 2D, 3D, metamorphosis, combination of 2D and 3D. The metamorphosis and the 2D and 3D combinations have a high level of acceptance by the young users. In all the kinds of animations it is necessary that the speed of the emission of the pictures is maintained constant in the multimedia system and that they are synchronized with the audio and/or the video. However, due to the time cost and the human resources to carry out these animated images by computer in the Web 2.0 the video and the pictures prevail. Obviously the computer animations of the 90s had the same problem as the video by taking a high storage space in the off-line information supports, such as are the CD-ROMs and the synchronization between audio and image in motion. In contrast to the current problems deriving from the credibility of the information in the Web 2.0 by the phenomenon of the star enunciator (Cipolla-Ficarra & Ficarra, 2010), the information
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Figure 12. Historia Universal del Arte –2D and 3D images with a perfect rendering
Figure 13. Use of directional lighting to highlight and explain the characters in the painting
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related to the cultural heritage is usually more reliable because the public institutions seek to promote a positive corporate image of the museums, monuments, natural parks, art galleries, etc. with the purpose of boosting the tourism industry, for instance. It is not for nothing that there is a tendency to insert holographic images in closed spaces, such as science museums halls. Holography is an advanced photograph technique which consists in creating three dimensional images. For that a laser ray is used, which minutely records a photosensitive film. The latter projects a three dimensional image upon receiving light from the right perspective. Evidently, the (r)evolution 3D is constant and we can find a lot of alternatives of the realities for immersive experiences (Trowbridge & Stapleton, 2009). From the prospect of communicability in the face of the variety of images that we have in Web 2.0, it is important to always bear in mind the temporal context of the software and the hardware, that is, a first stage where the image digitalization process took place from the paper support, as was the case with some centennial encyclopaedias (SEG, 1996), where the interaction factor was relegated to simple guided tours of the pictures to the current possibility of navigating in images which emulate or simulate 3D. A classical example is Second Life and the virtual worlds in 3D, in which at the moment of the connection the user is an “avatar” (a digital representation of a person) inside tridimensional cyberspace. In other words, the momentum of the interactive multimedia in the Web 2.0 aimed at cultural heritage has made apparent the possibility of turning every user into an editor of interactive contents thus ending with the function of mere consumer or reader of audiovisual contents from Web 1.0. All this happens in the era that opens with the new decade, known as the expansion of communicability. The new communities in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 require communicative quality in the bidirectional interaction process with the last multimedia interactive systems: iPod, iPhone,
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palm, e-Book, etc., which are in a phase of constant evolution. A very interesting portal where the images in video format, animation and photographs are outstandingly combined is to be found at the museum of the Acropolis in Greece, as it can be seen in the Figure 14.
ACHCA: AESTHETICS CULTURAL HERITAGE FOR COMMUNICABILITY ASSESSMENT Traditionally in the interactive systems the notion of aesthetics or beauty is linked to the notion of quality. It is so that Denise Ceddia contends that quality, just like beauty, is hard to define but easy to detect in its absence (Ceddia, 1993). In our case we will focus on analyzing the components of the digital, aesthetic and dynamic images which can boost the circulation of cultural heritage on-line in a correct way. However, before listing those components, it is necessary to analyze the aesthetic value and some of its theories which can help the communicability in the next years. Seizing on Ceddia’s definition of the word “beauty”, it tends to imply the connotation of something agreeable from the audiovisual point of view (Costa, 1999). Now from the physical point of view an image is a set of pixels which are depicted on a computer screen. Such images can be animated or static, such as photographs, sketches, maps, graphics. The images can also be bidimensional or tridimensional. In the human-computer interaction process the human being gets messages in the following way: 10% through reading, 20% through hearing, 40% through the eyesight and 80% is what is seen and heard at the same time (Cipolla-Ficarra, 1996b). The works of art that are exhibited in a museum may impress us, reorient our ideas, actions or feelings, they may move us, but we don’t have to find them agreeable. However, this pleasureseeking quality is what is usually implied when we call something beautiful. Therefore, as Monroe Beardsley and John Hospers claim, we will use
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Figure 14. A minimalist style allows one to watch on YouTube an interesting combination of dynamic and static images related to cultural heritage
the term “beautiful” as synonymous of aesthetical value but not necessarily linked to the quality of being pleasant (Beardesley & Hospers, 1997). The traditional classification of the theories of aesthetic value into subjectivist and objectivist is natural (Hauser, 1977; Beardesley & Hospers, 1997): •
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A theory of the aesthetic value is objectivist if it contains that the constitutive properties of the aesthetic value, or what makes an object aesthetically valuable, are properties of the aesthetic object itself. Something that prevailed in the design of the off-line multimedia/hypermedia systems. We call a theory subjectivist if it asserts that what makes something aesthetically valuable are not its properties, but its relationship to the aesthetic consumers, that is, that they like, that it is pleasant to them, that it triggers aesthetic experiences in response to it, etc., something that has been
boosted through the social nets of the Web 2.0. In contrast to the subjectivist theories, the objectivist theories contend, as we all tend to admit in the end, that when we assign aesthetic value to a work of art or an interactive system we are assigning worth to the work itself. We are saying that it has aesthetic value, and that this value is based on the nature of the object itself, not in the fact that most of the observers and users (experts or not in the use of the new technologies likes them or finds them pleasant). If they like it, it will be a consequence of the fact that it possesses aesthetical value, but the assignment of value does not consist in the fact that the work pleases any art critic, heuristic observer in the evaluation process or user of the interactive system aimed at the cultural and/or natural heritage. What a work of art demands from the observer is a sensible judgement of its merit and this judgement is based solely on the work’s qualities, not on those
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of the observer or on his/her relation to it. In this regard our evaluation methodology, which has been perfected along time, is based on direct observation and does not entail subjective elements. However, it is necessary to stress that in our case, the proposed methodology is an intersection of the formal and factual sciences, consequently, with some heuristic techniques of evaluation of the social sciences it is feasible even to measure subjective aspects, in contrast to what Nielsen asserted at the moment of measuring usability (Nielsen, 1997). Now in our case, following the quality attribute known as isomorphism (definition in Annex #1), we can establish a common quality to all the aesthetic objects that make up the dynamic and static images that can be found to different degrees in the interactive systems, but in such a way that its degree of presence confers to the interactive work the aesthetic value it possesses. This property is known as “beauty”. Next the first listing of elements that make up that quality: 1. Realism of 2D and/or 3D by simulation or emulation. 2. Flat, holographic or panoramic visualization. 3. Transformation of the images: scaling, shifting, morphing, etc. 4. Incorporation of the “z” coordinate in 2D images, that is, to switch a 2D image to 3D. 5. Elimination of the “z” coordinate in 3D images, that is, switch a 3D image to 2D. 6. Combination of images 2D and 3D, realistic or computer generated, for instance, to insert in a tripod several paintings by an artist from within his workshop. 7. To insert or eliminate the lighting on the objects. 8. Change the textures and colours of the objects. 9. Manipulation of the temporal context in the textures (advance or regression in time) in the landscape or in the art objects, for instance, the erosion of the rain on a sculpture situated at the centre of a square.
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10. Transition from black/white images to colour and vice versa. 11. Rotation of the objects in one or more axis (x, y, z). 12. Add audio to the images: explanations with narrators, museum or tourism guides, karaoke systems, etc. 13. Use of multiple voices, sound, and music in the fruition of static and dynamic images. 14. Visualization of textual information for additional information. 15. Immersion in 2D and/or 3D environments with personalized, realistic or simulated avatars. 16. Inclusion of special effects. 17. Continuity in the emission of the animated images by computer and video. 18. Synchronism between the audio and the images. 19. Activation and deactivation of a gallery of dynamic and static images. 20. Fruition of photographic images in panoramic view of 360º, 180º, etc. 21. Adaptability of the image to all the requirements deriving from Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (full screen, insertion of comments to be shared in the net, rss, rds, etc.). 22. Adaptation of the images in order to visualize the images in several rectangular formats that emulate the television screen: full screen, zoom, normal, etc. 23. Possibility of increasing the resolution of the images through the increase of the pixels on the screen of the interactive systems. 24. Freedom of movements in the simulated and emulated images or angular movements; horizontal, vertical, upwards, downwards, upper left/right angle, lower left/right angle. 25. Self-management of the system to incorporate objects and graphic information to the images (for instance, dimension in Mb., downloading time, possibility of being shared by other users, etc.)
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26. Minimalism in the design of the interface and inclusion of augmented reality. 27. Interaction with personalized, realistic or simulated avatars. 28. Images in 2D and 3D that can work in different platforms of software and hardware. 29. Movement of the objective (lens) of the camera (i.e., zoom in, zoom out, etc.) in the animations, photographs, maps, etc. 30. Standardization in the transitions: cut, dissolve, split vertical out/in, wipe up, etc. in the change of the shots of the video or passage of images in the carousel of photographs, for instance. 31. Isotopies among the components of the digitalized cultural heritage and the components of the navigation. For instance, to maintain the same style in the selection of colour within a historical period of an artist. 32. Use of frames, reconstructions, scenery to insert the work in its historical or natural context. In the listing there is a greater presence of the aesthetic aspect in the first 16 components than in the last 16, which are related to other design categories such as navigation, panchronism, structure and conection of the interactive systems. Their inclusion allows us to have an overall vision on the future lines of research. Besides, the current listing is in a constant evolution much as are the changes and novelties that are being introduced in relation to the members of the virtual community of the Web. In our case we have established a first set of quality attributes for the aesthetic aspect of the images in the cultural and natural heritage, in accordance to the evolution of the hypertext, multimedia, hypermedia off-line systems (commercial and of international circulation) and on-line, from the Web 1.0 until Web 2.0. From the point of view of the digital images, the Web 2.0 is a clear example of how the users prefer images over text. However, there are now people who write more than in the era of the Web
1.0, because the problem of the credibility of the image persists. To such an extent that Regis Debray speaks of the death of the image because of its self-editing characteristic, with commercial applications such as Photoshop and the need to return to the text (Debray, 1995). Luckily in the universe of study of the on-line and off-line interactive systems aimed at cultural heritage the credibility of the dynamic and static images is high, as it can be seen in Figure 15. Finaly, the necessary steps in the presented methodology can be summed up in the following way: •
•
•
•
•
•
Making up of the universe of study, through a random sample of on-line and off-line systems. Although it can be hard to purchase some of these off-line systems, many of them are of free access in the libraries and/or newspaper files. To establish the set of quality attributes that are intended to be evaluated bearing in mind the diachronic factor of the software and the hardware. To break down these quality attributes into metrics, using a universal language of the several components to eradicate linguistic ambiguities. To resort to a table of binary presence of the components that have to be analyzed in regard to whether they are present or not. For instance, if we want to measure the synchronism of the audio in the computer animations of guided links, it is necessary that the interactive system has those guided links. To determine whether an evaluation of the whole interactive system or a partial evaluation will be made. In the latter case, it is necessary to establish a random sample of the components to be studied. Once the set of the components to be studied has been established along with the design categories on which the work will be
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Figure 15. Results of the communicability evaluation. The quality value scale goes from 0% to 100% –100% being the highest mark and 0% lowest score
•
done, it is necessary to evaluate the tasks to be carried out in the evaluation process. For instance, to navigate through the different nodes collections and detect whether the behaviour of the dynamic means is identical: forward, backward, pause, audio control, etc. Compilation of the data, making of the graphics with the results and writing of the final report.
LESSONS LEARNED The current work has made it apparent that in the elaboration of quality metrics aimed at communicability it is necessary to count on an intersection of fields of knowledge deriving from the formal and factual sciences. This intersection has brought about a new specialist and communicability analyst. Starting from his knowledge which hails from software engineering, the human-computer interaction, semiotics, the design of interfaces for interactive systems, etc., it is possible to detect
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quality attributes which are underlying in the interactive systems of the cultural and natural heritage. This analyst can study the communicability of an interactive system on-line and/or off-line through a set of techniques, methods and analysis instruments in a veracious and efficient way and with low costs, since, for instance, he does not need a usability lab, with which it is possible to save staff, the rent or the purchase of a physical space, equipment maintenance, etc. In this regard it is necessary to point out that communicability is not a synonymous of usability. It is an evolution in time of the needs of the potential users of the interactive systems who have gone from learning the use of the computer respecting the five principles stated by Jakob Nielsen in the early 90s to the need of a qualitative communication among millions of users who are busy editing contents daily, especially those who are related to the static and dynamic images, such as photographs, drawings, video, etc. In future works we will try to make free access on-line encyclopaedia with examples of those works of off-line multimedia where are explained each one of the components in regard to
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the design categories which we consider make up a quality interactive system for the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. It has been seen in this work how the quality of the software can be measured without high costs and resorting to heuristic methodologies which do not need big investments, but rather specialists who represent the intersection of the formal and factual sciences.
CONCLUSION In the current chapter the importance of having available a methodology which does not require heavy economic investments in special equipment or labs has been made apparent. It is rather beneficial to generate and develop the profile of a new professional for the design of the interactive systems. This professional must develop and boost the communicability era. In this design process it is necessary that the communicability professional bears in mind the evolution in time of the dynamic and static means of the interactive systems. It is with this diachronic analysis that plagiarism can be eradicated, copyrights can be protected, and the adaptability and compatibility of the contents to the different generations of users interested in cultural heritage can be fostered. It has been seen among users that the time they use at the moment of interacting with this type of contents is longer than what the user devotes to seek tourism information in an information stand or a videogame related to cultural heritage. Implicitly, there is a greater willingness in the user to learn. Therefore, to establish quality attributes, metrics and to carry out the measurement operations is essential to increase the time of interaction with the systems whose contents are related to cultural and natural heritage. With our analysis methodology it has been seen how it is possible to break down the design of an interactive system, regardless of having an off-line or on-line information support, with the purpose of searching the presence or absence of quality.
The heuristic evaluation table is an ideal tool to know beforehand the size of the system that will be evaluated and the components that are present in it. The results obtained by the communicability evaluator can be verified in a usability lab, where real users or other evaluators participate. In our case the ACHCA (Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment) methodology is very convenient because it cuts down considerably the time-evaluation equation and therefore the costs of an assessment of communicability. In regard to our universe of study with multimedia systems which go from the floppy, CD-ROM to the DVD supports of the European region of the Mediterranean, they have made clear the presence of an excellent communicability since the first interactive systems in the 90s. However, it has been seen how with the democratization of the contents of cultural heritage in the Internet, in some cases the quality attributes of these systems have declined, especially those aimed at children and senior users.
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Analyst in Communicability: An expert professional who has knowledge and/or experiences in the intersection zone of the factual and formal sciences. Its main goal is to increase at the maximum the communicability of the on-line and off-line interactive systems. Communicability Metrics: A set metrics from software engineering, human-computer interaction, social sciences (including semiotics) and usability.
Communicability: A qualitative communication between the user and the interactive system, such as hypermedia, mobile phones, virtual reality, immersion multimedia, among others. The extent to which an interactive system successfully conveys its functionality to the user. Cultural Heritage: The cultural heritage of a people includes the works of its artists, architects, musicians, writers and scientists and also the work of anonymous artists/ expressions of the people’s spirituality, and the body of values which give meaning to life. It includes both tangible and intangible works through which the creativity of that people finds expression: languages, rites, beliefs, historic places and monuments, literature, works of art, archives and libraries (UNESCO, 1982). Interactive System: It is a computer device made up by a CPU and peripherals, whose functioning requires a constant interaction with the user. Currently these systems tend to their miniaturization, the mobility and wireless connectability among them. Quality Metrics: A set of attributes to assess an interactive system (product or service), for instance, an E-tourism website or a geographic information system software on a pocket PC. Web 2.0: Web applications and services can be employed as social tools allowing mass users collaboration and information sharing. The main characteristics of Web 2.0 are: the users’ participation in generating information; the web as an environment where developing web sites and applications that put the control of contents in the hand of its final users; the user-centered design and the rich user experience.
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APPENDIX A Design Categories and a Set of Quality Attributes 1) Interactive Systems On-line (Web 2.0) and Off-line –Design Categories − Conection − Content − Navigation − Panchronism − Presentation or layout − Structure 2) Quality Attributes − Adaptability of the content, that is, variety of styles of navigation, plenty of different media (text, graphics, maps, animations, videos, music and sounds), a wide control over active media. − Behaviour-animated help analyses the attributes universality, simplicity, originality and humour in animated pedagogical agents. − Competence considers how the systems adapts itself to skills of the main groups of users for navigation. − Empathy. The distance among meaning and significant is minimum when we have empathy in the communication. In interactive systems, empathy is very important for active media’s, particularly, video and animation (full screen and full motion). − Inference is a process by which one statement is derived from one or more other statements; the form in accord with which such a process occurs. If you know than A is older than B and, in turn, that B is older than C, you can infer that A is older than C. The process of deriving ‘A is older than C’ from the two statements is an inference. The inference connects the antecedent with its consequent a sign relation, particularly natural sign. Natural signs can be apprehended by direct observation and do not require the mediation of language. Inference is very important for the inexpert users, for example. − Isomorphism sets down a range of constant formal features among the different components and design categories, i.e., content, layout, structure, navigation, etc., that is, it researches those components that remain equal in the different categories and especially the topology of the elements’ distribution on the frame. Isomorphism seeks ‘regularity in irregularity’. − Motivation is the set of the dynamic means and structure resources that strengthen navigation in interactive systems. − Orientation examines the ability of the user to understand their present localization, where they can go inside the context they are in, and the opportunity to go back to a visited page. − Semiosis for universal access makes reference to the main components that converge in this attribute for interactive systems: linguistic, iconic, attention, narration and education/formation. − The control of fruition is the degree of autonomy in navigation that the structure of the interactive system gives the user. − The naturalness of metaphor assesses the user’s ability to understand the set of images that make up the structure of the interface. − The phatic function asserts the direct communication in the human-computer interaction process without generating mistakes. − The transparency of meaning analyses the usage mainly of terms (also, images and sounds related to the words) of the interface that do not cause ambiguities between content and expression. − The triple dynamic coherence analyses the relationship between text, image and audio in the dynamic media, nevertheless, this attribute does not consider the synchronization between audio and dynamic image (animation and video). − Unlimited iconic consists of those icons and their components that, depending on the national and/or international cultural setting, have different meaning, for example, the gestures, the colours, the words, etc.
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Chapter 4
BAM:
A German Portal to Libraries, Archives, Museums Werner Schweibenz University of Konstanz, Germany Jörn Sieglerschmidt University of Konstanz, Germany
ABSTRACT Starting from cultural heritage initiatives of the European Union and cultural portals such as the European Digital Library Europeana and the future German Digital Library, the paper presents BAM, the joint portal for libraries, archives, museums in Germany which is currently the only portal for cultural content. since the German Digital Library is not yet online. The goal of BAM is to provide access to and increase the visibility of German cultural content on the Web. To do so the portal directs users from the list of results on the BAM website to the digital object on the participating institution’s website. In addition, an alliance was formed with Wikipedia Germany to offer the possibility to link directly from an article’s web link section to the results of a corresponding BAM search. Moreover, organizational, technical and content related issues of BAM are described. Finally, future research directions for cultural portals are indicated.
INTRODUCTION BAM, the joint portal for libraries (in German: “Bibliotheken”), archives, museums, is currently the only existing single point of access for users in search of cultural content on the German Web. Due to this unique position, the BAM Portal and its hosting institution, the BibliotheksserviceZentrum Baden-Württemberg (Library Service DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch004
Centre Baden-Württemberg) respectively are involved in both the German and European efforts to establish, fund and maintain portals for research, culture and education: The future German Digital Library which is supposed to go online in 2011; the European Digital Library Europeana went online in November 2008. After describing the German and European approaches in the context of the strategy of the European Union, the chapter focuses on the BAM Portal as an example of a cultural portal which unites content from different institutions
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BAM
and branches– a challenge both the German and European cultural portal are confronted with. With regard to organizational issues and figures, technical structure and content related issues BAM can serve as a proof of concept and an inspiration for the national and the European portal. The practical experience of BAM, which dates back to 2001, suggests some directions for future research in the field of cultural portals, for example how to create and apply joint vocabulary and common authority files for the three sectors, how searching in cultural portals could be improved for the various target groups, how cultural portals can serve very diverse audiences, how the collection strategies of the different cultural portals and the participating institutions can be harmonised on a national and European level, what the roles of cultural portals in the information society will be, what a business model for cultural portals will be like, how content can be selected in a way that supports the role of a cultural portal, how copyright issues will of cultural content be dealt with, how cultural portals can become user-focused instead of collection-focused, and how cultural portals can be open for user participation in a social web.
CULTURAL HERITAGE INITIATIVES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: AN OVERVIEW During recent years, the European Union (EU) has been sponsoring several programs to promote the online accessibility of cultural content as “culture is a key dimension of the Information Society. The exchange of information on the world’s cultural heritage will help people from different cultures around the world to understand each other better” (quote from Pascon, 1997, p. 57). In addition to the cultural aspect, the EU also considers digital cultural content to be an important contribution to the development of a multimedia industry (cf. the so called Bangemann Report, 1994).
Therefore the EU has initiated a number of projects, for example ECHO1, MICHAEL-Culture2, MINERVA eC3 and i2010 Digital Libraries4 to name just a few. In addition to the EU initiatives there are also many national projects by the EU member states where national libraries, archives and museums organize projects to create and collect cultural content, for example the British Library5, the National Archive of Germany6, the portals Gallica of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France7 and Joconde of the Ministère de la culture de France8, the Italian portal cultura italia – un patrimonio da esplorare9 of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali to mention but a few examples. All these distributed databases will be integrated into a European portal presenting the diversity and the common traditions of European cultural heritage in all branches of knowledge. The aim of all the digitisation efforts in the EU and its member states is to increase the visibility and accessibility of the natural and cultural heritage via the Internet. For this reason Europeana10, the joint European portal for cultural content, was created, being the result of a ten years effort of the European Commission to promote a single point of access for digitised natural and cultural objects on the Internet. Europeana was launched on 20 November 2008 and has collected more than five million sets of data until December 2009. The strategic approach of the European portal is to restrict itself to the presentation of digitally available materials, i.e. digital objects and the corresponding metadata, instead of metadata that only describe these materials verbally without providing a digital version. In order to collect digital materials for Europeana, an EU project was launched: ATHENA11. ATHENA will bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from museums and other cultural institutions all over Europe, evaluate and integrate specific tools based on an agreed set of standards and guidelines to create harmonised access to the content. The Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg
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serves as ATHENA’s content aggregator for Germany using the BAM portal as technical platform (cf. Figure 1). In addition to ATHENA, there are other EU projects serving as content aggregators for Europeana, e.g. APEnet for archives,12 European Film Gateway for film archives etc.13 In addition to the data gathering function, these aggregators will offer a hosting service for smaller institutions that are not able to present their own content online. From a political perspective access to cultural content in Europeana should be open and free of charge. Nevertheless one can imagine scenarios that include commercial information providers such as photo archives, publishers, radio and television stations, and other media enterprises, the billing procedures being readily available and easily implemented. This is an issue to be considered in the long run as Europeana is supposed to generate enough income to provide the means for its maintenance in the future.
THE GERMAN DIGITAL LIBRARY: UNDER CONSTRUCTION In contrast to other European countries where national portals for cultural heritage are well established, the German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek – Portal für Kultur und Wissenschaft14) is still under legal, financial and technical construction. In the future, it is supposed to serve as Europeana’s national aggregator of digitised data from Germany within the framework of the EU’s digitisation strategy. Currently, rules and regulations are being designed to enable the German federal government and the sixteen federal states, which are responsible for all political activities in the fields of research, culture and education, to establish, fund and maintain the German Digital Library. The official administrative and funding agreement between the federal government and the federal states has been signed in December 2009. This legal agreement is a prerequisite for establishing the central services – including a
Figure 1. German and international digitisation undertakings and projects (© 2009, BibliotheksserviceZentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.)
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board, a network of professional organisations, and an agency that will serve as an administrative office – will be established in summer 2010 and be operational soon after this date. A hosting institution for the portal that will run the technical systems has still to be found. The German national portal is expected to go online in winter 2011. The set-up process will be supported and advised by a network of competence (cf. Figure 2) which initially consists of 13 partners from the different cultural sectors and administrative levels within the political hierarchy, among them the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg, the hosting institution of the BAM portal, MusIS– the South-Western German Museum Network (Schweibenz & Sieglerschmidt, 2008, pp. 1-3) and the South-Western German Union Catalogue SWB serving the academic libraries of three federal states. The network of competence takes over the responsibility for planning, coordinating and communicating the future portal actions, the major activities being the development of tools for digitisation and data management for the
portal, the definition of standards for compatibility and interoperability of the content, the preparation of a business model for the portal, and the organisation of communication and collaboration with partners such as cultural content providers and software developers. The German Digital Library will have an organisational structure as shown in Figure 3. It will be supervised by a board of governors consisting of nine members, four representatives being nominated by the federal government, four representatives being nominated by the federal states and one representative being nominated by the municipalities. This board approves new members to the network of competence. The network elects the executive board consisting of one to three persons who participate in the meetings of the board of governors and cooperate with the portal’s agency which will be responsible for all administrative and organisational matters. A technical partner for the hosting of the German Digital Library is still to be found. The final collection strategy of the German Digital Library is still to be decided upon. There
Figure 2. The German Digital Library: Partners in the network of competence (© 2009, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.)
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Figure 3. The German Digital Library: Organisational structure of the network of competence (© 2009, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.)
is a strong inclination towards collecting and displaying both digital objects including the corresponding metadata and also metadata without corresponding digital objects. In this regard the German Digital Library might differ from the collection policy of the Europeana for which it will serve as a data aggregator for Germany. The goal of the German Digital Library is to create a single point of access to more than 30,000 cultural, scholarly and scientific institutions such as libraries, archives, including media archives, repositories of universities, and museums; its cultural content is supposed to serve not only users from the areas of science, education and business but also a general audience both in Germany and abroad. In the long run, all cultural and scientific information in Germany is considered to be accessible on the Internet and – for the most part – free of cost. For the various prospective user groups a way of access will be created that will be easy to use and comfortable In addition the needs of specific target groups such as children or users with disabilities will be taken into account and specific ways of access for these target groups
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will be made available. In doing so, the German Digital Library tries to be as inclusive as possible.
BAM: A PORTAL PROVIDING ACCESS TO GERMAN CULTURAL HERITAGE With the German Digital Library being still under construction, BAM15, the joint portal for libraries (in German: “Bibliotheken”), archives, museums, is the only existing single point of access for users in search of cultural content on the German Web. As a consequence, the potential range of users is very broad, the major target audience being scholars and students, but also a general public of interested laypersons. As it is considered a central educational and scientific online resource, access to the BAM portal and the content of the participating institutions is free of charge. The BAM portal offers the participating institutions a common, cross-domain access point to digital catalogues, repertories, and inventories. With this purpose in mind, metadata of the partici-
BAM
Figure 4. BAM Portal: Referring Users to the Web Site of the Institution (© 2007, BibliotheksserviceZentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.)
pating institutions are collected, stored, indexed and made searchable on the BAM server, while the media content is stored in the online databases of the participating institutions who keep full control over and responsibility for their digital materials, using BAM only as a gateway and as a means to increase their visibility on the Web (Figure 4). For smaller institutions without online databases of their own, a hosting service is offered by BAM. These institutions can store both the metadata and the media content of their digital collections in the BAM database which allows them to present their content on the Internet without having to maintain a complex and expensive web presence instead of a simple home page. As a bonus for sharing their content with BAM, these institutions can include a search form into their home pages in order to present their own content via their own websites. This option is important for smaller institutions with limited resources and a low visibility on the Web. In addition to serving as a central point of access, BAM tries to increase the visibility of the digital content of all participating institutions. For
this reason, in August 2007 an alliance was formed between BAM and Wikipedia Germany, the German language version of the Internet encyclopaedia. Wikipedia Germany created a specific template for BAM that allows to connect the web links section of any given article to a predefined query in BAM. Both services take advantage of this cooperation: Wikipedia Germany offers its users a wide range of sources - both textual documentation and multimedia content – to investigate while BAM increases the visibility of its partners’ digital content. In addition, this linking strategy promotes a high ranking by search engines and draws traffic to the sites of the individual institutions. Until December 2009 more than 1,260 BAM links have been created in Wikipedia articles; this process goes on, continually increasing the number of BAM links and the visibility of its content. A detailed analysis of the BAM log files has not yet been carried out. Hence the above mentioned audience of the BAM portal remains vague; it is not the result of a thorough examination but more of an educated guess. The analysis of the log files
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carried out so far shows that there are more than 1,000 visits per day or around 30,000 visits per month during the last twelve months. Especially the BAM link in Wikipedia articles has considerably increased the traffic to BAM as the cursory log file analysis indicates.
Organizational Issues and Figures of BAM Originally, the BAM portal started as a project funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in May 2001. Since June 2007 it is run by a consortium consisting of the following institutions: •
• •
•
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz SPK), Berlin; the State Archive of Baden-Württemberg (Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg), Stuttgart; the State Museum of Technology and Labour (Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit), Mannheim; the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum BadenWürttemberg, University of Konstanz.
The consortium is open for new members who are interested in joining. However, membership is not a prerequisite for contributing content to BAM; the portal accepts digital data from all cultural and scientific institutions in Germany that are willing to participate. This service is free of charge. In December 2009, the total number of data sets in BAM was: Even at first glance, Table 1 reveals a striking difference in numbers between the three sectors libraries, archives, and museums – a content related issue that will be discussed later on in a separate section. Beforehand some technical aspects of BAM have to be explained in order to elucidate BAM’s approach of including both metadata with and without corresponding digital objects – a scheme that differs from Europeana’s
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collection strategy described above. While the beta version of Europeana is restricted to digitally available materials, i.e. digital objects and the corresponding metadata, the BAM portal also accepts metadata of objects that are not digitally available online. Therefore, in BAM the overall number of indexed objects is almost 42 million, while the total number of objects connected to digital materials is only 1.7 million.
Technical Issues of BAM In BAM, either a simple Google slot or an extended search form allows for searches through digital collections of heterogeneous provenance and structure. The results of a search are directly linked back to the originating online catalogues of the data in question where detailed information can be accessed (Figure 4). Digital reproductions of the objects, if existing, are also available online. The biggest challenge at the project’s beginning was the integration of the different metadata formats into one reference format for indexing and presentation. When work began in 2001, in Germany only the libraries possessed a common metadata framework for the exchange of data: MAB (machine readable exchange format for libraries). The archives used EAD (Encoded Archival Description),16 a metadata standard which is accepted among archivists in Germany, while the German museums practiced some kind of organized anarchy having no common metadata framework at all. Meanwhile the museumdat standard has been developed and is accepted as harvesting format in the German museum community.17 In the near future museumdat will be replaced by LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects), a subsequent standard currently under construction, a combination of museumdat, Spectrum, and Getty’s CDWA lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art). LIDO is promoted by museum organisations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA, therefore having the potential to become an international standard.
BAM
Table 1. The total number of data sets in BAM. (© 2009, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.) BAM total
41.990.418
Libraries Northern German Union Catalogue GBV (some 330 scholarly libraries) Southwestern German Union Catalogue SWB (some 1,200 scholarly libraries) State Library of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin Central Index of Digitised Imprints (ZVDD) … Archives State Archives of Baden-Württemberg State Archives of Hesse Federal Archive of Germany Municipal Archives (Freiburg, Heilbronn, Mainz, Reutlingen) ...
37.539.130 ~20 M ~14 M ~3 M ~0,5 M 3.328.263 2.1 M 1M 89 K
Museums Architecture Museum of the TU Berlin (collection of technical plans and drawings) Historical Museum of the City of Leipzig The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin digiCULT Schleswig-Holstein Foundation Haus der Geschichte, Bonn / Leipzig German Historical Museum, Berlin ...
300.317 69 K 142 K 25 K 18 K 6,7 K 6,5 K
Other sources Kalliope portal Internet Portal History of Westphalia ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius ...
822.708
As LIDO is based on museumdat, there will be the necessary consistency and reliability in metadata issues for the museums sector. The issue of a joint metadata framework is an aspect that should not be underestimated. At the beginning of the BAM project, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) was adopted as internal scheme.18 But due to the inherent restrictions of DCMES a proprietary scheme had to be developed in the pursuit of a sophisticated indexing and advanced searching procedure of heterogeneously structured data. The German Digital Library will be and Europeana already is facing analogous problems, for that reason there is hope that the different sectors involved in cultural content projects will be able to meet on the common ground of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM), a scheme developed by the Comité international pour la documentation, a subcommittee of the International Council of
Museums dealing with issues of documentation. The CIDOC CRM and the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR), an evolving library standard developed by a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, are by now harmonized19. This means that for museums and libraries a common standard is evolving while the archives are still excluded from this joint approach to metadata synchronisation. The CIDOC CRM was developed to avoid the shortcomings of other metadata schemas, which are rigid in structure and not able to represent the complexity of relationships between real world objects. The purpose of ontologies such as CIDOC CRM or FRBR is to structure the world of certain domains of knowledge – for example cultural heritage – in a format that could be read and processed by machines. In this way it is possible to map data on a common reference format for automatic upload and update
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Figure 5. Information levels of the BAM portal (© 2007, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.)
of data to portals like BAM, the German Digital Library or Europeana. The basic technical approach of BAM – as indicated in Figure 6 – is quite simple: The BAM portal collects only the metadata of the objects located in the online databases of the participating institutions and a corresponding link that points to the digital objects which are also located on the participating institutions’ websites. The result lists produced by BAM are fed back into the expert information systems, where the objects are shown in the appropriate presentation format. This procedure has two main advantages: the separate presentation models of very heterogeneous materials (books, manuscripts, three-dimensional objects, etc.) are in the responsibility of the expert information systems; and the BAM portal must not be occupied with several, perhaps perplexingly different structures of the presented objects. For example, the archives want to present their materials according to their provenance, i.e. the origin of the single record in the administrative and/or personal context of a defined historical process. Archivists are not so much concerned
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about pertinence, i.e. ordering the material by subject, as a finding aid. Rather most archivists think that using pertinence or subject headings for indexing could obscure the context of a record and thus be misleading. For this reason there is only a small overlap of entry points between the three sectors, as will be shown in the following section. Therefore, a full text index seemed to be the only reasonable approach to organise the access to the metadata in BAM. The search technology of BAM is based on the Apache-Lucene full text search engine library and other open-source components. Lucene is able to work efficiently by using pre-converted data formats like museum’s museumdat format, the archival metadata format EAD, the library exchange format MAB2 (in the future MARC21) and in addition individual museum or archival formats and mappings that do not adhere to metadata standards. The heterogeneous metadata from the different sectors and content providers are mapped to a common proprietary BAM format, which constitutes the raw input to a central search index. A query will produce a list of brief result
BAM
Figure 6. The technical structure of the BAM portal (© 2007, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum BadenWürttemberg. Used with permission.)
items that will contain hyperlinks to more detailed information provided either by the BAM portal – if the content providers do not have online databases of their own – or by the various online databases of the original content providers. In this way, BAM serves only as a gateway to the participating institutions and their cultural content. The technical structure of the BAM portal is illustrated in Figure 6. A SQL (Standard Query Language) database contains the data about the providers, the previously installed settings for indexing and the configuration of the assembly or pipeline, i.e. the working process that transforms and indexes the incoming data. The data is delivered either by the administrator directly and processed by him/her manually or the data is uploaded and processed automatically. Whereas initially data were integrated by hand for every data format delivered und transformed into a DCMES compatible data file by the administrator, the procedures of data ingest will be more and more automated over time. Some platforms, e. g. Central Index of Digitised Imprints (ZVDD), provide interfaces for harvesting data via an Open
Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), but the prerequisites for this are as of now not common practice for the most part of the content providers. Currently the data is stored as a XML (Extensible Markup Language, i.e. a syntax for structuring data) file in a file system (input and BAM meta repository). In the near future a Java Content repository (JCR) will be build up that contains all XML data in a more structured form. The pipeline indexer transforms the incoming data into the internal proprietary XML formats for archives, museums and libraries with the Extensible Style sheet Language Transformation (XSLT). This is a flexible instrument in order to integrate very different formats into one reference format. This data is stored in the BAM meta repository and indexed by Lucene producing the master index. The master index is mirrored by one or more slave servers. This ensures that the performance is scalable if necessary. By using authority files (see below) and stemming tools for the retrieval process, search terms will be expanded by either synonyms or additional words that can relate to the term sought-after. The 77
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predominant authority file used in BAM is the Subject Headings Authority File of the German National Library (Schlagwortnormdatei, SWD). The SWD provides a controlled vocabulary for all areas of knowledge that is continuously expanded with special regard to the needs of museums. The list of reference works for authority files (Liste der fachlichen Nachschlagewerke zu den Normdateien20) is used as a source. The SWD is compiled by the German National Library and six regional German library organizations, among them the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. The SWD may be used in the search option of the BAM portal to help users to find their way through the data by offering semantic tools for widening or narrowing the search. Although very useful, authority files are not yet common in the daily work of German archives and museums. For this reason, a lot of the information in the BAM portal has no relation to the SWD or other authority files. Therefore automatically indexed terms of these data are related for the most important results (for roots, composite terms) of this process to the SWD.
Content Related Issues of BAM What is evident from the amount of data sets in BAM (cf. Table 1), is the striking difference in numbers between the three sectors libraries, archives, and museums. This is not only due to the size of the holdings of the participating institutions but also to traditional differences between libraries, archives, and museums in creating records at different levels of granularity and collaborating in cataloguing and creating union catalogues. While libraries have a long tradition of both cooperative and digital cataloguing and can usually copy entire bibliographic records from other libraries, museums and archives have to invest considerable time and effort in the cataloguing of their unique resources even if they work together in cooperative cataloguing endeavours. Hence the list of resulting data in BAM is obviously unbalanced
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between the three sectors and will continue to be so, especially because libraries are nearly twenty years in advance regarding the digital cataloguing of their objects. Another well-known content related problem is the lack of a joint vocabulary for the three sectors which results in a small overlap of entry points, for example the personal name, some kind of title or subject and date, the personal name being the only reliable common search criteria for all three sectors (Hohn, 2001, p. 72). This very limited intersection is even reduced by the fact that the three sectors employ different name authority files instead of using the one of the German National Library (Personennamendatei, PND). Therefore, full text indexing – with all its well-known disadvantages – seems to be the only reasonable means for organising the access to the heterogeneously structured digital content in BAM. Future research and action has definitely to focus on the use of a common set of vocabularies for the three sectors in order to increase the precision of searches. It is also important that the vocabularies in question will be translated into other languages in order to allow a meaningful exchange within international portals such as Europeana. In this regard, BAM can draw on the long experience of the BibliotheksserviceZentrum Baden-Württemberg that also hosts a large library union catalogue and contributes to the German National Library’s authority files.
Future Evaluation Issues of BAM Up to now, no in-depth evaluation of the BAM Portal has taken place due to the lack of funding and personnel. There was an unsuccessful effort to gather user feedback: an online questionnaire was set up and users were asked to fill in their experiences with the portal. But the questionnaire was wholeheartedly ignored by the vast majority of the audience and therefore failed to provide feedback as only a very small number of users provided feedback. For a future evaluation other methods will be used. A promising approach is
BAM
a detailed analysis of the log files that are automatically created. A preliminary examination of the BAM log files showed that there were more than 1 000 visits per day or around 30 000 visits per month from June 2008 to May 2009. These numbers are small compared with those of major search engines, yet it is a reasonable start and a point from which to continue to build a stable and large BAM community. Another approach would be the analysis of search terms in order to find out if technical measures such as integration of authority files into the search process would help users in the search process. A preliminary analysis of 1 000 search terms which equals the average number of visits per day in the timeframe from June 2008 to May 2009 was carried out (Table 2). The analysis of this sample showed that almost half of the queries conducted by users were oneword searches (489 queries). In this sample, the users searched often for subject information (470 search terms), for names (391 search terms) and geographic information (220 search terms) while searches for years were sparsely used (22 search terms) (Table 3). The search terms were often used in combination, i.e. as more than one word searches, especially for names and for combination of both subject information/names and geographic information/names. The number search terms containing obvious er-
rors was 88 out of 1 000, mostly typos or errors in spelling which suggests that a function indicating the correct spelling by showing correct terms extracted from authority files would be quite helpful for the users.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS As of December 2009, Europeana has more than five million digital objects online while the German Digital Library is still under construction whereas BAM is serving its community for several years now, offering almost 42 million sets of data. Regardless of their current state of realisation, cultural portals faced and will face several challenges, last but not least the naming problem. BAM has solved this naming problem by including the names of all three cultural institutions into the chosen abbreviation, Europeana did so by abandoning the term “digital library” which is not well liked by archives and museums as they do definitely not consider themselves to be librarylike institutions. The German Digital Library has still to find a name that is acceptable for all the participating sectors. Even more important than the naming problem are the following questions that are still under discussion:
Table 2. The use of search terms in BAM. (© 2009, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.) search terms number
1 word searches 489
2 word searches 306
4 and more word searches
3 word searches 98
95
Table 3. The kind of search terms used in BAM. (© 2009, Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. Used with permission.) searches for subject information 470
searches for names 391
searches for geographic information 220
searches for years 22
searches containing errors 88
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•
80
How can a joint vocabulary and common authority files for the three sectors be promoted? Currently libraries, archives, and museums are most often using different terminologies and authority files for documenting the items in their collections and describing the overall collections. A joint vocabulary would be a means to improve the precision of searches in a national portal. In addition, this would be a prerequisite for the translation of authority files into other languages in order to allow a more effective search in Europeana. The VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) project is an example for an effort to meet the requirements of internationally coordinated authority files world wide.21 It seems possible that this effort will be adopted by the different communities. In Germany the national and other archives are working with the above mentioned name authority file PND of the German National Library, in addition, there are plans to unite the various German authority files of the library sector into one joint authority file. How can searching in cultural portals be improved for the various target groups that range from subject experts to laypersons? Access to digital collections is more than just entering a search term and getting back a list of results. Access also includes intellectual accessibility of content according to the needs, goals and previous knowledge of specific target groups such as novices or pupils. With regard to the searching procedure this means that the search interface, the search terminology, and the search results have to be given serious consideration as laypersons face considerable problems when they have to search a database made by professionals for professionals and being based on expert terminology they do often not know or understand correctly (cf.
•
•
Cameron, 2001, p. 309; Economou, 2008, p. 146). How can cultural portals serve very diverse audiences? On the Internet, the potential audience is very heterogeneous, each target group having specific needs, goals, and prior knowledge with regard to the content they are looking for. Therefore, different levels of access are necessary to meet those needs. A potential solution for this problem is to use an interaction design method called personas. This method uses quantitative and/or qualitative data to create representations of archetypical users, the so called personas (Schweibenz, 2008). In the following persona-based development process the application is tailored according to the needs and goals of these personas, sometimes using different levels of access in order to meet the different needs and goals of the specific target groups. Research suggests that by using personas for the project communication and the software design process, a user-centred software product can be created. However, more research in specific user-centred design issues for cultural portals is necessary. How can the collection strategies of the different cultural portals and the participating institutions be harmonised on a national and European level? The major differences in the collection strategies are to collect either digital objects including the corresponding metadata or both metadata with and without corresponding digital objects. The consequences of these different strategies are far reaching as a portal with digital objects only will reduce the scope of a potential user to a limited amount of information while a portal which includes metadata without corresponding digital objects increases the scope considerably even if the materials might not be right at hand but collected in physical form from
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•
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various institutions. Apart from the portals’ strategies, one has to take into account the structure of the digital collections of the participating institutions and the inherent differences between the collections of libraries, archives, and museums. These differences will be irrelevant as soon as the physical materials are digitised and properly documented but beforehand various obstacles in perspective, structure, organisation, documentation, and materiality of the different collections have to be overcome. To reach this goal, a joint collection strategy is imperative. What will be the roles of cultural portals in the information society? The prospective roles of portals are still developing, especially their political and cultural functions and characters. With regard to this, one should be aware of the fact that cultural portals are not a neutral service, such as roads or public health, but always carry an agenda, sometimes hidden, sometimes not (Fisher, 2008, p. 147). What will a business model for cultural portals be like that provides both sustainability and open access? From a political perspective, access to cultural content in Europeana and the German Digital Library should be open and free of charge. At the same time, financial constraints might result in pressure to create revenue in order to provide the means for the maintenance of cultural portals. As soon as a national portal will start to create income from the content it holds, the content contributing institutions will ask for their fair shares or might even think of doing this business in their own responsibility and for their own profit. In this way, a severe conflict between the content contributors and the portal might arise. But the conflict might not only be about revenue but also about the content the institutions contribute as the
•
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national portal depends on the digitisation strategies of the contributing institutions and the attractiveness of and the demand for the contributed content, both aspects being as important prerequisites for sustainability as the business model. How can content be selected in a way that supports the role of a cultural portal? The problem of the portal is that the contributing institutions decide what to digitise. This can have far-reaching consequences: “Decisions on matters such as what to digitize or what to format into an online exhibit can have a life much longer than the decision-maker. It is therefore crucial that such decisions be made with a well-grounded understanding of what is actually being demanded by users”, as Gerry Wall points out (2003). Therefore, the national portal and the contributing institutions should develop a common national strategy to digitise primarily that kind of content that makes the portal attractive for a large audience. This might be contradictory to digitisation needs of individual institutions that might be forced to take action because of the decay of certain materials and therefore might have to postpone the digitisation of more important and/or attractive content. How will copyright issues of cultural content be dealt with? Often the various institutions have items in their collections where the state of copyright is not clear and/ or difficult to clarify. Nevertheless, these items are often digitised and put online because institutions are not aware of potential copyright problems. In order to avoid serious legal problems for contributing institutions, the national portals should try to arrange legal agreements with the relevant organisations that represent the interests of copyright holders. Such arrangements should cover all the content contributed to the national portal and as well the content
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displayed by the contributing institutions. This might be a difficult assignment but it is definitely worth the effort as it encourages institutions to contribute their content and feel both confident and legally protected in doing so. Currently both Europeana and BAM apply a so called “clean hands model”, i.e. they rely on the fact that each contributing institution holds the legal responsibility for all the content related copyright issues. This perspective might be reasonable and the only effective way from the portal’s point of view, but it might prevent smaller or more copyright-conscious institutions from contributing. How can cultural portals become and/or remain user-focused instead of collectionfocused? The major problem with digital collections is that they are often created according to the internal needs and organisational structures of the institution that are in charge of the physical collections. This means that digital collections are most often collection-focused instead of being user-focused. In order to meet the needs of the prospective users, archives, “libraries and museums should identify what people want, not just what they have to offer them. Ask not what wonderful things you can do for others, ask what others want from you. In other words, institutions should plan to make an enterprise user-focused, not collection-focused“ (Smith, 2003). This is an important issue for providing attractive cultural content that will be sought after by a prospective audience. Can cultural portals be open for user participation in a social web? In discussions about cultural content online, Web 2.0 is currently an important issue as user behaviour related to cultural content is changing (Finnis, 2008). The key question is how much cultural portals want and can open up for user participation as this process
is always related to a loss of control over their content (cf. the chapter on museums and Web 2.0 by Schweibenz in this book). It might be also a question of attitude on the side of different institutions’ staff; European cultural professionals seem to be reluctant to use or allow Web 2.0 applications (cf. Varbanova, 2008, p. 177). This list of questions will surely grow as cultural portals are more and more in use; there will also develop other research questions and directions as indicated in this section. However, it is important to start doing joint research both on a national level and on a European level in order to improve the services of cultural portals and increase their significance in the information society.
CONCLUSION With the advent of the European Digital Library Europeana the importance of national cultural portals is growing as they serve not only as single points of access on a national level but also as content aggregators for their countries. With the German Digital Library being still under construction, the BAM portal has taken over the role of the content aggregator in Germany until autumn of 2011, when the national portal is expected to go online. BAM currently holds almost 42 million data sets including 1.7 million digital objects. The collection strategy of BAM is – in contrast to Europeana – to gather both digital objects including the corresponding metadata and metadata without corresponding digital objects. The BAM portal collects, stores, indexes and makes searchable the metadata of the participating cultural institutions, while the media content is stored in the online databases of the institutions who keep full control over and responsibility for their digital materials and use BAM only as a gateway. To increase the visibility of its content on the Web, BAM coop-
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erates with Wikipedia Germany using a specific template that connects the encyclopaedia article’s web links section to a predefined query in BAM. BAM’s hosting institution, the BibliotheksserviceZentrum Baden-Württemberg, is partner in the network of competence for the German Digital Library and serves as content aggregator for the EU’s project ATHENA that brings together content owners from museums and other cultural institutions all over Europe.
REFERENCES Bangemann, M., Fonseca, E. C. D., Davis, P., Benedetti, C. D., Gyllenhammar, P., Hunsel, L., & Pierer, H. V. (1994). Europe and the global information society: Bangemann report - Recommendations to the European Council. Retrieved December 30, 2009, from http://ec.europa.eu/ idabc/servlets/Doc?id=18174 Cameron, F. (2001). Wired collections: The next generation. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(3), 309–315. doi:10.1016/S02604779(01)00052-8 Economou, M. (2008). A world of interactive exhibits. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums (pp. 137–156). New York: Routledge. Finnis, J. (2008). Turning cultural websites inside out: Changes in online user behaviour, Web 2.0 and the issues for the cultural sector. In Uzelac, A., & Cvjeticanin, B. (Eds.), Digital culture: The changing dynamics (pp. 151–165). Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for International Relations. Fischer, H. (2008). Ecology of the media and hyperhumanism. In Uzelac, A., & Cvjeticanin, B. (Eds.), Digital culture: The changing dynamics (pp. 143–149). Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for International Relations.
Hohn, L. A. (2001). Profiling the ALM sector. In M. Witt (Ed.), Archives, libraries and museums convergence. 24th Library systems seminar, Paris, 12-14 April 2000. European library automation group. (pp. 62-73). Paris: Cité des sciences et de l’industrie. Pascon, J. L. (1997). Developing a national strategy for multimedia cultural heritage. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 1997. Selected papers from the first international conference, Los Angeles, CA, March 16-19, 1997 (pp. 57-66) Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Schweibenz, W. (2008). Know thy visitors: Personas for visitor-centered museums. The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 1(2), 103–109. Schweibenz, W., & Sieglerschmidt, J. (2008). Curating digital heritage by MusIS – the SouthWestern German Museum Network. In Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Conference of CIDOC, Athens, September 15 – 18, 2008. Retrieved December 30, 2009, from http://www.cidoc2008.gr/ Smith, A. (2003). Issues in sustainability: Creating value for online users. First Monday [Online peer- reviewed journal], 8(5). Retrieved December 30, 2009, from http://firstmonday.org/ Varbanova, L. (2008). The online power of users and money: Can culture gain? In Uzelac, A., & Cvjeticanin, B. (Eds.), Digital culture: The changing dynamics (pp. 167–180). Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for International Relations. Wall, G. (2003). Business model issues in the development of digital cultural content. First Monday [Online peer- reviewed journal], 8(5). Retrieved December 30, 2009, from http://firstmonday.org/
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http://echo2.mpiwg- berlin.mpg.de/home. http://www.michael-culture.org. http://www.minervaeurope.org/. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/ activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm. http://www.bl.uk/collections/toppage.html. http://www.bundesarchiv.de/bestaende_ findmittel/bestaendeuebersicht/index_ frameset.html. http://gallica.bnf.fr/. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/ joconde/fr/apropos/presentation-joconde. htm. http://www.culturaitalia.it/pico/.
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http://www.europeana.eu. http://www.athenaeurope.org/. http://www.apenet.eu/. http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/. http://www.ddb.de/. http://www.bam-portal.de/. . http://museum.zib.de/museumdat/. http://dublincore.org/. ; http://www.ifla.org/publications/functionalrequirements -for-bibliographic-records. http://support.ddb.de/swd/listeNSW/index. htm. http://viaf.org/.
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Chapter 5
Intangible Heritage Management and Multimodal Navigation Gianluigi Ciocca Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Alessandro Colombo Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Raimondo Schettini Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Maria Teresa Artese Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy Isabella Gagliardi Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
ABSTRACT This chapter presents tools and methods which have been developed in order to manage and consult multimedia ethnographic archives for texts, images, audios (both music and speech), and videos. The system offers the user several retrieval strategies for querying the multimedia archive database by exploiting alphanumeric relational query, audio similarity query, clustering, and image and video similarity. Once a subset of information meeting the user’s needs has been identified, this can be displayed in a 3D virtual exhibition which can be visited interactively. The system presented is actually exploited to manage and multimodally navigate the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Italian Lombardy Region with some 18,000 oral documents, 3,000 textual transcriptions, 2,000 musical transcriptions, 5,000 MP3 audio files, 10,000 photos, and 500 videos. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch005 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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INTRODUCTION According to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Unesco (Unesco, 2003), the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) – or living heritage – is defined as the practices, representations, expressions, as well as the knowledge and skills, that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. The Convention states that the ICH is manifested, among others, in the following domains: 1. Oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; 2. Performing arts (such as traditional music, dance and theatre); 3. Social practices, rituals and festive events; 4. Knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; 5. Traditional craftsmanship. The Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Italian Lombardy Region (AESS) (AESS, 2009) (Renata Meazza, 2008) was founded to preserve, study, and enhance the value of documents and images of the life, social transformations, literature, oral history, material culture, and anthropic landscapes of the Lombard territory. The archive is composed of 18,000 oral documents, 3,000 textual transcriptions, 2,000 musical transcriptions, 5,000 audio files in MP3 format, and 10,000 photographic documents, that are related to photographs, and 500 videos. It is managed through a database which integrates the catalogue cards with multimedia objects of different types: audio files, images, digital videos, textual transcriptions, musical scores, etc. On-line museums and archives call for tools and methods to navigate their contents and to provide the facilities of the search, browsing, clustering and visualization of multimedia data.
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To support the search of information, digital archives generally employ three different retrieval modes, considered alternative, the alphanumeric relational query; the content-based query, exploiting automatically computed low-level image features (such as colour and texture); and the textual similarity query, exploiting any textual notations attached to database items (such as captions or textual cards…). The text-based approach, although effective for the expression of high-level features of the documents, may imply a considerable manual task in indexing and is clearly not suitable for the description of purely visual contents, such as texture, or contour or of audio content. On the other hand, the low-level features may not precisely model the user’s perception: for example the system’s inference of texture may be quite different from the user’s. Consequently all these indexes must be integrated to provide a complete and accurate description of the documents, and, since the objective of the user’s queries can not be defined in advance, it is evident that user feedback must be considered in the retrieval. In designing a system able to manage multimedia data, as in the case of the AESS database, these main problems have therefore to be addressed: • • • •
what navigation paradigms should be offered to the users? what information should be used for the retrieval purposes? how does the system evaluate the match between the query and the database items ? how can non-expert users interact with the system in an intuitive way ?
In this chapter we shall address all these issues together with the solution we propose and the tools and methods which have been developed and integrated into a single system, in order to manage and consult multimedia ethnographic archives. Our system is able to manage all the three types of retrieval modes to navigate the AESS ethno-
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graphic multimedia data: besides the standard textual query, we propose to compute similarities among images, by comparing the terms of their textual descriptions (QuickLink) (Gagliardi et al., 2001) (Gagliardi et al., 2001); similarities among images, by comparing significant visual features of an image against the features of the images contained in a database (QuickLook) (Ciocca et al., 1999b) (Ciocca et al., 2001b) and finally, similarities among audios, through the identification of shared acoustic features (AudioCluster) (Gagliardi et al., 2005). Clustering of audio documents as well as an automatically created 3D virtual gallery and guided tours are offered to the users. The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. After discussing related works to the presence of ethnographic museums and collections on the web, and the start-of-the-art of tools and methods for the management of multimedia information, we present the design of the AESS web site, from type of data, users, and aims to implementation. In the following section, the innovative technological instruments of research by similarity that have been developed and integrated into the system will be described in depth. Finally, we conclude the chapter with a discussion and the conclusion.
BACKGROUND In Internet a number of collections of ethnographic objects are made available with the purpose of making the contents of museums and other public or private organizations accessible to the general public. Among others consider (Sezione di Antropologia Museale, 2009) (Museo Etnografico dell’Alta Brianza, 2009) (Museo del lino, 2009) and (Museo Lombardo di Storia dell’Agricoltura, 2009). The museum itself is accurately reproduced with the opportunity for the user to virtually visit its rooms, showcases and bookshops. In this case the web site is the digitalized copy of an exist-
ing physical site, enriched by functionalities of search and navigation that can be more or less sophisticated. A less frequent way for ethnographic objects to be collected on the web is when they are not visible in museums or galleries, but are gathered and preserved in archives or libraries available only to experts and researchers of the domain. In particular, this is the case of archives of multimedia documents about samples of immaterial tradition, like dialects, popular music, social events, and usages. This patrimony is strongly interrelated and is continuously being updated, as is the case in our AESS, for which Internet represents an ideal container and exhibition window. The following ethnography web sites, for instance, appear to belong to the second type, though with different rates of interactivity. “Sardinia Digital Library” (Sardegna digital library, 2009) is the digital Library of the Italian Autonomous Region of Sardinia. The portal has been conceived to store the digital and multimedia contents regarding culture, history, literature, music, territory, environment and images of Sardinia, with the aim of exploiting its material and immaterial cultural heritage, composed of movies, music, visual arts, audio archives. The user can browse the site to find images, video, audio and texts, or query the database in a simple way. Each document has a brief textual description, authors, ancillary information, tags and the multimedia file. Related resources are associated. “American Memory” of the Library of Congress (America Memory, 2009) provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken texts, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. In the “American Memory” data come from different collections, from African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920” to “Coca-Cola Advertising”, from “September 11, 2001, and Public Reactions” to “Panoramic Photographs”. The user can browse
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the collections by topic, by time period, by media type or place, or search a specific collection or all the collections, thus retrieving documents with a description and other information. Each collection has a specific graphic interface, different colours, commands, etc., while maintaining the same framework. Other audio and multimedia archives (East Midlands Oral History, 2009) (Archivi della Democrazia Cristiana, 2009) are present on the web in which the user retrieves documents on the basis of textual keywords, but no system is available on the Internet which can index, retrieve and navigate multimedia data in a complex and integrated way. Liew (2004) made a survey on the characteristics of the online cultural heritage exhibitions and their Information Retrieval features, especially objectives, purposes, content and searching/ browsing facilities. While many of the museums, libraries and archives offer Information Retrieval tools with Boolean and proximity searches on textual keywords, images and other multimedia data, if any, they are not treated for retrieval purposes. MultimediaN E-Culture project (Schreiber, 2008) uses semantic annotations to enrich and make more powerful searches in knowledge-rich environments such as cultural-heritage ones. They have noted that the users tend to prefer keywordbased searches, but also faceted searches and relation searches have been explored. Digital London (Shoemaker, 2005) describes problems, difficulties, both conceptual and technical, and new opportunities coming from the development of an interlinked collection of web-based digitalized sources on eighteenth century London; using XML markup. Further work is necessary to allow users to search and display results when working with multiple sources. The issue of integrating terms and keywords coming from different sources into a single dictionary or taxonomy is exploited in Chaudry et al. (2005); which describes the methodology used
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to develop a taxonomy in the integrated museum and archive system in Singapore. Some systems offer specific solutions to specialized problems. Lazarinis (2009) has developed a tool which can to effectively search images in e-organizations and present high-quality images with zoom facilities. Bonfigli et al (2003) proposes a Web-based application that enables virtual visits to access cultural information tailored on the basis of user profiles and devices. It also permits one group to build up virtual visits that can be viewed by different people interested in the same subject. A lot of work has been devoted to the analysis of the behaviour of users seeking information in the digital museum context. Skov (2008) points out 4 different user needs ranging from exploration, characterized by high recall and low precision, to the identification of a known element, characterized by high precision. In Amin (2008), the purpose of the study is to understand the search behaviour of cultural heritage experts: that is to compare, relate and combine pieces of information. Current search tools are inadequate for their expectations. The hypertext paradigm and the huge amount of collections of large on-line textual documents has led to the study and implementation of fully or partially automated techniques for the construction of links (Wilkinson, 1999), which constitute the basis of our QuickLink. A few pioneers began research in this field before hypermedia applications became as widespread as they are today, starting from cases in which the source information was already well structured, so that converting text into a hypertext is relatively easy: The work of Frisse (1988) converted a medical handbook, using the hierarchical structure. In 1997 the authoritative journal IP&M published a monographic issue on the subject. Salton et al. (1997) proposed a technique that can be used to create links between text segments and to practically construct a hypertext at retrieval time. They had to deal with the problem of identifying internally consistent fragments from
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available texts and used a graph representation to show the results. Agosti & Crestani (1997) have proposed a design methodology for the automatic generation of an IR hypertext, starting from a collection of multimedia documents and using well established IR techniques. Tudhope (1997) has designed a semantic hypermedia architecture, in which the semantic similarity of information units forms the basis for the automatic construction of links integrated into hypermedia navigation. As far as audio documents, in the IR environment a great number of studies have been devoted to the delineation of those acoustic features (melody, timbre, rhythm, tonality, …) that can best identify a piece and therefore act as effective search keys (Eggink, 2004) (Aucouturier et al., 2004) (McKinney et al, 2004) (Pauws, 2004) (Essid, 2004). Methods and algorithms have then been studied for the extraction and classification of data according to these features (Basili et al, 2004). Finally, the development of systems for the integration of these methodologies in the web environment, with the aim to offer users results which more fully meet their requests, is an issue of major interest (Knopke, 2004). The clustering problem for audio documents has been addressed in many contexts by researchers in many disciplines: different clustering techniques have been studied (Jain, 1999) (Fraley et al., 1998) and compared (Steinbach et al., 2000), A few practical applications have been developed, as, BIRCH (Zhang et al., 1996) and CURE (Guha et al., 1998), which propose two algorithms to clustering data from large databases. The need to retrieve visual information from large image and video collections is shared by many application domains, and a wide variety of content-based retrieval methods and systems can be found in the literature (Aigrain et al., 1996) (Rui et al., 1999) (Gudivada et al.,1997) (Del Bimbo A., 1999) (Lew et al., 2006). Their capability as
general purpose systems is, however, in large part limited by the a-priori definition and setting of: 1. the user’s aims, which may be broadly classified as: a) target search: the user knows exactly what image he is looking for, b) similarity search: the user wants to retrieve all the images resembling an example, c) and category search: the user aims to retrieve an image representative of a specific class; 2. the set of features (visual or textual) used for image indexing; 3. the similarity metric adopted; 4. the way in which the user may interact with the system in order to express his/her information needs. In Tsai (2006) a survey of the retrieval methods in digital cultural heritage libraries based on the perspective of image retrieval is provided, whose retrieval strategies for users can be: query by example, query by specification, browsing, relevance feedback and keyword-based queries. Current methods usually provide QBE, browsing and keyword based queries. The paper concludes claiming that “generally speaking it would be very useful for users if all the above-mentioned retrieval methods could be provided.” To the best of our knowledge, no system is available in which methods or tools are able to find similar objects, or the data structure is complex enough to perform the circularity of data.
THE AESS SITE The AESS site has been designed and implemented keeping in mind that a design methodology is a crucial element in the creation of efficient and effective web sites. In our case, for example:
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•
•
•
it was essential to ensure a capillary communication among the different competences involved: designers, computer scientists, end users, domain experts, Lombardy Region staff, and so on; the amount of data handled is huge and constantly increasing; it may require finer and more selective modalities of querying and visualizing; some types of data are interrelated. Strategies have been already implemented for their integration, both in querying and visualizing, but still others might have to be provided in the future.
Over the years a number of methods have been proposed for the development of hypermedia (the hypermedia paradigm is based on the idea of organizing information as chunks freely browsable by users selecting links and making use of other advanced navigation tools, such as indexes or maps) and web applications, from RMM (Isakowitz et al., 1995) (and its extension) (Isakowitz et al., 1998) to ADM (Diaz et al., 2005), including OOHDM (Schwabe et al., 1998) (Schwabe et al., 1999), HDM (Garzotto et al., 1993), and WebML (Ceri et al., 2000). A detailed discussion of these methodologies is beyond the scope of the chapter. The following steps, rather general and common to all methodologies, have been adopted: 1. Requirements analysis: is the process of detecting what are the data involved, the aims of the systems, and the types of users. 2. Data design: is the process of producing a detailed data model of the data involved in the system. Usually they are managed through an underlined database; therefore E-R or UML models are adopted. 3. Navigation design: is the process of individuating the paths that will enable hypermedia or web navigation. 4. User interface design: is the design of the interfaces with the focus on the user’s ex-
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perience and interaction. The goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible. 5. Implementation: is the realization of the application. Here, only some general information are given.
REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS: DATA, USERS AND AIMS Types of Information The archive of the AESS web site stores information concerning the oral history of the Lombardy region: the data concern mainly popular songs and other audio records describing the popular traditions handed down from generation to generation, such as traditional fairs and customs. Songs, interviews, ballads, dances, how-todo knowledge represent the core of information (items) collected by the Archive Of Ethnography and Social History: at the beginning in the ’70s the items were gathered up analogically, mainly in audio format, as songs or interviews, with some pictures and videos representing the occasions in which the audios were recorded. Now the data are recorded as digital files, as video mpeg4 or audio mp3.
Users and Aims Four main kinds of users have been identified: •
•
Lombardy Region staff: directors and technicians, who have specific competences and requirements of their own work: dataentry and updating, data quality control, etc.; professional users: experts, ethnographers, and art historians who need a simplified interface in order to query the system for their activities of study and research, but
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•
•
are accustomed to the specific terms used in the cards; educators and teachers: who need a friendly and attractive interface to make local history and tradition also known to schools and young people; generic users without any competence in ethnography nor in browsing the web, who therefore require a further simplified query interface to satisfy their amateurish interest and curiosity.
Data Design Four different types of information, which can be indexed, searched and retrieved in each query session, have been identified: 1. oral documents: these form the kernel of the archive and consist of catalogue cards each describing an item by title, author, date, incipit, metric, some keywords taken
from a dictionary, coupled with audio files, and also textual and musical (pentagram) transcription; 2. supports: physical devices (books, discs, CDs, etc.) on which the document is available (printed, recorded, etc.); 3. events: occasions in which audio documents have been recorded or photographs taken; 4. images: photographs or videos representing events or occasions during which audios have been recorded (performed as songs, recorded as interviews, etc.). In Figure 1, the schema represents the data and the relationships among different types of data that are both structural and associative links. In structuring the archive a number of issues and problems has been faced, due to its complexity. First of all, because of (from the type of data point of view)
Figure 1. AESS data and their relationships
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•
•
its multimedia characteristics (about 50,000 documents, what with images, texts, scores, audios, videos) the heterogeneity of media that support information (magnetic tapes, audiocassettes, CDs, DATs, digital files, negative plates, films, positive prints, slides, super8s and 16mms, DVDs, books, letters, …). And (from the semantic content point of view):
• •
the variety of both the genres (songs, rhymes, ballades, interviews, portraits, …) themes (games, tools, landscapes, works, ….).
However, the greatest complexity derives from the relationship between documents and their physical supports, precisely from the existence of several versions of the same document, for example the same song performed with little local variants, the presence of the same document on different supports; for example, the same image in negative and on file, fragments of the same document on different supports; for example, a part of an interview on a CD and another part on another one.
Multimodal Navigation and Retrieval (Navigation Design) The application of our methods to the AESS on the web has called for the addition of modes of navigation that can meet the needs of a large number of users, many of whom are not specialists in the field. The design of the web site provides facilities that allow all users to query the database successfully, even if they are not expert in the field, or are unfamiliar with the database contents or with the language in which database terms are expressed. Multimodal (that is multiple modes differentiated both for the complexity of the search on multimedia data and for the scope/deepness of
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the interaction) means of navigation and retrieval have been designed and implemented. The web site offers a standard retrieval interface, the yield is more immediate for a user using a simple but powerful interface (below follows a more detailed description), that allows differentiate searches on the different cards, where query fields have been chosen by the ethnographical experts of the Lombardy Region. To allow more sophisticated navigation on the multimedia data and to find documents like the one the user is interested in, four different kinds of modes are offered: •
•
•
•
similarity-based textual description: once the user has obtained a document, in response to a query, he can apply the “similarity link” algorithm to retrieve the most similar objects according to their description; similarity image retrieval: the user can perform a similarity search in order to retrieve images which are similar in pictorial content; similarity audio retrieval: the user can navigate among the most similar audio documents according to their acoustic similarity; clusters of audio files: the user can choose among the available audio files, clustered by the algorithm defined below.
The user can navigate the archive through different interfaces, designed to allow the different users to interact with the system, described here in increasing order of interaction with the system: •
•
Catalogue: it displays the whole content of the archive, allowing the navigation among the four types of information (oral documents, supports, events, and images). Guided search: it provides the users with a predefined query such as “Carnevale di Bagolino” (Carnival at the village of
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•
•
Bagolino) or “Music of the Four Provinces” with a brief explanation. See below for further details. Figure 2 shows the “Carnevale di Bagolino” guided search starting page, in which, besides a brief description, the documents, supports and images related to the events are computed and ready to be browsed. Simple search: it supplies a simplified query interface in which the user is required to specify what, who, how and where to retrieve information from the archive. In Figure 3 its interface: the user can type in terms or choose one from a list real-time computed, by querying the database. If he wants only documents with audio files, he has to check the corresponding button. Advanced search: made up of four query forms, each one for a specified information type, it allows querying separately each type of information. By filling a field of a form (e.g. “support”), all the devices satisfying the query will be returned.
•
Specialized search: a container of innovative search tools. At the moment it contains cluster audio functionality.
For all types of interaction, the result is composed of the list of documents satisfying the query, grouped by type (Oral Documents, Images, Support and Events). For oral documents, three icons can be displayed aside of the document: the presence of the audio file, of the transcription and of the pentagram. The user can therefore enjoy multimedia files, directly from the results list. For images, the results are presented either as a list, or in thumbnail form, in rows of five icons. In Figure 4 the images retrieved by the “carnevale di Bagolino” guided search are shown. By clicking on a document, its card is shown in more details. When the user reaches an oral document card, he can not only read the catalogue details of the described item, but also, if available, listen to the associated audio file or visualize its text and score. In addition, audio documents with similar audio, if any, are suggested (in Figure 5
Figure 2. “Carnevale di Bagolino” guided search
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Figure 3. Simple search form
an example). Analogously, from an image card it is possible to gain access to visually similar images (similarity image retrieval algorithm) and/ or to images with a similar catalogue card (similarity-based textual description), and also, when
known, to the occasion when the image was taken. Starting from an oral document, the supports on which it is stored, as well as the events in which it has been recorded, and the images collected are
Figure 4. Images retrieved by “Carnevale di Bagolino” guided search
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Figure 5. Audio document card
available in the bottom of the card, with a show/ hide mechanism. In a similar way, cards have links to each other, thus performing the relationship among data, shown in Figure 1. In the web site, related to the themes of the Guided search, two guided tours -“Piffero” (Pipe or Fife) and “Canto narrativo” (Narrative Songs) have been completed, while two ones more, about rituality and folk performance, are to be added soon. These guided tours are illustrated with a selection of songs, performances, interviews, video clips, etc., recorded or gathered in North Italy, that the user can listen to, read, and compare in order to completely enjoy their content. In particular, apropos of the “Piffero”, the musical history of a few territories is presented together with the stories of instruments and players who are representative of extraordinary musical traditions. Pipe repertoires and related documents are of great relevance not only locally: they constitute a rare example of a unique ethnomusic heritage. As far as “Narrative Songs”, known also as ballads, they are one of most widespread genres of the European ethnomusical tradition. A selection of ten songs, gathered and recorded in North Italy, is proposed: these songs are offered to listening and readings and are accompanied by translations from dialects to Italian, and by formal and content analyses.
Other features include the automatic analyses and summarization of video sequences (according to their visual contents) into still images; and the semi-automatic generation of three-dimensional virtual environments using VRML in which digital items can be placed, displayed, and visited. In Figure 6 the AESS multimodal navigation and retrieval is shown. The user, from the home page, can either search the database (1) or deepen his knowledge of ethnographic themes through the guided tours (2). In the first case he has to choose among the different interfaces: guided search (3), simple search (4) or advanced search (5). Whatever choice he performs, the results are presented as a list or in thumbnail form (6). By clicking on an element, its detailed card is showed (7). At the bottom of the cards links to other documents are present through structural or associative links (8).
User Interface Design The first requisite considered in designing the interface of the AESS web site was usability, defined according to the ISO standard 9241, as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use“. To implement a functional, efficient and
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Figure 6. AESS web site structure
effective web site, we have used a quality model in the design phase, so that we could evaluate the site quality in a structured way, applying six fundamental criteria and taking into account the scope, users and context of use of the site. Content: Is the site information content adequate to its objective? Is the information relevant? Complete? Reliable? Updated? Functionality: Are the site functionalities adequate to its objective? Does the site function correctly? Management: Is the site correctly managed? Communication: Is the aim of the site immediately comprehensible when one looks at its homepage? Does the site communicate correctly 96
the brand name of the organization? Is the communication style consistent with the aim of the site? Usability: Is the site usable? Accessibility: Is the site easily accessible? Are the system’s access performances satisfactory? Is the site easily reached by the most common search engine? Is it adequately referenced by other sites? Is the URL easy to remember? Is the site independent from the browser? Is it accessible to disabled users? The above criteria have been applied during the interface design phase. Since all the pages, as well as also the navigation modes, had been accurately designed, the interface design was quite straightforward. We
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shall not describe the details here we list only the main features provided: • •
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a visual index in the contents page, with intuitive images of the object typologies; system feedback on each action of the user, both on the “mouse over” and on “click over”. The feedback can be visual (the button changes colour), or textual (a brief description is displayed); a visual “breadcrumb” in the navigation bar at the bottom of the page.
These criteria were applied both when designing the interface and when assessing the implemented web site. The main W3C guidelines have been followed to ensure good accessibility (W3C, 1999) (W3C, 2008).
Implementation The AESS archive has been structured logically and physically so that the macro functionalities (presentation, audio and image similarities computation, multimedia streaming, etc…) are managed by a dedicated server. Figure 7 shows the structure of the AESS archive. Each server has its own specific configuration of hardware and software. The hardware ranges from high performance servers to high-end consumer computers with Unix-like and Windows operating systems. The public entry point is the AESS web server that both collects and assembles information from the other servers or forwards requests to the appropriate server, (e.g. to perform audio similarity search). The Web server is based on Oracle IAS 9.2, an integrated, standards-based software platform. The heart of the Oracle Application Server consists of Oracle HTTP Server (based on Apache HTTP Server) and OC4J (OracleAS Containers for Java EE) which deploys Java EE-based applications. The DBMS server manages most of the AESS data and contains references to other related media (e.g. videos). It
is based on a Linux system and Oracle technologies. The database procedures are implemented via the native Oracle language PL/SQL. The role of the stream server is to manage the multimedia data: audio and video. User requests are transparently forwarded by the Web server to the stream server. It also performs audio analysis and similarity based audio retrieval. Queries based on image similarity are managed by the image similarity server. This server host the QuickLook image retrieval system that has been adapted to interface with the AESS Web server. The system is composed of a private database containing the image descriptors used in the evaluation of the image similarities and by a set of front-end applications that are used to perform all the image retrieval and management tasks. As in the case of the stream server, the AESS Web server acts as a mediator between the user and the QuickLook image similarity system. The image similarity server has been developed using different technologies: C++, PHP, C#, ASP. The management server is the administrative entry point to the AESS archive. Admin-related actions (insert new data, add a new image, etc...) are performed using a protected connection with the other private servers. Another role of the management server is to assure that all the database entries are synchronized among the servers. For example, when an image Figure 7. Structure of the AESS archive
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is added to the main database, it is also included in the image similarity server database, and the two entries are linked together.
TOOLS AND METHODS IN THE AESS SITE In this section we will describe in depth the contentbased retrieval methods that have been integrated in the AESS web site, giving some technical details in the Information Retrieval context.
Similarity-Based Textual Description Audio, video and images are often accompanied by a textual description of their semantic contents. The items can be retrieved by assigning them a value of decreasing similarity to a given query item, calculated on the basis of their descriptive texts, generally brief and relatively homogeneous in form and content, as the cards of an art catalogue usually are. When this similarity is found, the texts are connected by a link of the associative type. The similarity model used is the conceptual “contrast” type, which considers similarity an intersecting of features, in this case, of terms. The basic idea is that the presence of terms common to two different cards indicates that these can be considered similar to each other. The possible links thus identified are a function of the number of terms present in the two cards and have a “strength” of (0,1). Precisely, the similarity between two texts is defined by the number of terms in common in proportion to the total number of terms on the two cards. This model clearly suggested the use of Salton’s well known formula (Salton, 1989, pag. 122) (Salton et al., 1997) to which weights could be added: simi, j =
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2(witermi ∩ w j term j ) witermi ∪ w j term j
where wi is the weight associated with the termi throughout the catalogue, as we shall explain below, and simi,j can assume any value in the range of [0-1]. The greater the value of simi,j, the greater the similarity is between the two textual annotations. The results depend, obviously, on the terms chosen for comparison. Our system, designed for general use, can utilize either automatically or manually created dictionaries. In the former case they include all the terms present in the textual annotations (except those on a standard Italian stop list, containing terms, such as articles or adverbs, that are “poor discriminators”, too frequent to be significant). No stemming procedure is applied, as no satisfactory algorithm is available for the Italian language. Most of the morphological variations (singular/plural, feminine/masculine,...) are, however, uniformly handled (Lazarinis, 2008), (Lazarinis et al., 2008). In the latter case, the dictionaries are created manually by experts in the domain, who indicate the most significant terms according to the applied criteria (Gagliardi et al., 2001). We advise the use of a controlled dictionary of the terms present in the annotations, if available. A weight can be assigned automatically to each term considering the importance of the term in the domain, or in the collection, regardless of its frequency (Gagliardi et al., 1999). The value of the weights may vary from 0 to 1, with a granularity to be agreed on, on the basis of the archive dimension and variety. A further procedure was designed to allow the user to assign a greater/lesser weight to some terms (or categories of terms) at query time, in order to express his specific interest.
Relevance Feedback After a query, when the system presents the retrieved items, the user is allowed to progressively refine his response by applying the mechanism
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of relevance feedback (Ciocca et al., 1999) to indicate the pertinence or non-pertinence of the items. The user selects one or more of the items retrieved by the system to serve as positive or negative examples. Following the user’s choices, the system temporarily increases or diminishes the weights of the involved terms, and then reapplies the similarity algorithm. To do so the system constructs an “ideal query”, the terms of which are the union of the terms of the positive examples, with their weights modified as follows (Gagliardi et al., 2001b): •
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the weights of terms common to the positive examples are increased by as many degrees as the times they occur, up to a maximum of 1; the weights of terms common to positive and negative examples are decreased by as many degrees as the times they occur, down to a minimum weight of 0.
The weights of terms found only in one positive example remain unchanged. Moreover, a double change may leave the weights of the involved terms unvaried. Summarizing, the user works only on the objects, the system only on the text. From the user’s point of view, this approach overcomes the linguistic barriers of both sector terminology and language particular of the database, an even more significant advantage in the case of a minority language, such as Italian. From the point of view of the system, a text-based search guarantees a good semantics (conceptual similarity) in the results which is particularly desirable in the case of artworks, and an objective which can not be achieved with a content-based search which considers only low level perceptual features, such as colour or shape (perceptual similarity) (Cacciari, 1995).
Similar Audio Retrieval The availability of larger and larger collections of audio documents in digital format and the technological possibilities offered over the net have inspired some researchers to develop technologies for processing vocal and musical data, creating models of auditory perception, and inventing methods to analyze, represent and synthesize audio signals and their characteristics. Typically, the analysis of sound is based on the calculation of vectors of the characteristics that describe its spectral content. In our system, designed to retrieve audio files similar to a given one chosen as query, we have used the Audio Information Retrieval TreeQ (Foote, 1999), implemented by Jonathan T. Foote of the Institute of Systems Science, at the National University of Singapore (Foote, 1999a), to compute the audio similarity. In this system, every audio file is represented by a histogram, derived from a quantization tree built to maximize the information among all the files in the search set (Figure 8). These histograms can be considered vectors; therefore, the acoustic similarity index between two files is estimated computing the distance cosine between the related vectors: the closer the index is to 1, the more the two file are similar in their acoustic features. Once the histograms have been computed, they can be used as a compact representation of the audio source. Similar audios will have similar histograms, and a distance measure between these can be used to classify and rank the audios according to their similarity. This system can also be used as a search engine for audios. Given one or more examples to use as query, the system can grade, by similarity, all the audios in the database to produce a ranked list like that composed by a conventional text search engine (Gagliardi et al, 2005).
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Figure 8. The TreeQ method
The main steps of the procedure are: •
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First, each audio waveform is processed into a spectral representation and stored in the data files. The next step is to “quantize” each vector using a quantization tree computed by TreeQ. This recursively divides the vector space into bins, each of which corresponds to a leaf of the tree. TreeQ constructs a quantization tree from training data so that different kinds of audio will tend to wind up in different bins. Once the tree has been constructed, it can be used to quantize input data. Any input vector will fall into one and only one bin. Given any input data, the distribution of the vectors in the various bins characterizes that data. For each input file, the sum of the vectors collected in each bin yields
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a histogram file that is used in the distance measure. The distance measure between audio files can be any measure, such as for example, the simple Euclidean distance between their corresponding templates (or rather 1 minus the distance, so that closer files have larger scores). Once the scores have been computed for each audio clip, they are sorted by magnitude to produce a ranked list, using a threshold to limit the retrieval to only the most similar audio files (Figure 9).
Then we performed an evaluation experiment where 8 typical users and 3 ethnomusicians tested the effectiveness of the retrieval algorithm by assigning similarity ranking to the top 5 (if any) retrieved pieces. Despite the different competences, the subjects evaluated the similarities
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in a consistent manner, with a tendency of the musicians to make subtler distinctions. The experiment showed that the algorithm is considerably effective in terms of precision, having the overall precision of 83.66. We computed the similarity between all the possible couples of documents in the AESS database and stored the meaningful results (that is, all the couples with a similarity index greater than 0.8) in a table of the database. When a user, applying any type of consultation selected, reaches the information card of any oral document, links to possible similar documents from the acoustic point of view are also shown. Figures 9 and 10 shows an audio item with its “acoustically similar” documents: in Figure 9 the list is closed, while in Figure 10 it is open.
Audio Clustering The AESS web site also implements the functionality of audio clustering, supplying information about the similarity of files in a general manner that is not referred to a particular file. A cluster can be simply defined as a group of similar objects and the implemented algorithm summarized in a few words: given n vectors, the algorithm divides them into K groups, or clusters, so that the vectors belonging to the same cluster
are more similar to each other than to vectors belonging to the other clusters (Jain et al., 1988). As in the traditional clustering processes, the division of the vectors is reiterated until certain conditions are satisfied; in our case the process is interrupted when, inside each cluster, the similarity index among all the possible couples of vectors is greater than a threshold empirically set at 0.8. According to this criterion, we have developed an algorithm that computes a first clustering which assigns all the vectors to n different groups, then controls if each obtained cluster is acceptable: if not, the cluster is divided in two sub-clusters and a new clustering is computed on those vectors that have been assigned to the divided cluster, using as new centroids the two vectors with the lowest index of similarity. Once all the clusters satisfy the evaluation criterion, the algorithm estimates whether it is possible to group together two or more different clusters to produce a new cluster that still satisfies the evaluation criterion. In particular, the clustering is computed by assigning each file to the cluster identified by the centroid to which it has resulted most similar, by calculating the barycenter of each cluster and then by computing the similarity index between the barycenter and the centroid: if this index is equal to 1 the process ends; otherwise the barycenter is set as the new centroid and the process is reiterated from the beginning.
Figure 9. Card of an audio document with the indication of “acoustically similar” documents
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Figure 10. The same card, with the oral documents shown
In this manner, the number of clusters increases and decreases during the process, adjusting to the nature of the data. The final number of clusters is not influenced by the initial one, although the initial number influences the speed of the algorithm. The speed is also affected by the quality of the first clustering. To guarantee that the initial clustering is good enough, the choice of the initial centroids is fundamental: these are selected randomly, on the sole condition that they not be too similar (their similarity index must not exceed a suitable threshold), in order to “cover” the whole vectorial space in the most uniform way. An initial clustering starting from centroids selected in this way assures a lower number of successive partitions and re-joinings. The implemented algorithm has produced satisfactory results: a high discrimination power among the different audio types has been shown, while each cluster contains only similar objects. Moreover, the clustering obtained is sufficiently stable. The major problem of clustering algorithms is, in fact, that they are completely 102
dependent on the selection of the initial centroids. Our algorithm too is affected by this selection, but the possibility of varying the number of clusters allows us to curtail that dependence drastically, rendering the solution more reliable and stable. The result of the clustering is saved in a database table, and can be viewed from the web site (Figure 11) by selecting “Specialized search” and then “Cluster Audio”. Finally, when the user selects one of the table cells corresponding to the clusters (colored with increasing intensity, according to the number of audios in each cluster) a new page is displayed with the data related to the audio files in the selected cell. Although clusters composed of only one file are not shown, this does not necessarily mean that the audios contained in those clusters have no similar documents in the archive. Given the non-transitivity of the distance cosine, it is possible that an audio A, even if similar to audio B, will not be found in the same cluster, because a third audio C, similar to B, but not to A, belongs to that cluster (and A and C, not being similar, can-
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Figure 11. Audio cluster
not be included in the same cluster). But the card for audio B will list both A and C as similar to B.
SIMILARITY-BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL TOOLS The similarity image retrieval module is based on the QuickLook image retrieval system (Ciocca et al., 2001b). The QuickLook system combines within a single framework the capabilities of alphanumeric relational query, the content-based image and video query exploit automatically computed image features, and the textual similarity query using any textual annotations attached to database items (such as figure and video captions). The system offers the user several retrieval strategies for querying the database. He can then progressively refine the system’s response by indicating the relevance, or non-relevance of the items retrieved. Its framework can be adapted to support different image categories and tasks (Ciocca et al., 2001c). Its functionalities are continuously extended and updated with new features.
Similarity-based image retrieval can be accomplished using pictorial attributes and (if available) textual annotations both referring to the image content. A generic query may be composed of visual and/or textual parts (sub-queries). During the retrieval phase, each sub-query is processed separately, and then the results are combined with a similarity function to obtain a final score. The images are then ranked according to this score. If the user is not satisfied by the system’s response, he can refine the search, modifying the query with examples of what is relevant or non-relevant to what he is looking for. The similarity function is dynamically adapted to the query by a relevance feedback mechanism (Ciocca, 1999) that modifies the similarity function used to evaluate the images. The pictorial and textual contents allow the user to submit a number of different kinds of queries, as in the following examples.
Query by Pictorial Examples The user selects one or more relevant (or nonrelevant) images, focusing on pictorial attributes,
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from the system’s display. The pictorial indices of the selected images are used to retrieve similar images in the database. Images are indexed in the database via pictorial indices automatically extracted from the images themselves. These indices are composed of visual features referring to the visual content of images. Examples are colour, texture, shape, spatial relationship, and combinations of these. This type of information is very difficult to define and index using natural language: it requires the design of algorithms that extract suitable surrogates of the visual features from the images; these surrogates can then be processed automatically. The visual indices are stored in the database as numerical vectors. When the user selects one or more images to be used as query, a query processing algorithm formulates a new query that better represents the images of interest to the user, taking into account the visual features of the relevant images, without allowing one different feature value to bias query computation. The resultant query is then used to retrieve similar images by comparing the pictorial indices of the images in the database. Two pictorial indices are compared by computing a similarity distance for each pair of corresponding features (each feature has its own evaluation function), and then combining the normalized distances in a final score. The final score is a weighted sum of the single distances. The weights are computed by a relevance feedback mechanism based on one or more images selected by the user. The key concept of the relevance feedback mechanism is that the statistical analysis of the image feature distributions of the images the user has judged relevant, or not relevant for its query, can be used to determine what visual features the user has taken into account (and to what extent) in formulating this judgment, and then accentuate the influence of these features in the overall evaluation of image similarity, as well as in the formulation of a new query. The structure of the relevance feedback mechanism is entirely description-independent,
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that is, the index can be modified, or extended to include other features without requiring any change in the algorithm. Since comparing an image query Q with every image I in the database is a time-consuming task, we have implemented a method for filtering the database before the pictorial distances are actually computed. This method is based on a variant of triangle inequality (Berman et al., 1999) and has the advantage of being applicable to any distance measure that satisfies triangle inequality.
Query by Textual Examples Image textual annotations can also be exploited. The user can select one or more relevant (or non relevant) objects, indirectly focusing on the underlying textual description attributes, from the system’s display. The textual descriptions are used to retrieve images with similar textual content in a manner similar to the text-based similarity retrieval described above.
Query by Composite Examples The user can select one or more relevant (or nonrelevant) images as a composite entity. All available information, visual and textual, is exploited in the retrieval process using the approaches described above. Composite pictorial and textual examples allow the user to perform multimodal similarity image retrieval. Although within the AESS archive image similarity is computed using only pictorial features, the relevance feedback mechanism and the query formulation algorithm can be also applied to textual descriptions: words found in relevant texts are added together to increase the weights associated with each word according to their relative frequencies in the texts; instead, words present in both relevant and non relevant texts are discarded. Figure 12 shows the logical schema of the image-based similarity retrieval. The relevance
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Figure 12. Graphical representation of the image similarity retrieval approach. From the previous system response, the user submits his new query to the system, and the system iteratively refines the result
feedback mechanism is depicted as the user in the processing loop refines the previous results retrieved by the system by providing more examples, both in the form of image and (possibly) textual examples. The representative query and the similarity function are updated accordingly. Figures 13a-13b shows an example of image similarity retrieval which exploits the relevance feedback mechanism. The user starts by selecting an image card and then by clicking on the “Search similar images” link. The system provides an initial ranking of the images in the database start-
ing from the most pictorially similar. The user can then use the interface to select the images that are really similar to the initial one (positive examples), and the images that are not similar (negative examples), and resubmit the query. The system updates the query and the similarity function and returns a refined ranking. The user can iterate through this process until the result is considered satisfactory. From this interface the user can open the image cards and start another image similarity search.
Figure 13. a). Initial image similarity result b). Refined image similarity result
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VIDEO ANALYSIS AND SUMMARIZATION TOOLS
Segmentation of the Video in Elementary Units
Video sequences are analyzed and summarized (according to their visual contents) into still images. On these images, the same retrieval strategies developed for images can be applied to retrieve video sequences. The still images chosen to represent the video content are called key-frames. Automatic video analysis and indexing is a complex process that involves different tasks (Dimitrova et al., 2002). A schema of the analysis tasks is shown in Figure 14.
In the current implementation we segment the video into shots (a continuous sequence of frames taken over a short period of time) by detecting abrupt changes and fades between them, since these are more common than other editing effects. For abrupt changes we have implemented a threshold-based algorithm coupled with a frame difference measure computed from histograms and textures descriptors. To detect fades we have implemented a modified version of the algorithm proposed by Fernando et al. (2000). Results obtained by these algorithms are submitted for evaluation to a decision module which gives the final response. This allows us to cope with conflicting results, or with groups of frames that are not meaningful, such as those between the end of a fade-out and the start of a fade-in, increasing the robustness of the detection phase. A gradual transition detection algorithm is currently being developed, and it will be integrated in a similar manner.
Definition of the Representation of Visual Contents Video indexing must capture the spatio-temporal contents of the video in a compact way. In order to do so, the first step in video indexing is the definition of a suitable representation of the visual content (i.e. a suitable representation for the video frames). We have decided to work on uncompressed data instead of compressed data in order to have access to the algorithms developed for image indexing, such as histograms, texture representations or content layouts, and to be able to choose those most suitable to our purposes from among them. To compensate for the timeconsuming step of video decoding, we apply the indexing algorithm on spatially sampled frames.
Summarization of the Video Our summarization system dynamically selects representative frames from the shots by analysing the complexity of the events presented and by discarding redundant information (Ciocca et al.,
Figure 14. The video analysis and summarization tasks
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2006). We use a measure of the cumulative visual content change between two consecutive frames within the shot to measure the complexity. The values obtained describe how the frames change over the entire shot, high slopes indicate significant changes in the visual content, which for the most part can be attributed to moving objects, the movement of the camera itself, or highly dynamic events. These cases are considered “interesting event points” which must be included in the final shot summary. An example of visual summary from a video sequence is shown in Figure 15a. The original video is a MPEG-4 sequence 30 minutes and 30 seconds long, composed of 45,753 frames (384x288 pixels at 25fps). The video is part of the AESS video archive, and is an excerpt from a documentary on the “Summer White Carnival” at Cegni, a village in the North of Italy, showing
a festival in progress, and a participant preparing for the traditional Carnival masquerade.
Summary Post-Processing The set of frames in the summary can be further processed (Ciocca et al., 2006b). The summary may contain frames that are not significant because they are without sufficient information (very dark or blurred), duplicates of frames because of false recognition of the shot or low-quality video filming. Therefore it is necessary to proceed to a phase of removing this type of frames. In cases where the summary contains a very large number of frames, it is useful to create a hierarchy of summaries each of which consists of a different number of key frames. This hierarchy structure allows the user (or the archivist) to navigate
Figure 15. Example of visual summary extraction and post processing. The initial summary with many redundant and uninformative frames. b) The same summary after the processing phases. The original video contains 45,753 frames, the initial summary 55 and the final summary 19.
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through the video content at different levels of details and to choose the preferred visualization level if the one suggested automatically by the system is not satisfactory. An example of visual summary post-processing is shown in Figure 15b.
Identification of the Overall Video Structure The set of frames obtained by summarization of the entire video can be used to represent the overall contents without having to watch the whole video. By changing the algorithm tuning parameters, we can change the granularity of the summary obtained and, consequently, the number of frames retrieved.
Definition of Indexing The indexing task must take into account the information extracted from the previous steps in order to build a hierarchical structure and allow access to the video information at different levels of abstraction. At each step in the video analysis
process, we can store different gathered information in the database: shots and scenes positions, their duration, the set of frames and so on. This information can then be used for retrieval purposes. Figure 16 shows a video card with its visual summary displayed. The user can play the video in its entirety or select one of the images in the summary to play the corresponding sequence.
3D VISUALIZATION TOOLS We have realized a system for the generation of three-dimensional virtual environments using VRML in which digital items such as video and images can be collocated, displayed, and visited (link at http://aess.itc.cnr.it/museo_virtuale.htm). Each environment can be designed to resemble a real museum, exhibition, gallery or other installation, and is able to welcome different kinds of multimedia objects. These three-dimensional environments allow the end user to perceive, during the navigation, the space, the proportions and the dimensions of the environment of exposure
Figure 16. A video informative card with its visual summary displayed at the bottom
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and of the objects within. This space is totally navigable since it is structured in such a way that a virtual user can walk, move and interact with it and the objects displayed. The user is helped in the exploration by an HUD (Head Up Display), which allows the user to interact with the objects in the environment. The objects in the virtual environments can be of different types: images, videos, audios, texts and three-dimensional objects. They are directly collocated in the environment (as in the case of images and videos) or through an appropriate simplified visual representation of the object (avatar). To this last category belong texts, audio and 3D objects. Every object has a link to a presentation card which usually consists in an HTML page that can contain informative fields such as author, year, place in which the original one is present, real dimensions, description, etc. In case of avatars, for instance text avatars, the descriptive card can be substituted with the original text or object. The objects can be positioned in the environment on the floor and on the walls. Two different positioning approaches are available. In the first one it is possible to give a list of rules to guide the environment creation such as the space, position and order of the object to be inserted. Special objects like empty spaces (“blanks”) or end-ofroom markers are used to control the creation of the environment. The other strategy simply fills the environment with the objects given in input retaining the order of presentation. The spaces devoted to the positioning of the objects, defined “spawn regions”, consist in zones of the wall or of the floor described by geometric points. For example, in the case of walls, a zone of appearance is defined by the left-up and right-down points that correspond to the angles of a rectangle defined in the three-dimensional space. Such zones are dynamically managed by the environment generator in flexible way. The same region of appearance can contain a varying number of works according to the dimension of the objects to put in or the type of positioning rules.
The number of rooms of the virtual environment is not fixed a-priori but depends on the number of objects to be collocated. When there is no more space in a room, a new one is produced which is ready to welcome other objects. The user moves through the different rooms to assist in the complete exposure through “hyperlinks” represented by virtual doors. The virtual environment generator combines all the input data together (objects, room architecture, information cards etc.), and generates a VRML document. This document can be visualized with the most diffused browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator 7.2 or following, Mozilla Firefox), using a VRML plugin. The system is light, portable and accessible from any machine, independently from the hardware or the operating system, giving the possibility to interact with virtual worlds in a simple and effective way. The generator is structured so that it is always possible to add, without having to modify the base configuration, new components: new global positioning politics that allow a different management of the input objects list, new types of spawning regions and new local positioning politics; new types of multimedia objects and different kinds of room architecture. Figure 17 shows an example of a virtual environment. The user approaches the environment in an “entrance-room” and can move through the rooms by entering the virtual doors. Interaction with the displayed objects is achieved using the user interface bar at the bottom of the screen.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The AESS web site has been widely used mainly by the Lombardy Region staff, and by professional users, for which the system has been tailored. The Lombardy Region, our committing partner, has performed the evaluation of the system and its innovative tools and methods.
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Figure 17. Example of virtual exhibition. The entrance (a) and a room (b). In the room the image positioned on the walls and avatars for audio, textual and 3D objects can be seen
Their evaluation and their satisfaction index have been positive. Now we are planning to evaluate both the AESS web site and its retrieval tools in a more complete and objective manner. With the growing amount of video clips, movies, and images, the structure of database, in which the main document type is the audio, has to be revised to give more relevance to images and videos. Therefore we plan to design and implement a new data structure to balance audio, video and image data, and to allow a more complete fruition of the time-dependent data to the user. With respect to the image retrieval module, we are studying an interface that will allow the user to inform the system of the type of image database to be indexed; the system will then automatically ignore (i.e. not compute) certain pictorial features if the images belong to a predefined class. We also plan to use semantic information (e.g. image classification) to expand the image descriptions and to create a database preview by clustering the images, combining the semantic, visual and textual information. Moreover, the video processing module will be integrated in the image retrieval system and will include new detector algorithms for editing effects. Another important consideration in designing electronic catalogues is how to present the docu-
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ments to the prospective users. In these catalogues the quality of the images, their capacity to faithfully represent the real information, is essential. This means that the complex problem of the reproduction of colour must also be solved. Moreover, we plan to explore new paradigms, languages and tools for the generation of our 3D virtual museums, since we found several limitations in the use of VRML. First of all, the creation of user interfaces for complex interactions is quite impractical. Second, we would like to create multi-user, persistent virtual museums, where users are able to interact with each other and with the virtual space. It would be interesting, for example, to collect information about the visit of the users or to give the possibility to the users to leave feedback or some comments about a particular document.
CONCLUSION In this chapter we have presented the tools and the methods developed to manage, consult, retrieve and navigate multimedia ethnographic archives, comprehending texts, images, audios (both music and speech), and videos. The system offers the user several retrieval modes for querying the multimedia archive database exploiting alphanu-
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meric relational query, audio similarity query and clustering, image and video similarity. These methods and tools have been integrated in a single system and applied to the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Italian Lombardy Region. The AESS web site has been presented here from design to implementation, together with the innovative technological instruments to perform similarity searches. More precisely: •
•
•
•
Similarities among images by comparing the terms of their textual descriptions. (QuickLink) Similarities among images by comparing significant visual features of an image against the features of the images contained in a database (QuickLook) Similarities among audios through the identification of shared acoustic features (AudioCluster) Creation of “visual summaries” of the videos through the identification of significant still images, or frames, in them (StillMovie)
The generation of a virtual environment, where to show the results obtained with the above similarity experiences, has been also integrated in the web site. The different approaches employed have been shown, and the advantages of their application illustrated in a real case, where multimodal navigation allows users to interact with the data in a more detailed and complete manner. Preliminary results have proved satisfactory. This study was performed as a part of the Italian Lombardy Region research contracts, and partly funded by Fondazione Cariplo projects. Thanks to the Lombardy Region, and in particular to the Archivio di Etnografia e Storia Sociale for their permission to publish this paper.
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ADDITIONAL READING Agosti, M., Crestani, F., & Melucci, M. (1996). Design and implementation of a tool for the automatic construction of hypertexts for information retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 32, 459–476. doi:10.1016/0306-4573(95)00075-5 Allan, J. (1997). Building hypertext using information retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 33, 145–159. doi:10.1016/S03064573(96)00059-3
Eakins, J. P. (2002). Towards intelligent image retrieval. Pattern Recognition, 35(1), 3–14. doi:10.1016/S0031-3203(01)00038-3 Esner, P. (2008). The evolution of visual information retrieval. Journal of Information Science, 34(4), 531–546. doi:10.1177/0165551508091013 Krug, S. (2000). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to Web usability. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing.
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Pollard, R. (1993). A hypertext-based thesaurus as a subject browsing aid for bibliographic databases. Information Processing & Management, 29, 345–357. doi:10.1016/0306-4573(93)90060-Q Quicklook2. (2005). [Web site]. Retrieved from http://quicklook.itc.cnr.it Rada, R. (1992). Converting a textbook to hypertext. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 10, 294–315. doi:10.1145/146760.146791 Rosenfeld, L., & Morville, P. (2002). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Salton, G., & McGill, M. (1983). Introduction to modern information retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill. Smeulders, A. W. M., Worring, M., Santini, S., Gupta, A., & Jain, R. (2000). Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 12(22), 1349–1380. doi:10.1109/34.895972
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Archivio di Etnografia e Storia Sociale (AESS): Is the department of Lombardy Region that was founded to preserve, study, and enhance the value of documents and images of the life, social transformations, literature, oral history, material culture, and anthropic landscapes of the Lombard territory. Audio Retrieval: Searching for audio files in large databases similar to the audio query: the search will analyze the actual contents of the audio rather than the metadata such as keywords, tags, and/or descriptions associated with the audio. Content-Based Image Retrieval: Searching for digital images in large databases similar to the image query. “Content-based” means that the
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search will analyze the actual contents of the image rather than the metadata such as keywords, tags, and/or descriptions associated with the image. Ethnographic Archive: Archive related to ethnography (“ethnographical data”), that is the branch of anthropology that provides scientific description of individual human societies. Information Retrieval: Is the science of searching for objects (documents, information within documents, and metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the World Wide Web) that match a search query. Lombardy Region: Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy, and the Administrative Regional Government. Multimedia Database: A collection of information (data) which is arranged in individual records and is searchable. In our case information is composed of text, images, audio and video. Similarity-Based Textual Retrieval: Searching for files in large databases similar to the query (in our case, image): the search will compare the terms of their textual descriptions, and retrieve the most similar objects according to their description; Video Analysis and Summarization: Is the process in which video sequences are analyzed and summarized (according to their visual contents) into still images. Web Site Design: Is the process to create usable, accessible, effective, and efficient web sites according to design methodologies.
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APPENDIX Web Sites AESS web site http://www.aess.regione.lombardia.it/aess.htm (2009) or http://www.aess.itc.cnr.it/aess.htm American Memory from the Library of Congress. Retrieved December 2009, from http://memory.loc.gov/ Archivi della Democrazia cristiana. Progetti di Ricerca. Retrieved December 2009, from http://www. archividc.it/index.htm East Midlands Oral History Archive. Retrieved December 2009, from http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/emoha/ emidlandsprojects.html Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina. Retrieved December 2009, from http://www.museosanmichele.it/ Museo del lino (Cremona). Retrieved December 2009, from http://www1.popolis.it/MuseoDelLino/ Museo Etnografico dell’Alta Brianza. Retrieved December 2009, from http://meab.parcobarro.it/ Museo Lombardo di Storia dell’Agricoltura S. Angelo Lodigiano (Lodi). Retrieved December 2009, from http://www.museilodi.it/aree%20naturalistiche/museo%20storia%20agricoltura/museo%20 storia%20agricoltura.html Sardegna Digital Library (2009). Retrieved December 2009, from http://www.sardegnadigitallibrary.it/ Sezione di Antropologia Museale dell’Associazione Italiana per le Scienze Etno-Antropologiche c/o Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente di Romagna. Retrieved December 2009, from http://www. metweb.org/met/
Some Ethnographic Museums on the Web Associazione Nazionale dei Musei Scientifici, Orti Botanici, Giardini zoologici ed acquari Via la Pira, 4 50121 FIRENZE 055 - 2757460. Presidenza c/o Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali Trento MEB: Musée d’Ethnographie de Bordeaux. Retrieved from http://www.meb.u-bordeaux2.fr/index.htm MEN: Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchatel. Retrieved from http://www.men.ch/ Musée d’Ethnographie De Budapest. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/ sets/72157601987294856/ Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève. Retrieved from http://www.ville-ge.ch/meg/index.php Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina. Retrieved from http://www.museosanmichele.it/ Museo del lino (Cremona). Retrieved from http://www1.popolis.it/MuseoDelLino/ Museo Etnografico dell’Alta Brianza. Retrieved from http://meab.parcobarro.it/ Museo Etnografico della Gallura (Sardegna). Retrieved from http://www.museomeoc.com/home.asp Museo Etnografico della Piana del Dragone di Volturara Irpina. Retrieved from http://www.museovolturara. it/ Museo Etnografico di Alessandria. Retrieved from http://www.museogambarina.it/ Museo Etnografico di Bomba (Abruzzo). Retrieved from http://www.museoetnograficobomba.it/homeit. htm Museo etnografico di Lodrino (prealpi lombarde). Retrieved from http://www.museoetnografico.it/ Museo Etnografico di Ortonovo (La Spezia). Retrieved from http://www.metortonovo.it/ Museo Etnografico Ossimo Ieri della Valcamonica. Retrieved from http://www.intercam.it/valcam/assoc/museo/
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Museo Etnografico Tiranese (Sondrio). Retrieved from http://museotirano.provincia.so.it/ Museo Lombardo di Storia dell’Agricoltura S. Angelo Lodigiano (Lodi). Retrieved from http://www. museilodi.it/aree%20naturalistiche/museo%20storia%20agricoltura/museo%20storia%20agricoltura.html Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari (Roma). Museo Nazionale Preistorico Pigorini (Roma EUR). Retrieved from http://www.pigorini.beniculturali.it/ Russian Museum of Ethnography. Retrieved from http://eng.ethnomuseum.ru/ Sezione di Antropologia Museale dell’Associazione Italiana per le Scienze Etno-Antropologiche c/o Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente di Romagna Santarcangelo Di Romagna (RN). Retrieved from http://www.metweb.org/met/
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Chapter 6
Digital Rights Management in Peer to Peer Cultural Networks Dimitrios Tsolis University of Ioannina, Greece Spyros Sioutas Ionian University, Greece
ABSTRACT As a general and effective protection measure for copyright violations which occur with the use of digital technologies including peer to peer (P2P) networks, copyright owners from the cultural sector often use Digital Rights Management systems and digital watermarking techniques to encrypt copyright information with the cultural content. In other cases copyright owners restrict or even block access to the digital cultural content through the Internet and the P2P infrastructure. This chapter claims that DRM and P2P can be quite complementary. Specifically, pa P2P infrastructure is presented which allows broad digital cultural content exchange while at the same time supporting copyright protection and management through watermarking technologies for digital images.
INTRODUCTION Peer to Peer networking is supported by suitable software which enables a computer to locate a content file (text, image, video, sound, software etc.) on another networked device and copy the encoded data to its own hard drive. P2P technology often is used to reproduce and distribute copyrighted content without authorization of the rights owners. Except for digital music and video the P2P infrastructure is also used to make and DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch006
distribute illegal copies of digital cultural content which lies under the protection of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) legislation. For this reason the short history of P2P technology and software has been one of constant controversy by many in the content industry. In the Cultural Heritage area the content owners are feeling even more threatened by the broad and unregulated exchange of digital content in P2P environments (CSTB, 1999) and cultural networks. For this reason security must be applied to Cultural Heritage networks according to the following basic guidelines. Information integrity is
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Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
very important especially in networks where data accuracy is decisive. Confidentiality is the aspect of security that ensures the privacy of information. Copyright management and protection of the creator’s intellectual property rights is a necessary but difficult task especially when it comes to digital content exchange. Copy control and owner identification are the most popular countermeasures against copyright violations. Provision made for supporting digital rights management in the structure of a cultural network can be a powerful instrument in the procedure of checking the validity of information source. Complementary, fingerprinting and watermarking digital content before its distribution among trustworthy users protects the content from its unauthorized disposal since the trace of a copy will reveal the source of the leak in a cultural network. As a general protection measure for copyright violations through digital technologies including P2P, copyright owners often uses digital watermarking techniques to encrypt and watermark content or otherwise Digital Rights Management technologies to restrict access, totally blocking digital content to be accessed through the Internet and the P2P software infrastructure. This chapter claims that watermarking, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and P2P can be quite complementary. Specifically, a P2P network infrastructure is presented which allows broad digital content exchange while on the same time supports copyright protection and management through watermarking technologies. In brief, the platform is functioning mainly for digital images of cultural heritage and is tracking all the watermarked image files which are distributed and copied through the P2P network. The challenge is the algorithmic complexity of detecting multiple watermarking keys in the P2P network effectively and quickly, especially when thousands of image files are concerned. This is managed by an optimization detection algorithm which allows effective watermarking key detection in optimal P2P hops.
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THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The proposed system is setting a new basis for the close cooperation of the two different scientific areas of DRM and P2P aiming at exploiting the distributed computing nature of P2P networks for efficient digital rights protection and management. As a background knowledge the basics of the two different technologies are being presented.
Digital Rights Management and Protection: Watermarking Unfortunately, there is not a commonly agreed definition for DRM. The term, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (DRM, 2008), covers the description, recognition, protection, control, commerce, monitoring and tracking of all the possible usage types concerning digital content - including the relationship management between the digital object’s owners. According to Katzenbeisser (2002), DRM is a term that is used to describe a range of techniques which collect information for rights and right holders, so as to manage copyrighted material; and the conditions under which these materials will be distributed to the users. DRM refers to the protection of the intellectual properties of digital content by controlling or detecting the actions of the authorized end user to the digital content. It gives the digital object’s owner the ability to securely distribute valuable content such as books, photos, videos, magazines; at the same time helps the owner manage the content, avoiding unauthorized usage or copying. The copyright protection is mainly achieved extensive use of digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is based mainly on the use of detectable and readable watermarks. In this section the most important advantages and disadvantages of each case are being presented. The watermarking algorithms are applying watermarks (invisible information in bitstreams) to digital images (Wayner, 2002). The process of
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
watermark embedding is using a watermarking key and the watermarking algorithm, to produce the watermarked digital image. The embedding method vary based on which image domain is being processed, e.g. the space, frequency domain or the wavelets. Depending on the embedding method detectable (single-bit) or readable (multibit) watermarks are being incorporated to the digital images. The watermark detection is using usually the same watermarking key and the reverse embedding method to detect if a watermark exists or no in the digital image (in the detectable case) or to read the information incorporated into the digital image (in the readable case). Figure 1 presents the watermark embedding and detection process. The main advantage of the detectable watermarks is unbeatable robustness to the most common attacks such as digital image compression, geometric transformations (e.g. rotation and scaling), Gaussian filters, linear transformation, aspect ratio, shearing, signal enhancement, row-column removal and the analog to digital attack. The main disadvantage of the detectable case is that it does not reflect to the needs of real life applications. For example, in the case of a very large digital image library with thousands of images it is necessary to assign one watermarking key per digital image so as to ensure unique identification for
each digital watermark. This application is very important especially if the digital images will be commercially exploited through the Web. Consequently an equal number of watermarking keys is necessary before starting the embedding process. After the completion of the watermarking process lets assume that the digital images are being commercially distributed and a sold digital image has been published to a Web site or used in a DVD title. If the owner of the digital image library would like to prove that he owns the digital images he should acquire the digital image from the Web site or DVD and apply the detection process. The detection process requires the correct watermarking key for the specific image so as to have a Yes or No result. The first solution is to test all the watermarking keys through the detection process for the specific image, but this is practically impossible because a thorough detection process has an average of 30 seconds duration and the overall detection process could last many days. The alternative is to find a way to limit down the number of the watermarking keys used by the detection process. Most of times in real life applications “readable” watermarks are being used. In this case the detection process uses only one watermarking key and reads the invisible information embedded to the image through watermarking. This information
Figure 1. Watermark embedding and detection process
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could be a number, a text e.g. “Copyright–Owner– 2008” etc. The advantage is that the detection process is quick and easy. The disadvantage is that “readable” watermarks are not as robust as the “detectable” watermarks and a “readable” watermark is a multi-bit stream which may deteriorate the quality of the watermarked image. Related work in readable watermarks includes an example of an additive spread spectrum watermarking scheme that has been developed by Kalker et al. (2001) for DVD protection and a multiplicative spread spectrum watermarking algorithm which has been developed by Barni et al. (2002), who proposed an optimal and blind decoding and detection of multiplicative watermarks. An important example of a multiplicative and detectable spread spectrum watermarking system is the work of Cox et al. (2002), which has strongly influenced subsequent watermarking research. Based on the aforementioned main features of detectable and readable watermarks and the related work so far, an ideal watermarking application should cast watermarks combining the robustness and imperceptibility of a “detectable” watermark and the easy and quick detection process of the “readable” watermarks. In the next sections a new and innovative algorithm for digital image watermarking is being proposed and presented which utilizes content-based image retrieval techniques to cast and detect robust readable watermarks into digital images.
Peer to Peer Oriented Computing Peer to Peer (P2P) is a relatively recent, highly distributed computing paradigm that enables sharing of resources and services through direct communication between peers (Androutselis, 2004). Extending the traditional model where most computers on a network act as clients, P2P introduces the concept of the simultaneous client/server mode: peers act both as clients and as servers. This form of collaborative networking
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is based on dynamic and failure-tolerant architectures. Dynamicity refers to the ability of P2P networks to include/exclude peers at run time while maintaining an adequate level of performance. Failure (fault) tolerance refers to the ability to overcome connectivity problems posed by peer failure (Liben, 2002). The advantage of P2P technology is the ability to handle failures, manage transient peer populations and most importantly, to leverage Service Oriented Computing (SOC) architectures. SOC supports the development of applications as if they were a connected network of functionalities (services) available, in a network-enabled environment, within and across different organizations (Singh, 2005). In parallel, Web services (WS), “a vision of loosely coupled interaction between components, programs, and applications” and a major implementation technology for SOC, is becoming a driver for business integration (Borenstein, 2004). It should be noted that P2P computing is still in an evolving state and much needs to be done to overcome complex issues including security, network bandwidth, and architecture design. Androutselis (2004) and Liben (2002) provide an excellent review for P2P technologies and protocols. P2P approaches enable communication of loosely coupled systems and rely on open standards. Discovery is paramount for P2P (Stoica, 2003) and XML is used to enable communication/messaging. Peers use a loose client / server mode. It appears that there are not many security standards on the development of P2P (Papazoglou, 2003). Fault tolerance is the strong-point of P2P which focuses more on information transfer. P2P architectures are, in some cases, complicated and thus difficult to support. The next table (Table 1) summarizes the main characteristics of P2P networks. The great advantage and use of P2P networks is the efficiency while exchanging information and content between the network peers. The nature of P2P networks makes broad search and digital
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Table 1. P2P’s main characteristics Feature Peer Client/Server mode Focus Decentralisation Description/messaging
P2P Loose Information High XML-based
Security
Low
Peer connectivity time span
Short
Architecture complexity
High
content exchange easy for the network users and this is the main reason why P2P networks have been used for distributing media files (audio, video and image) and digital cultural content.
State of the Art in DRM and P2P The main contribution of the this chapter is the implementation of an information system which combines the advantages of a P2P network regarding digital content exchange while at the same time protects the copyright of the content owner. This combination makes the proposed system ideal for digital cultural content exchange. Equivalent systems, which combine watermarking, DRM and P2P technologies, do not yet exist in practice but only in theory. Certain methodologies and strategies have been proposed for exploiting P2P technologies in DRM and vice versa (Einhorn, 2005). Based on these methodologies the ambition is the implementation of a system which combines both the strengths of DRM and P2P technology while at the same time alleviates certain weaknesses and risks. The methodologies propose a schema in which digital rights management (DRM) and peer to peer (P2P) technology are complementary technologies and help solve many of the intellectual property problems now hotly contested in the current policy arena. From a popular vantage point, Napster—though not a pure P2P network (because it relied on a central server to direct users
to sought content)—illustrated the mass appeal of P2P file sharing. The Napster phenomenon gave rise to networks built on FastTrack, Gnutella, and other software, which have been designed without central servers and have so far avoided Napster’s legal fate. P2P services are potentially beneficial for a number of reasons. They allow users to search for and download content files located anywhere in the network. That could make it much easier to find works in the public domain, assist new artists who can publicize their abilities, and widen the audience for political speech otherwise confined to a few listeners. However, the costs are sobering; most users simply engage the software in order to find music and movies that have been “ripped” and uploaded to network nodes for free taking by others. That threatens the content industries by displacing unit sales and licensing opportunities, and thereby undermines their business models for delivering content. Though the content industries prevailed in litigation against Scour and Aimster, industry attempts in California to close down Grokster and Streamcast failed in district and circuit courts. In the Grokster and Streamcast cases, the courts ruled in summary judgment that the particular programs in question had significant, non-infringing uses that qualified for legal protection under the Supreme Court’s 1984 landmark decision in Sony v. Universal City Studios, which upheld the legality of the videocassette recorder. The district and circuit courts also found that neither software provider had the requisite knowledge of actual infringement or the ability to curtail immediate use to qualify as a contributory or vicarious copyright infringer. Thus, at least for the time being, and contrary to the wishes of industry, decentralized P2P operations remain in business and free of contributory and vicarious liability for copyright infringement. Meanwhile, the industry continues to look to DRM technologies to stem the tide of unauthorized file sharing. Legally different from copyright itself, digital rights management refers to technological tools and capabilities that monitor content use and
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shield against unauthorized uses or distributions. DRM can then go some way toward protecting intellectual property by helping content owners to stop copying, enforce use restrictions, and otherwise assert property rights to copyrighted material. In contrast to the views of many critics, DRM is an important facilitating mechanism for protecting copyrights in a free market. The proposed system is setting a new basis for the close cooperation of the two different scientific areas of DRM and P2P aiming at exploiting the distributed computing nature of P2P networks and multimedia watermarking technology for efficient digital rights protection and management. In the current literature only one more system worldwide is claiming that is using encryption / watermarking technologies to protect the copyright of digital video files which are distributed through P2P (Xiaoli, 2010). According to this work a wavelet-PCA-based fingerprinting scheme for Peer-to-Peer video file sharing is being proposed. More specifically and based on the authors, in order to utilize P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks in legal content distribution to benefit the legal content providers, copyright protection needs to be enhanced. Towards this objective, a fingerprint generation and embedding method is proposed for complex P2P file sharing networks. In this method, wavelet and PCA techniques are used for fingerprint generation. First, the wavelet technique obtains a low frequency representation of the test image (or source file, which is assumed to be one frame of a video) and PCA finds the features of the representation. And then, a set of fingerprint matrices can be created based on a proposed algorithm. Finally, each matrix combines with the low frequency representative to become a unique fingerprinted matrix. The fingerprinted matrix is not only much smaller than the original image in size but also contains the most important information. Without this information, the quality of the reconstructed image will be very poor. Thus, the fingerprinted file is more suitable for distribu-
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tion in P2P networks. Because, in the distribution stage, the uniquely fingerprinted matrix will only be dispensed by the source host and leave the rest for P2P networks to handle. On the other hand, among other frames of the same video which are not decomposed, some will be embedded with sharable fingerprints. The relationship between unique fingerprint and sharable fingerprint and the purpose of using it will be discussed in the article. The work results indicate that the proposed fingerprint has shown strong robustness against common attacks such as Gaussian noise, median filter and lossy compression. In accordance with the above analysis the combination of P2P and DRM technologies constitute a promising and secure solution for broad cultural content exchange ensuring copyright protection. In the next session our proposed system is being presented in detail.
THE PROPOSED DRM P2P INFRASTRUCTURE In this section a P2P infrastructure is presented which allows broad digital cultural content exchange while on the same time supports copyright protection and management through watermarking technologies for digital images. The main components of the proposed infrastructure are presented in Figure 2. In the next sections the components are presented in detail.
Copyright Protection through Watermarking Embedding Component The copyright protection part of the P2P infrastructure is mainly based on a watermarking algorithm for digital images which produces the correspondent watermarking keys distributed within the P2P environment.
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Figure 2. The Components
The copyright protection system’s main objectives are to provide an appropriate information infrastructure which supports rights management for the digital content and for the transactions taking place and on the same time protects the copyright of the digital images though robust watermarking techniques. The watermarking techniques are playing a very important role in such systems mainly because they provide the protection means for proving the identification of the copyright owner and detecting unauthorized use of digital content (Nikolaidis, 1999, p. 8). Towards this functionality, watermarking algorithms are casting keys to the digital content (in most of cases invisible keys) which when detected prove the copyright ownership of the digital content (Barni, 2002). In case of digital cultural content transactions a very large number of digital images are being exchanged through networks and the Internet for which the legality of their future use is highly improbable. The situation is even more difficult in P2P network infrastructures through which digital content is being exchanged based on specialized stand alone applications which exchange digital files of all kinds (and not only images). A proposed solution is to apply a watermarking algorithm which produces sufficient information which is distributed to the P2P nodes. This information consists mainly of the watermarking key and other data relating to the digital image itself.
Generating Keys with the Watermarking Algorithm Generally, a watermark is a narrow band signal, which is embedded to the wide band signal of a digital image (Davis, 2000). In our case spread Spectrum techniques are being used and are methods by which energy generated at one or more discrete frequencies is deliberately spread or distributed in time or frequency domains. In particular, our technique employs pseudorandom number sequences (noise signals) to determine and control the spreading pattern of the signal across the allotted bandwidth. The noise signal can be used to exactly reconstruct the original data at the receiving end, by multiplying it by the same pseudorandom sequence: this process, known as “de-spreading”, mathematically constitutes a correlation of the transmitted pseudorandom number sequence with the receiver’s assumed sequence (Fotopoulos, 2000). Thus, if the signal is distorted by some process that damages only a fraction of the frequencies, such as a band-pass filter or addition of band limited noise, the encrypted information will still be identifiable. Furthermore, high frequencies are appropriate for rendering the watermarked message invisible but are inefficient in terms of robustness, whereas low frequencies are appropriate with regards to robustness but are useless because of the unac-
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ceptable visual impact (Cox, 2002; Nikolaidis, 1999; Nikolaidis, 2000). In our case, the embedding of a robust multibit watermark is accomplished through casting several zero-bit watermarks onto specified coefficients. The image watermark, a random sequence of Gaussian distribution in our case, is casted multiple times onto the selected coefficients preserving the same sequence length but shifting the start point of casting by one place. Actually the final watermark that is embedded into the image is not a single sequence but many different sequences generated with different seeds. These sequences are casted, one after the other, on the mid coefficients of the image, using the additive rule mentioned above and begging from successive starting points. If all sequences where to be casted, beginning from the same starting point, then, besides the severe robustness reduction resulting from the weak correlation, the possibility of false positive detector response would dramatically increase, since every number that has participated as a seed during the sequence generation procedure, will be estimated by the detector as a valid watermark key. Shifting the starting point by one degree for every sequence casting ensures that the false positive rate will remain in very small level due to the artificial desynchronisation introduced. Every single random sequence of Gaussian distribution is generated using a different number as the seed for the Gaussian sequence generator. It is important to differentiate the sequences in order not to mislead the detection mechanism, since it is based on the correlation between the extracted sequence and the sequence produced with the watermark key. The watermark key is responsible both for the generation of the first sequence and the construction of a vector, containing the rest of the numbers that will serve as the corresponding seeds. The placement of several Gaussian sequences into the image content can model, under specific conventions, a multi-bit watermark. The detection of a zero-bit watermark is interpreted as if
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the bit value of the specified bit is set to one. On the contrary, failure of the detector to detect the zero-bit watermark leads to the conclusion of a zero bit value. Thus, in order for a message to be casted into the image content, it is initially encoded using the binary system and applied afterwards in the sense of zero-bit watermarks using the embedding mechanism and according to the derived bit sequence. Some important remarks regarding the novelty of the proposed schema are addressed below. Data payload: The reason that most of the proposed robust watermarking systems are zerobit, is highly related to the data payload. Data payload is the amount of information encoded into the image during the watermark procedure. In other words, it is the number of coefficients modified according to the additive rule. The performance of the correlation function adopted by the detector is increased when a strong statistical dependency is present. On the other hand, the statistical dependency requires a significant sequence length in order to fulfill the requirements of the correlation function. In addition, the position and the amount of coefficients modified, affects directly the resulting image quality. This is on of the most important tradeoffs that the designer of a watermarking system has to balance. Casting multiple sequences will maximize the problem of image distortion. In that sense, the maximum number of bits allowed for encoding the watermark message is crucial. In the proposed scheme a total number of 16 bits were selected. The first bit indicates the existence of a watermark. If the response is positive the detector continues with the following zero-bit watermarks, otherwise the mechanism outputs a negative response. This is a useful shortcut saving the detector of valuable time and processing power. The second bit serves as a flag important for the decoding operation. The role of this bit flag is described in detail in the following paragraph. The next 14 bits are dedicated to the encoding of the watermark message.
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Under the aforementioned conventions the system is capable of embedding 214 different messages. Seed Vector Generation: The watermark key is a positive integer value playing a vital role in the overall watermarking procedure. It corresponds to the private information that must be shared between the embedder and the detector of the watermark. One of the basic principles of private watermarking is that the encryption of the information to be embedded is performed according to a private key. Thus, if an image is watermarked using a specified key, it is impossible for the detector to detect the watermark unless provided with the same key. The encryption is accomplished by using the private key as the seed for the pseudorandom sequence of Gaussian distribution generator. In our case, there is the necessity of 15 extra numbers, one for each sequence. Thus, the private key except from its basic operation as a pseudorandom generator seed is also used as the seed for producing a vector containing 15 numbers. It is important for every private key to produce a different vector of numbers, in order to avoid undesirable statistical dependencies between different watermarks. A pseudorandom generator provided by any compiler is capable of applying this one-way relationship between the private key and the produced vector of numbers.
Flag bit operation: Under the convention, that for every one-bit-value we cast a zero-bit watermark and for every zero-bit-value we don’t do anything except moving to the next starting point, the number of zero-bit watermarks to be casted is dictated by the bit sequence. It is obvious that a bit sequence containing only a single one-bitvalue is preferable from a sequence consisted of 14 aces. Both for, processing power and watermark’s imperceptibility purposes, a bit re-versal trick is required for optimizing the embedder’s performance. Thus, after acquiring the binary representation of the message, a counter scans the bit sequence counting the zeros and the aces. If the number of aces is greater than the number of zeros a bit reversed sequence is generated. The zerobit watermarks casting is now performed according to the newly generated sequence. In that case, the flag bit is set to one serving as an indicator to the detector that the extracted sequence is bit-reversed. As a consequence, the decoder, equipped with the appropriate information, can easily decode a message represented by 14 aces binary sequence, even though the embedder had casted only two zero-bit watermarks. The benefit of using the specified trick is that even though a 16-bit watermark is
Figure 3. Multiple watermarking keys per image
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supported, we only need to cast 8 zero-bits watermarks in the worst case. The detector used in the proposed information system reveals the existence of 11 watermarks. Three of them correspond to the three zero-bit schemes while the rest 8 positive responses are used for the encoding of the fingerprint. The detector has succeeded in detecting all eleven watermarks without any confusion or misleading, resulting in a capability of facilitating proof of ownership for the digital cultural content, copy control, digital signature and transaction tracking at the same time (House, 1998).
Intermediate Conclusions In this section a watermarking algorithm has been presented which is robust enough to facilitate copyright protection and management for the digital images of cultural heritage while at the same time produces sufficient information which is distributed and stored to the P2P nodes. This information consists mainly of the watermarking key. Taking into consideration that for each digital image a set of watermarking keys are being used for copyright protection, the next step towards an efficient P2P environment which supports digital rights management is to use these keys as an information for retrieving the copyright status of each image transacted through the P2P network. For this reason, the watermarking keys are being stored in the independent network Peers. The copyright owner can use the watermarking key as query information to track down its digital images and their use. The issue is how quickly and efficiently the Peer that contains the under inspection key is being located taking into account that thousands of digital images could exist in the P2P network and multiple watermarking keys could exist in a digital image. The solution proposed is a scalable and robust data indexing structure based on a Nested Balanced Distributed Tree (NBDT).
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NBDT P2P Network Component: An Overview This section presents a novel efficient and fault tolerant discovery-search infrastructure for P2P node search and discovery, called NBDT. The proposed solution provides support for processing: (a) exact match queries of the form “given a key, locate the node containing the key” and (b) range queries of the form “given a key range, locate the node/nodes containing the keys that belong to this range”. For our P2P network the keys under query are the watermarking keys containing copyright information and embedded to the digital images. Furthermore, the system is robust with respect to failures, providing a solution in this way for a fully decentralized registry environment. NBDT provides a tree-like structure for the P2P network upon which watermarking keybased searching can be performed. In terms of bandwidth usage, searching scales very well since no broadcasting or other bandwidth consuming activities take place during searches. Since all searches are key based there are two possibilities: either (a) each host implements the same algorithm, that translates a keyword to a binary key or (b) another service provides the binary key. This service accepts keyword based queries and can respond with the corresponding key. The second approach is more precise. It is also possible to use a more centralized implementation for such a service. From now on we assume that the key is available. This section describes also an algorithm for the first case. The structure was built by repeating the same tree-structure in each group of nodes having the same ancestor, and doing this recursively. This structure may be imposed through another set of pointers. The innermost level of nesting will be characterized by having a tree-structure, in which no more than two nodes share the same direct ancestor. The Figure 4 illustrates a simple example (for the sake of clarity we have omitted from the picture the links between nodes with
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
the same ancestor). Thus, multiple independent tree structures are imposed on the collection of nodes inserted. Each element inserted contains pointers to its representatives in each of the trees it belongs to. Let σ an initial given μ sequence of w-bit keys belonging in universe K=[0,2w-1 ], where μ an unknown density. At initialization step we choose as peer representatives the 1st key, the lnKst key, the 2lnKst key and so on, meaning that each node with label i (1w may be appeared in the system and K must exceed. For this purpose we will model the insertions/deletions as the combinatorial game of bins and balls presented in (Kaporis, 2003): Modeling the insertions/deletions of keys in this way, the load of each peer becomes Q(polygonN) in expected case with high probability. Obviously, peers’ representatives early described have also
been chosen according to this game. We also assume that each key is distinct and as a result the probability of collisions is zero. Each key is stored atmost in O(loglogN) levels. We also equip each peer with the table LSI (Left Spine Index). This table stores pointers to the peers of the left-most spine (for example in Figure 4 the peers 1, 2, 4 and 8 are pointed by the LSI table of peer 5) and as a consequence its maximum length is O(loglogN). Furthermore, each peer of the leftmost spine is equipped with the table CI (Collection Index). CI stores pointers to the collections of peers presented at the same level (see in Figure 4 the CI table of peer 8). Peers having same father belong to the same collection. For example in the Figure 4, peers 8, 9, 10, and 11 constitute a collection of peers. It’s obvious that the maximum length of CI table is OpN. For example in Figure 4 we are located at (green) node 5 and we are looking for a key k in [13lnn, 14lnn-1]. In other words we are looking for (green) node 14. As shown in (Einhorn, 2005) the whole searching process requires an optimal number of O(loglogN)
Figure 4. The NBDT P2P System
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hops or lookup messages for detecting the watermarking key. When we want to insert/delete a key/node from the structure, we initially search for the node that is responsible for it (using a number of O(loglogN) hops in worst-case) and then we simply insert/ delete it from the appropriate node. If new w’-bit watermarking keys, with w’>w, request to be inserted into the system, then we have to insert new peers on the network infrastructure and as a result we have to re-organize the whole p2p structure. In practice, such an expensive reorganization is very sparse. The new peers of NBDT are inserted at the end of the whole infrastructure consuming O(1) hops in worst-case. In particular, when a node receives a joining node request it has to forward the join request to the last node. The last node of NBDT infrastructure can be found in O(1) hops in worst-case by using the appropriate LSI and CI indexes. If the load of some peer becomes zero, we mark as deleted the aforementioned peer. If the number of marked peers is not constant any more then we have to re-organize the whole p2p structure. Based on the basic theorem of Kaporis (2003), if we generate the keys according to smooth distributions, which is a superset of regular, normal, uniform as well as of real world skew distributions like zipfian, binomial or power law (for details see Kaporis, 2006), we can assure with high probability that the load of each peer never exceeds polylogn size and never becomes zero. The latter means that with high probability split or delete operations will never occur. In other words, the re-organization of the whole P2P structure with high probability will never occur which means that only the O(loglogN) hops are necessary to detect the appropriate watermarking key pointing to copyright information and no further time is being consumed for structure re-organization.
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CONTRIBUTION TO THE LITERATURE - EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION The main contribution of the current work to the current literature is proved mainly by the individual components evaluation. The evaluation proves the unique robustness of the watermarking algorithm and at the same time the key detection process within the P2P framework is very efficient and outperforms the most popular infrastructures used directly for many solutions for P2P information discovery. The experimental evaluation of the system is divided into two separate evaluation processes (1) The evaluation of the watermarking algorithm in terms of robustness against attacks to the digital images and (2) the evaluation of the NBDT P2P Network.
The Watermarking Algorithm: Comparative Evaluation and Robustness In this section we present the experimental results concerning the evaluation and robustness of the multimedia watermarking algorithm applied just before inserting a digital image to the P2P network. Robustness is the most highly desired feature of a watermarking algorithm especially if the application demands copyright protection, and persistent owner identification. In addition the image distortion and false positive parameters are being evaluated. In our experiments the metric selected for evaluating the image distortion introduced by the multi-bit watermark casting is PSNR (Pick Signal to Noise Ratio). Although PSNR is definitely insufficient for modeling the complexity of the human visual system is by all means an effective metric for measuring image similarity. The PSNR metric is used to evaluate if the watermark deteriorates the image quality. The evaluation is based on the
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Figure 5. Image database: PSNR
comparison between the original and the watermarked image. Figure 5 demonstrates the results. Regarding the fact that in most cases a PSNR value above 40 decibel is satisfactory the derived results can be consider to meet the image quality requirements. Casting multiple zero-bit watermarks onto the same coefficient area raises the probability of causing abnormal fluctuation of the detector’s false positive probability. In order to confirm that no such case is true, we used 5 different watermarks applied to a sample of 5 images for approximating the false positive probability. The watermarks were generated from 5 different integer numbers, also responsible for the generation of the vector containing the rest integer values required by the embedding mechanism. Every image was watermarked using each of this numbers as a watermark key while afterwards the detector was tested for possible false positive response with every number contained in the produced vector. That is, an image watermarked with the number K1 as a watermark key was examined by the detector 15 more times using as primary keys the numbers of the vector produced by the random generator with K1 as a seed. The reason for examining only this small subset of numbers instead of a large random set is that this numbers hold highest probability of
causing a false positive, due to the statistical dependence introduced to the correlation function. Table 2 demonstrates the experimental results: The above table indicates only one false positive response under the “Plate” image. Thus, the derived conclusions justify our hypothesis about the false positive probability of the detector which remains in relatively low values, thanks to the statistical independence introduced by the embedding start point shifting. The watermark’s robustness depends on the efficiency of Image Extenders which were analysed in the section above. The watermarks robustness has been extensively tested. The average score of the watermarking robustness against various types of attacks is 94% which is a very efficient result for the type of application under consideration. The results are briefly analyzed below (Table 3): Closing the performance evaluation it is worth mentioning the results derived from the print-scan or digital to analog attack. A small number of images after they have been compressed with a jpeg algorithm, they were printed to plain paper. Using a flatbed scanner the images were scanned back to their digital form and delivered to the watermark detector. The detector output is presented in Table 4.
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Table 2. False positive response Keys 50
100
200
Chariot 350
700
1
1
1
1
Horse 1
1
1
1
Mask 1
1
1
1
1
Plate 1
1
1
1
1
1
1
22715
12662
25325
27935
23102
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
22430
23392
25316
28203
2170
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
16275
22561
2367
21228
32468
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
21417
20718
19320
17222
12328
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
4906
6314
9131
13355
23212
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
9000
1073
17987
26975
4255
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3863
24449
86
29076
9340
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
26227
32712
12916
32372
12235
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
20017
27912
10934
1851
24347
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
21604
2031
28420
2467
29292
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
28180
11332
10403
25394
5760
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
940
7595
20906
8104
21924
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
13042
20424
2421
24568
10709
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
26566
10606
11456
29111
15696
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
20934
20780
20474
20015
18943
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Table 3. Watermarking robustness: Various attacks Type of Attack Convolution and Median Filters
Average Score 100%
Jpeg Compression
90%
Scaling
100%
Cropping
95%
Shearing Rotation – Crop
93% 97,5%
Rotation – Crop – Scale
79%
Linear Transformations
100%
Aspect Ratio
100%
Row and Column Removal
100%
Geometric Distortion
80%
The watermarking robustness is more than adequate. The JPEG compression, crop and rotation attacks which are the more common types of attack for applications which distribute digital multimedia through the web are being dealt effectively.
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In addition to the above evaluation a comparison between the proposed multimedia watermarking algorithm and existing ones was conducted. The comparative evaluation outlines the main strengths and weaknesses of the proposed watermarking schema especially in comparison with numerous and well established watermarking algorithms which include equivalent algorithms for casting detectable and / or readable watermarks. Numerous watermarking schemes have been proposed and implemented, but their performance evaluation, as well as their comparison, is a difficult task. Recent attacks have proven that the robustness criteria used so far are often inadequate. Most of the watermarking systems are made to be robust against JPEG compression, cropping, low-pass filtering and rescaling, but fail to succeed in simple geometric transformations and distortions like rotation. The comparative evaluation of the overall watermarking schemas was based on a benchmarking tool developed by Kutter and Petitcolas (Kutter, 1999). The complete study and evaluation methodology of the water-
Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Table 4. Print: Scan or digital analog attack Image Format
Image Compression
Print Quality
Result
Tiff
None
Best
Detected
Tiff
None
Normal
Detected
Jpeg
Medium Compression High Quality
Best
Detected
Jpeg
Medium Compression High Quality
Normal
Detected
Jpeg
Medium Compression Medium Quality
Best
Detected
Jpeg
Medium Compression Medium Quality
Normal
Missed
marking techniques was exhaustively presented in the IEEE ICIP 01 Conference (Tsolis, 2001). According to this comparative evaluation process the results for the proposed watermarking schema are briefly presented the next figures and tables. Tables 5 and 6 show the percentage of success of various watermarking methods especially focusing of compression, geometrical transformations and filtering and Gaussian attacks. The 8th and 9th table shows the competition between the best three rivals of each category. The mark 1 is for the best of the three, 2 for the middle and 3 for the worst of the three. The mark X is for a draw between the three watermarking methods. Finally in Figure 6 the watermarking schemes’ standings are being briefly presented. The comparative evaluation proves that the proposed watermarking algorithm is more improved than the existing techniques mainly regarding jpeg compression, horizontal flip and shearing and advances the state of the art of such applications. At this point it should be noted that the EikonaMark watermarking application is casting
detectable watermarks which are supposed to be more robust than the readable equivalents. The Digimarc application casts both detectable and readable watermarks and the WatCod – WatDec tool casts only readable watermarks. In this case the proposed watermarking application even if it casts readable watermarks it is proved more robust than the applications which cast detectable watermarks.
The NBDT P2P Network For comparison purposes, an elementary operation’s evaluation is presented in Table 10 between NBDT, Skip-Graphs, Chord and its newest variations: F-Chord(α) (Stoica, 2003), LPRS-Chord (Zhang, 2003), BATON (Jagadish, 2005), and its newest variation BATON* (Jagadish, 2006). Our contribution provides for exact-match queries, improved search costs from O(logN) in DHTs, Skip-Graphs and BATON (BATON* requires O(logmN)) to O(loglogN) in NBDT and adequate and simple solution to the range query problem.
Table 5. Watermarking algorithm performance: Filtering and compression Schema
Filtering 3x3 median, Gaussian Gaussian
Median
Compression
Sharpening
FMLR
JPEG
GIF
Digimarc 1.51
100
100
100
100
65
100
EikonaMark 3.01
100
100
100
100
87
100
WatCod - WatDec
100
100
-
-
90
100
SysCop 1.0 R1
80
80
-
-
58
80
Proposed Schema
100
100
100
100
98
100
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Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Figure 6. Watermarking algorithm standings
Table 6. Watermarking algorithm performance: Geometrical transformations Schema
Typical Geometrical Transformations Scaling
Cropping
Rotation
Shearing
Horizontal flip
Col & line rem
50
100
100
42
42
100
89
0
-
-
0
0
0
-
-
0
0
92
100
100
17
100
With JPEG
No JPEG
With JPEG
No JPEG
Auto Crop
Auto Scale
X
Y
Digimarc 1.51
81
72
100
98
95
97
50
WatCod -WatDec
97
83
94
91
37
51
EikonaMark 3.01
0
0
0
0
0
SysCop 1.0 R1
0
0
0
0
0
Proposed Schema
81
81
81
85
93
Table 7. Watermarking algorithm competition: Filtering and compression Schema
Filtering 3x3 median, Gaussian (X = draw)
Compression
Gaussian
Median
Sharpening
FMLR
JPEG
GIF
EikonaMark 3.01
X
X
X
X
3
X
WatCod -WatDec
X
X
X
X
2
X
Proposed Schema
X
X
X
X
1
X
Horizontal flip
Col & line rem
X
X
Table 8. Watermarking algorithm competition: Geometrical transformations Schema
Typical Geometrical Transformations (X = draw) Scaling
Cropping
Rotation
Shearing
With JPEG
No JPEG
With JPEG
No JPEG
Auto Crop
Auto Scale
X
Y
X
3
1
1
1
1
2
2
Proposed Schema
1
1
2
2
2
2
1
1
2
2
WatCod-WatDec
X
2
3
3
3
3
3
3
X
X
Digimarc 1.51
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Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
Update Queries such as key registration and de-registration requests are not performed as frequently as a user login and logout in a typical P2P data delivery network. NBDT scales very well in the expected case with high probability. In worst-case a global rebuilding of the whole structure may occur, which is also not typically met in key registry implementation cases. Additionally, a fault tolerance schema is available to support with fidelity an elementary web services business solution. Based on the aforementioned results for the NBDT system, in the steady state, in a N-node network, each node resolves all lookups via O(loglogN) messages to other nodes. Key updates require only O(loglogN) number of messages in worst-case. Node updates require O(1) number of messages in expected-case with high probability and this outperforms the most popular infrastructures used directly for many solutions for P2P information discovery. This makes NBDT ideal for a system in which thousands of watermarking keys are being exchanged through the network peers. The aforementioned evaluation was performed using a simulator which’s source code is available in http://www.ionio.gr/~sioutas/New_Software. htm. The simulator generates initially K keys drawn by some distribution. After the initializa-
tion procedure the simulator orders the keys and chooses as bucket representatives the 1st key, the ln(n)th key, the (2*ln(n))th key and so on. Obviously it creates N buckets or N Leaf_nodes where N=K/lnn, each of which stores polylog(n) keys (or (logn)c keys, where c is a constant). The simulator executes the next insertions/deletions as a combinatorial game of bins and balls, ensuring the desirable load balance of each bucket.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The future applicability of the proposed infrastructure is strong as it could be used for the creation of P2P environments, supported by GUIs, with which a user could exchange digital files while copyright protection occurs at the same time. The predicted scenario includes the use of a specialized GUI for searching and retrieving digital cultural content while at the same time embodies, verifies and presents copyright information the user. The user will be informed constantly about the copyright owner, the restrictions of use and contact details regarding the digital item which desires to download and use. The search of digital content will support keyword and query by image content searches and the downloading will be based on the use of readable and detectable watermarks.
Table 10. Performance comparison with chord, BATON and skip graphs P2P Network Architectures
Lookup Key
Update(Insert/delete) key
Data Overhead-Routing information
Join/Depart Node
CHORD
O(logN)
O(logN)
O(logN) nodes
O(log2N) w.h.p.
H-F-Chord (α)
O(log n/ log log N)
O(log n/ log log N)
O(logN) nodes
O(logN)
LPRS-Chord
Slightly better than O(logN)
Slightly better than O(logN)
O(logN) nodes
O(logN)
NBDT
O(loglogN) expected with high probability
O(loglogN) expected with high probability
Exponentially decreasing
Strong Rainbow Skip Graphs
O(logN)
O(logN)
O(1)
O(logN) amortized
BATON
O(logN)
O(logN)
Two (2) nodes
O(logN)
BATON*
O(logmN)
O(logmN)
m nodes
O(mlogmN)
O(loglogN) amortized expected with high probability
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Digital Rights Management in Peer To Peer Cultural Networks
The watermarks will be keys pointing to further information about the copyright status of the digital content.
CONCLUSION In this chapter we focused on a P2P network infrastructure which has the practical significance of allowing broad digital cultural content exchange between the network’s users while supporting rights protection and management of the copyright owner through watermarking technologies. In brief, a watermarking algorithm casts watermarking keys to the digital images and the same time the watermarking keys are being stored in the independent network Peers. Based in the NBDT system, in the steady state, in a Nnode network, each node resolves all lookups via O(loglogN) messages to other nodes. Key updates require only O(loglogN) number of messages in worst-case. Node updates require O(1) number of messages in expected-case with high probability. The watermarking key detection process within the P2P framework is very efficient and outperforms the most popular infrastructures used directly for many solutions for P2P information discovery. The key detection process is very important for the copyright owner because when successful the copyright status of each digital image can be retrieved and evaluated. As a consequence the copyright owner does not loose control of his digital content exchanged through the P2P network.
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ADDITIONAL READING Adelsbach, A., Huber, U., & Sadeghi, A. R. (2006). Fingercasting: Joint fingerprinting and decryption of broadcast messages. In 11th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, Melbourne, Australia (Springer [Berlin: Springer.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4058, 136–147. doi:10.1007/11780656_12 Adelsbach, A., Rohe, M., & Sadeghi, A. R. (2005). Non-interactive watermark detection for a correlation-based watermarking scheme. In Communications and Multimedia Security, Salzburg, Austria (Springer [). Berlin: Springer.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3677, 129–139. doi:10.1007/11552055_13 Adelsbach, A., & Sadeghi, A. R. (2001). Zeroknowledge watermark detection and proof of ownership. In 4th International Workshop on Information Hiding, IH’01, Pittsburgh, PA (Springer [). Berlin: Springer.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2137, 273–288. doi:10.1007/3-54045496-9_20 Ahmed, F., Sattar, F., Siyal, M. Y., & Yu, D. (2006). A secure watermarking scheme for buyer-seller identification and copyright protection. EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, 23.
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Caplan, P. (2003). Patents and open standards. Retrieved from http://www.niso.org /press/whitepapers/ Patents_Caplan.pdf Celik, M., Lemma, A., Katzenbeisser, S., & van der Veen, M. (2007). Secure embedding of spreadspectrum watermarks using look-up tables. In International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP’07, Honolulu, HI (Vol. 2, pp. 153-156). New York: IEEE Press. Craver, S. (1999). Zero knowledge watermark detection. In 3rd International Workshop on Information Hiding, IH’99, Dresden, Germany (Springer [). Berlin: Springer.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1768, 101–116. doi:10.1007/10719724_8 Craver, S., & Katzenbeisser, S. (2001). Security analysis of public-key watermarking schemes. In Schmalz, M. S. (Ed.), SPIE, Mathematics of Data/ Image Coding, Compression and Encryption IV, with Applications, San Diego, CA (Vol. 4475, pp. 172–182). Bellingham, WA: SPIE. Creative Commons. (n.d.). [Web site]. Retrieved from http://creativecommons.org Crowcroft, J., Perkins, C., & Brown, I. (2000). A method and apparatus for generating multiple watermarked copies of an information signal. WO Patent No. 00/56059. Emmanuel, S., & Kankanhalli, M. (2001). Copyright protection for MPEG-2 compressed broadcast video. In IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, ICME 2001, Tokyo, Japan (pp. 206-209). New York: IEEE.
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IPR-Helpdesk. (n.d.). Intellectual property aspects of World Wide Web authoring. Retrieved from http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org Koloniari, G., & Pitoura, E. (2005). Peer-to-peer management of XML data: Issues and research challenges. SIGMOD Record, 34(2), 6–17. doi:10.1145/1083784.1083788 Li, Y., Zou, F., Ma, F., & Li, M. (2004). pXRepository: A Peer-to-Peer XML Repository for Web Service Discovery. In Grid and cooperative computing: Third international conference ( [). Berlin: Springer]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3251, 137–144. doi:10.1007/978-3-54030208-7_24 Li, Y., Zou, F., Wu, Z., & Ma, F. (2004). PWSD: A scalable Web service discovery architecture based on peer-to-peer overlay network. In APWeb04 ( [). Berlin: Springer.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3007, 291–300. doi:10.1007/978-3-54024655-8_32 Microsoft. (2005). Standards licensing programs. Retrieved from http://www.microsoft.com/ mscorp/ip/standards/ OASIS. (2010). Policy on intellectual property rights. Retrieved from http://www.oasis-open. org/who/ intellectualproperty.php Piva, A., Cappellini, V., Corazzi, D., De Rosa, A., Orlandi, C., & Barni, M. (2006). Zero-knowledge ST-DM watermarking. In P. W. Wong & E. J. Delp (Ed.), Proceedings of SPIE: Security, steganography, and watermarking of multimedia contents VIII, San Jose, CA (Vol. 6072, pp. 291-301). Bellingham, WA: SPIE. Ronchi, A. M. (2008). eCulture: Cultural content in the digital age. Berlin: Springer.
Sakkopoulos, E., Makris, C., Sioutas, S., Triantafillou, P., Tsakalidis, A., & Vassiliadis, B. (2005). NIPPERS: Network of InterPolated PeERS for Web Service Discovery. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (pp. 193198). New York: IEEE. Sycara, K., Paolucci, M., Ankolekar, A., & Srinivasan, N. (2003). Automated discovery, interaction and composition of Semantic Web services. Journal of Web Semantics: Science. Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 1, 27–46. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2003.07.002 The Community Directive on software copyright Directive 91/250/EEC: http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ legal/en/ipr/software/software.html TRIPS - Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. http://www.wto.org/ english/tratop_e/ trips_e/t_agm0_e.htm U. S. House of Representatives. (1998). The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Software Copyright. Retrieved from http://www.copyright. gov/ legislation/dmca.pdf Verma, K., Sivashanmugam, K., Sheth, A., Patil, A., Oundhakar, S., & Miller, J. (2005). METEORS WSDI: A scalable P2P infrastructure of registries for semantic publication and discovery of Web services. Information Technology Management, 6(1), 17–39. doi:10.1007/s10799-004-7773-4 Yu, S., Liu, J., & Le, J. (2004). Intelligent Web service discovery in large distributed system. In Z. R. Yang, R. M. Everson & H. Yin (Eds.), IDEAL 2004 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3177, pp. 166–172). Berlin: Springer. Yu, S., Liu, J., & Le, J. (2004). Decentralized Web service organization combining semantic Web and peer to peer computing. In Z. R. Yang, R. M. Everson & H. Yin (Eds.), IDEAL 2004 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3177, pp. 116 – 127). Berlin: Springer.
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Zhang, J., Kou, W., & Fan, K. (2006). Secure buyer-seller watermarking protocol. IEEE Proceedings on Information Security, 153(1), 15–18. doi:10.1049/ip-ifs:20055069
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Detectable Watermark: A digital watermark which when detected exists or no in the digital image (Boolean Yes or No detection result). Digital Rights Management: Covers the description, recognition, protection, control, commerce, monitoring and tracking of all the possible usage types concerning digital content - including the relationship management between the digital object’s owners. NBDT P2P Structure: Provides a tree-like structure for the P2P network upon which keybased searching can be performed. In terms of bandwidth usage, searching scales very well since no broadcasting or other bandwidth consuming activities take place during searches. P2P Key Update: Whenever a peer is inserted or deleted from the network a P2P key update process has to be initiated so as to ensure data integrity between the peers. Peer to Peer Networks: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a relatively recent, highly distributed computing
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paradigm that enables sharing of resources and services through direct communication between peers. Readable Watermark: A digital watermarking which when detected the information incorporated is being read (e.g. the identity of the copyright owner). Watermark Detection: The watermark detection is using usually the same watermarking key and the reverse embedding method to detect if a watermark exists or no in the digital image (in the detectable case) or to read the information incorporated into the digital image (in the readable case). Watermark Embedding: The process of watermark embedding is using a watermarking key and the watermarking algorithm, to produce the watermarked digital image. The embedding method vary based on which image domain is being processed, e.g. the space, frequency domain or the wavelets. Depending on the embedding method detectable (single-bit) or readable (multibit) watermarks are being incorporated to the digital images. Watermarking: The watermarking algorithms are applying watermarks (invisible information in bitstreams) to digital images.
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Chapter 7
Museums on the Web: Interaction with Visitors Max Arends Vienna University of Technology, Austria Doron Goldfarb Vienna University of Technology, Austria Dieter Merkl Vienna University of Technology, Austria Martin Weingartner Vienna University of Technology, Austria
ABSTRACT This chapter surveys current best practices for museum-visitor interaction on the Web and presents impressive, publicly available examples. These examples illustrate particular interaction ideas and highlight promising research directions. The chapter provides a qualitative analysis of museum Web appearances with specific focus on interaction between museums and their visitors. The material in this chapter is grouped around the interaction paradigms of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3D, and mobile Web. The main focus of the analysis is on art museums. However, when more advanced solutions are visible at other museum types, they are mentioned as well.
INTRODUCTION The Internet and especially the World Wide Web on top of it is playing an incredible role in enabling democratic access to information and interactive communication for its participants. This development is even more remarkable when remembering the history of the Internet that was conceptualised during the Cold War era in order DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch007
to ensure the possibility of communication after a nuclear strike (Rosenzweig, 1998). The success of the Internet is amongst other issues also due to its decentralised structure and open standards and protocols. For a review of the history of the Internet in terms of the network part, we refer to (Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts & Wolff, 2009). Once available for the general public, the Web quickly became a prime information source. In general, museums realised the potential of infor-
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Museums on the Web
mation dissemination on the Web quite early. Just to give some examples, the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive1 lists the first Web site of various art museums as shown in Table 1. A usability evaluation of early museum Web sites is described in (Hertzum, 1999). Based on a questionnaire survey among 30 museums, the author concludes that those early Web sites were mostly the work of individual heroes who, by means of doing, learned how to use the then new Web technology. However, these early Web sites lack an understanding of the expected user groups. Moreover, these Web sites simply transfer the interaction patterns with traditional media to the Web, thus rarely taking advantage of the inherent non-linearity of the new medium. Also quite early, the potential for Web-based art education was discussed in (Milekic, Moreno & Kazee, 1998). In this paper the authors argue that digital media on the Web will be beneficial for art education. Their main points are as follows. Firstly, the enormous storage capacity that enables museums to show artefacts, which are otherwise in the archives of the museum. Secondly, the collections are easy to access and search for the public. When it comes to search, the issue of classification gains importance, as the searchers are no longer necessarily savvy in the jargon of curators. In a nutshell, the authors argue that the digital medium of the Web allows for new interaction paradigms. So, simply copying the interaction paradigm of old, paper-based media is insufficient.
In the years since its launch, the Web changed dramatically in terms of usage patterns. In the beginning, the Web was primarily a medium with a limited number of information providers and a huge number of information consumers. For the providers, Web sites were mainly seen as digital analogues to brochures, where an organization may describe itself and deliver this picture to their customers. In particular, basic information about the museum was given. This era can be referred to as the Web 1.0 time. Kevin Sumption describes this first generation of museum Web sites as a derivate of the […] ‘just in case’reasoning. ‘Just in case’visitors surfing the net might wish to visit your museum, they could find sufficient information to know where to find you, what admission costs, and what programs are showing. (Sumption, 2006) The next big step of the Web involved largescale user participation. Platforms were developed where the role of users transcends from mere recipients of information to active producers of information. These platforms have in common that they provide easy-to-use tools that enable their users to share thoughts, photos, videos, etc. Without any intention of completeness we just refer to places like Facebook2, Twitter3, Flickr4 or YouTube5. All of these places are referred to with the umbrella term of Web 2.0, the ReadWriteWeb (Murugesan, 2007). The governing principle is more or less unrestricted user participation to
Table 1. Dates of first Web sites of selected art museums according to the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive Museum
City
URL
Date of first Web site
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York
www.metmuseum.org
11 Nov. 1996
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC
www.nga.gov
5 Apr. 1997
National Gallery
London
www.nationalgallery.org
1 Dec. 1998
Musée du Louvre
Paris
www.louvre.fr
3 Dec. 1998
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Wien
www.khm.at
29 Apr. 1999
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create vibrant online communities around shared interests. As an important consequence, in Web 2.0 applications the authority is removed from the content provider and transferred in the hands of the user (Simon, 2007). As a parallel development we notice an increase in popularity of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs). The core concept of MUVEs is to provide the technological infrastructure for 3D virtual worlds where the individual user participates impersonated as an avatar. The user may explore the world, contribute to the world by creating objects or installations, and perhaps most importantly socialise with other participants and thus become part of a social network. Such sites are often referred to with the umbrella term of Web 3D. A prominent example of such an MUVE is Second Life6. Using different technology, however, it is possible to create such virtual worlds that are simply accessible via the Web browser. One of the benefits of MUVEs is the sense of co-presence of visitors. Each visitor virtually recognises other visitors that are strolling through a virtual exhibition at the same time. MUVEs thus foster communication between visitors and between museum and visitors, a great way to observe and satisfy the needs of visitors and encourage real visits when being on-site of the museum. A vibrant area of current research and development is related to the use of mobile devices for museum visitors. This comes rather natural when acknowledging the wide proliferation of smart multimedia handheld devices among the population. The range of potential devices is impressive, from PDAs over WiFi-enabled MP3 players to various smartphones. The visitor benefits from having more engaging material for the museum visit, possibly on their own devices. Moreover, multimedia handheld devices may serve to connect visitors of the real museum with those of the museum’s virtual presence. Basically, a museum visit can be separated in three different phases: (1) the pre-visit phase, (2) the on-visit phase, and (3) the post-visit phase. In
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the first phase, pre-visit phase, the visitor shall be given the opportunity to obtain information about the artefacts of a museum. This includes the possibility to browse through the entire collection, to search for certain artefacts and to create a tour through the museum, so that the visitor is able to concentrate on artefacts of interest. In the next phase, the on-visit-phase, the visitor is actually on-site at the museum and examines the artefacts. A museum visit involves the cognitive and emotional traits of a person. Thus, each visitor should be allowed to interpret the visit according to her personal traits like interest and pace. Therefore the ideal museum guide should observe the user’s affective reactions and adapt its behaviour. As typical guided tours and audio guides do not offer this flexibility, we will describe the possibilities of multimedia guides in this chapter. In the last phase, the post-visit phase, the visitor wants to reflect the museum visit and to get further information about the artefacts that were of most interest to her. Moreover, the visitor might want to share her impressions with others. The remainder of this chapter is structured according to the prevalent distinction based on interaction patterns, namely Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3D, and mobile Web. Examples of impressive publicly available realisations addressing particular interaction ideas as well as promising research directions are discussed. The chapter provides qualitative analysis of museum Web appearances with specific focus on interaction of the museum with its visitors. The main focus of the analysis is on art museums. Finally, the chapter is concluded with a discussion of our findings.
WEB 1.0 We use the term Web 1.0 for traditional one-way communication from an art museum to a visitor, i.e. a one-to-many communication model. In such a setting, the museum provides the content and the visitor is invited to consume the content. Even at
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this very basic level of interaction we have seen quite a range of differences in museum presentations. Museums that only provide indicators of their physical existence, e.g. their address, mission, opening hours, admission fees, current exhibitions and collection as well as potential special programs mark the bottom line. An archetypical representative of this category is the Kunsthaus Zürich7. The Web site follows the idea of a brochure with necessary information for real visits, samples from the collection, and an online shop. The Web visitor has no means to browse or search the collection apart from selected highlights. The only possibility to interact with the museum is via an email interface. The major goal of sites adhering to the Web 1.0 philosophy is to convey authentic information from the museum to the visitor. Hence, providing ways to conveniently access the wealth of stored information is of prime interest. In principle, two different strategies can be discerned: searching and browsing (Marchionini & Shneiderman, 1998). With searching, we refer to information seeking behaviour based on the comparison of particular attributes, e.g. finding all information related to a particular artist or a particular title of a painting. In contrast, browsing refers to the information seeking behaviour where associative links between information items are explored to locate relevant information. In a nutshell, searching refers to target-oriented search behaviour whereas browsing means rather explorative and associative search behaviour. Searching, obviously, requires that the user has some understanding of what actually might be available. Pragmatically speaking, in order to search for information regarding a particular artist, the artist’s name must be known to the user. Especially when it comes to names, the problem of different transliterations becomes apparent. Just as an example, the name of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich provides quite some variations in spelling, ranging from Malevic to Malewitsch8. Providing exact string match functionality only,
the burden of choosing the correct spelling, where correct means the spelling used by the information source, is left at the shoulders of the visitor. When misspelling the search term, mediocre search results will be the consequence. The Yad Vashem Web sites provides additional search options for their photo archive in the digital collections9. In their “Advanced Search” option, the user may choose among various string matching options such as exact, fuzzy or soundex. Obviously, the use of thesauri is another option to normalise a variety of name spellings. A prominent example is the thesauri collection of the Getty Foundation10. Browsing comes in various flavours at museum Web sites. The Centre Pompidou provides access to their collection via tree structures. The visitor may browse along the edges of the tree until particular artefacts are reached and displayed11. In addition, the number of artefacts that match the selected criteria is shown to the user. This feature is dramatically helpful to anticipate the size of the result set. Sadly, though, this helpful feature is seldom available at museum Web sites. An aesthetically pleasing application of temporal browsing is implemented at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, i.e. the so-called Mapa del Tiempo12. Along concentric circles, the time of creation of artefacts in the museum’s collection is indicated. The circles are divided into eight differently coloured segments, each of which representing a century. Dots represent artefacts that were created in a particular year. Within each segment, the closer a dot is to the centre of the concentric circles the older is the respective artefact in relation to the selected century. The colour intensity of the dot indicates the number of artefacts in a specific year. The semantics of the colour intensity is straightforward in that the more artefacts are available the darker appears the dot. When clicking on a particular dot, the respective artefacts are shown in the centre of the circles. For the visitor this feature shows the temporal distribution of artefacts in the possession of the museum in an easy to grasp fashion. The
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idea could be further expanded as to also display background information on the artefacts. Also belonging to the category of browsing, the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History13 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a prime example of providing educational material for the visitors to explain art movements in a spatiotemporal context. The various art epochs are illustrated with samples of the museum’s collection. By moving a slider on the top of the map, the visitor may change the time period of interest. Representative samples of artefacts are then displayed on the respective parts of a world map where the artefact was created. When zooming in to a particular region, more artefacts from the selected region are displayed together with explanatory material about historical key events and the artworks themselves. Hence, the visitor gets a very detailed impression of the museum’s collection as well as educational descriptions of the particularities of the artefacts. With the examples presented above, the museums want to provide access to their collection for the visitor of the Web site. The access is independent from the physical arrangement of the artefacts in the premises of the real museum. The Art Gallery of New South Wales provides a virtual walkthrough for its exhibition ARTEXPRESS 0914. By using a QuickTime VR view the visitor gets an impression of the actual hanging of artefacts in the exhibition. The artefacts in the QuickTime VR view are interlinked with images and descriptions of the artefacts on the Web site. In principle, such an approach provides a feeling for the real exhibition space to the visitor of the Web site. Due to the fact that the QuickTime VR view and the descriptions are in separate windows of the browser, the application appears to be rather clumsy to use. The primary goal of Web sites adhering to the Web 1.0 paradigm is to provide curated information to the user. The mode of communication is thus strictly unidirectional, i.e. from the museum to the visitor. Ease of access to the information is of vital importance at these sites.
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WEB 2.0 The central idea of Web 2.0 is to engage the visitor in a conversation where the visitor is able to raise her voice and engage in discussions or join an online community around a particular museum. In other words, Web 2.0 means a many-to-many mode of communication that enables the museum to maintain a cultural dialogue with its audience in real time (Russo, Watkins, Kelly & Chan, 2008). However, the flipside of the coin is that if museums do not jump on the Web 2.0 communication paradigm the dialogue will be held elsewhere and possibly with less reliable sources. Such a situation was already foreseen in a seminal paper on museums in the networked society (Trant, 1999). In this chapter, Jennifer Trant drew the picture of museum Web sites vs. Web sites of art enthusiasts. She claimed that the values a museum has to offer are authenticity, context and interpretation. However, in order to provide a holistic exposition, museums are urged to interlink their holdings with other institutions to provide a narrative beyond their own particular holdings. In fact, Web 2.0 features can be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the museum can take advantage of the already established avenues of social platforms. In this case the museum moves into arenas where potential visitors are used to spend some amount of time in their online life. Examples are marked by the above-mentioned platforms like Facebook, Flickr or Twitter. Secondly, the museum can chose to provide Web 2.0 features on its own platform or cooperate with other institutions to build their own platform. The advantage of the first approach is obvious in that a considerably large user group is already at hand. In the second approach this user group is yet to be created; this in competition with other social platforms for their share on the online life of the networked society. The advantage of the second approach is that potentially only interested people will join, thus making it easier to ensure intellectual quality of the conversation on the platform. Choosing this
Museums on the Web
second avenue, museums are faced with some noteworthy structural ambiguities, as pointed out in (Russo, Watkins, Kelly & Chan, 2006). • •
•
The museum is unable to predict the ways in which the social platform will be used. The number of users willing to participate is hard to predict which leads to uncertainties regarding the needed technical infrastructure of the platform. The consistent length and duration of participation is hard to plan for.
For a typical museum presentation in Facebook consider the Museo Nacional del Prado15 with about 30,000 followers, so-called fans in Facebook terminology, as of April 2010. The museum regularly provides news about current exhibitions, selections of its holdings as well as information on how to access the museum. For establishing a communication channel with Facebook users it is of vital importance that the museum regularly provides new information in order to continuously reach its fans. This issue is seemingly ignored by the Musée d’Orsay16 that only reports on the current number of fans from time to time, probably one of the lesser relevant pieces of information. For the final and most comprehensive example of Facebook appearance consider the Metropolitan Museum of Art17. In this case, Facebook is further used to provide a sort of universal access point for information on the museum shared on other social media such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. Together with a section “Artwork of the Day from the Met” and coupled access to the museum’s collection database the visitor is invited to explore the museum. The Facebook user community is rewarding this effort and about 155,000 users are fans of this museum as of April 2010. The “Artwork of the Day” is a particularly profitable feature that may be used to provide new information for the visitor each time she enters the Web site. Coupled with educational material describing why the artefact is of importance, the
museum would contribute to a deeper understanding for the visitor. Another nice example in this direction is the “Object of the Week” Blog at the Powerhouse Museum18 where curators describe an artefact of the museum’s holdings. In particular, the description contains hints on what makes the artefact special for the curator. It thus adds a human-touch to the Web appearance of the museum. Flickr is another prominent Web 2.0 platform with museum appearances. Flickr is a very popular photo sharing platform where users can upload, comment on, and tag images. Especially the user-generated tags prove to be very efficient for describing the contents of an image thus facilitating search and retrieval for other users. We will, however, postpone a discussion of the benefits of user-generated tags for further down in this Section. The Powerhouse Museum was one of the early adaptors of social photo sharing. Their rationale behind the decision of making available a substantial portion of the photographic collection is that this “gives much wider exposure to our images and also encourages the public to add tags and comments”19. In this case the museum shares its holdings with the Flickr community. A different approach is taken by the Metropolitan Museum of Art20. Here photos from the museum, being either event or behind-the-scenes of exhibitions photographs, as well as photos from visitors are shared. The number of users who are allowed to upload photos is restricted to group members, thus a certain degree of moderation is enforced by the museum. The final general Web 2.0 platform we want to mention is Twitter. Basically, Twitter is a microblogging service where messages of maximum 140 characters can be shared with other Twitter users. Typically, this channel of communication is used for exhibition announcements, special events, reference to press coverage, or the like. An archetypical example would be “Kandinsky final days - only through Jan 13! Make the most of your museum experience on-site & online:
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http://ow.ly/Tqio”, a message sent out by the Guggenheim Museum to announce the near-end date of a special exhibition21. It should be noted that this message has been retweeted, i.e. the Twitter jargon for forwarding a message, numerous times and thus expectedly reached a huge number of Twitter users. Another flavour of the Web 2.0 idea is to involve visitors in a collaborative description of the museum’s artefacts. This approach is referred to as social tagging. Such an approach holds the promise of making artefacts easier findable in the visitors’ language and the visitors’ concepts as opposed to the curators’ jargon of traditional descriptions. In addition, the vocabulary used for social tagging is current, flexible, inherently multilingual and multicultural (Matusiak, 2006). The downside, however, is the widely missing aggregation of tags, such as singular vs. plural forms, misspellings, abbreviations and synonyms. There is room for research in integrating social tagging with thesauri to overcome this limitation. Also among the early adopters of social tagging is the Powerhouse Museum. After about six months of operation, the user community submitted some 3,400 tags for artefacts in the Powerhouse Collection database. Sebastian Chan observes, “these user keywords most often are generally descriptive, allowing users to discover objects that are difficult to discover through the Museum’s formal classification system” (Chan, 2007). Somehow as a confirmation of the usefulness of user-generated tags, in a Twitter message Sebastian Chan wrote22: “Moderating tags I come across this tagged accurately as ‘poo’ -http://bit. ly/2332rM”. The artefact thus tagged is a metal sanitary pan from the Powerhouse collection23. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is about collaboration and thus transcending the traditional roles of information providers and information consumers. Hence, the mode of communication is typically multidirectional between the museum and its visitors. Using well-established social media platforms, the museum can dramatically increase
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its potential outreach. Moreover, experiments have shown that the user community willingly volunteers in enriching artefact descriptions by providing tags. Together these tags form a socalled folksonomy that facilitates information access for other visitors.
WEB 3D While the Web 2.0 revolution is currently in the state of being institutionalised, Web 3D might contribute to the foundations of a new one. In contrast to the traditional (HTML-based) Web browser interface strictly following a two-dimensional approach, a number of technologies have already been developed in order to extend the Web browsing experience to the third dimension. One of the first approaches, VRML, has been succeeded by X3D, which is now the de-facto standard for Internet-based 3D content24. Besides the official standards, there are various browser plug-ins currently available or in development, ranging from pure 3D graphic API’s to sophisticated game engine plug-ins. Deployment of Web 3D content is, however, not necessarily tied to using a Web browser, as there are a number of standalone platforms for displaying and interacting with online 3D content. A 3D environment might indeed offer several advantages to cultural heritage institutions for presenting their respective content, as users for example have the ability to rotate objects and view them from different perspectives in a more natural way. As this feature would intuitively best apply to three-dimensional objects like sculptures or architecture, it might be perceived as not beneficial for the presentation of two-dimensional objects like paintings or drawings, which are usually best enjoyed from their front view. A study presented in (Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000) does, however, report that there are significant differences in the individual interpretation of 2D artworks when viewed in a 3D environment compared to
Museums on the Web
traditional viewing. Two groups of students were presented either with a paper reproduction or with a 3D presentation of the same painting that they had not seen before. Afterwards they were asked to complete various tasks such as to find an appropriate title for the painting or to describe its perceived meaning. The results indicated that the members of the 3D group tended to “think not ‘what’ they faced, but to ‘why’ or ‘how’ something was in front of them”, that they were “more likely to conceptualise their experience at an abstract level” and that “the VR experience tended to stimulate a free and imaginative elaboration of the inputs” (Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000). A number of institutions have already built virtual replicas of their premises in 3D, thus allowing the virtual visitors to move through the museum almost as they would do in real-life. But there are more opportunities to employ a 3D environment for the visualisation of museum artefacts. One option is to include objects from the museum’s archive that are currently not on display, presenting them in an adapted environment that could for example be based on the regular museum premises, i.e. the multiple replication of its exhibition rooms, thus extending the physical museum into the potentially infinite virtual space. Another option would be to utilise more abstract visualisation metaphors focusing on various relations that exist between the different artefacts. The latter approach might be very useful if the intention of the virtual environment lies in education rather than mere presentation. In (de Byl, 2009), reification, i.e. realisation instead of simulation, is mentioned as the most important pedagogical aspect of so-called 3D virtual learning environments (3DVLE’s). In that sense, finding strategies for directly visualising artefact relations like teacher/student relationships between their respective creators might for example be better suited for learning than the direct simulation of the museum’s premises. Another interesting approach that can facilitate learning is to create 3D
games for conveying the museum’s artefacts or their thematic background in a playful way. Some 3D environments also offer multi-user capabilities, leading to the term multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). Impersonated as avatars, multiple users can simultaneously interact with the shared environment and with each other, thus promoting the feeling of co-presence and being part of a community. In (Di Blas, Gobbo & Paolini, 2005) it is argued that these multi-user features are essential for creating the feeling of “virtual presence, i.e. the feeling of being there with someone else, engaged in some kind of activity”. The authors believe that this feeling is much more important for a satisfactory virtual visit than the quality of the graphics or the realism of reproductions. Moreover, the principles of social tagging, as presented in the previous Section, can obviously also be applied, thus combining both synchronous and asynchronous means of communication within the same setting. A well-known example for a MUVE is the above-mentioned platform Second Life. As an example for an abstract 3D approach, a browser plug-in based visualisation system that is following the metaphor of an information landscape is proposed in (Ruffaldi, Evangelista, Neri, Carrozzino & Bergamasco, 2008). In a case study applied to a graphic arts collection from Lucca/ Italy, the user is presented with an environment where the information is thematically arranged in 3D space, beginning with the choice of four different techniques, namely watercolour, engraving, drawing, and lithography. After choosing a technique, a path leads to a cube-like structure where the walls act as canvases for up to four related presentations (history of the technique, materials and tools, demo images, iconographical comparisons). Each of the presentations can again link to additional information, for example a step-by-step explanation of how to produce pastel drawings. In that case, a series of images describing the technique, arranged sequentially behind each other in 3D space, is presented.
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The authors claim that the system is supposed to complement traditional channels of information presentation, providing a “visual language well suitable to convey visual signs like drawings and prints” (Ruffaldi et al., 2008). Somewhat in between purely abstract information visualisation and close-to-real replicas, some approaches combine the best of both worlds. The Exploratorium in San Francisco for example maintains an island25 in Second Life, following the design goal to show content that can only be represented in or facilitated through a virtual environment. Although the visitors are impersonated as avatars that are moving in a real-world like environment, they are offered activities that would be impossible in a real museum, such as changing the visual and positional frames of reference, changing the scales of objects, creating hyperlinked information on exhibits or experiencing dangerous situations (Rothfarb & Doherty, 2007). A quite realistic replica of a real museum is the Second Life representation of the Old Masters Picture Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections26. The impressive neo-renaissance facade and all the rooms of the museum are modelled true-to-scale. The virtual museum features all 750 masterpieces from the permanent exhibition. Virtual visitors can roam around, communicate with other visitors and listen to the original audio guide recordings for selected artefacts. As an exact replica of a historic site, the Palace Museum Beijing, in cooperation with IBM, offers the multi-user environment “The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time”27. The virtual world provides an exact virtual replica of the historic forbidden city of Beijing, populated by historical computer-controlled characters as well as online visitors, volunteers and museum staff. The visitor’s avatar can freely walk through the historic area or take a guided tour, either passively observing the ongoing activities or actively participating by interacting with other visitors. For many objects, additional information is available on mouse-click. Photos, places and items of interest can be saved
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and shared with the online community and features for planning a real visit are available as well. Since museum replicas in environments like Second Life have to be manually modelled in a tedious and time-consuming process, several research projects are working on authoring systems that support museum professionals in the creation process. In (Mateevitsi, Safkianos, Lepouras & Vassilakis, 2008), a system is proposed that is based on a commercial game engine, featuring both authoring and presentation modules. The authoring interface is aimed at museum curators with limited programming and design skills, allowing them to arrange and to annotate artefacts within a 3D environment that has previously been created by a digital content producer. The visitor interface provides users with either third- or first-person views of the virtual museum. When a visitor approaches an artefact, additional information is displayed automatically. As an additional feature, a museum guide avatar leads visitors to artefacts of interest that are chosen based on metadata properties matching those of the currently viewed object. Besides authoring systems for easier content creation, additional research is focused on methods for the automatic generation of virtual museums. The authors of (Amigoni & Schiaffonati, 2009) present a system that assists curators of archaeological museums in creating virtual 3D presentations by automating the main tasks of preparing artefacts and allocating space for display. The curator chooses sets of objects, which are then automatically grouped according to up to six criteria (time, place of origin, material, culture, function, type of object). After classification, the user can further refine the automatic grouping’s result in an interactive process. The final artefact groups are then automatically placed in a predefined room-based 3D environment. Various fine-tuning possibilities regarding how the different groups should be arranged across the different rooms enable the curator to influence the automatic
Museums on the Web
placement. The resulting virtual museum can be viewed with standard VRML-viewer software. Another application for 3D environments in a museum setting, are educational games. WolfQuest28, a single- and multi-user 3D game created by the Zoo Minnesota, has the goal to teach the behaviour of wolves and other animals living in the Yellowstone National Park. In the multiplayer online version, up to five players find themselves in the roles of wild wolves that are about to explore their environment and to hunt together. According to (Schaller, Goldman, Spickelmier, Allison-Bunnell & Koepfler, 2009), user evaluation shows that the topics that are covered by the game are effectively conveyed. While Web 3D technologies are an interesting tool for conveying museum content over the Web, they can also be employed to museumrelated activities that are not directly dealing with content presentation itself. Second Life has, for example, been used for staging virtual meetings like the ICOM’s International Museums Day in 2008 (Hazan, 2008). Another rather unusual application of the 3D virtual environments consists of producing so-called Machinima movies, 3D animations that are solely produced from within a 3D environment like Second Life or from a 3D game. “Tour of the solar system”29 is an example for such a Machinima movie that was created from within the Exploratorium museum’s island in Second Life. As the utilisation of 3D interaction elements in museum presentations is still in its infancy, some further careful analysis is needed. Especially the following points still lack a conclusive answer. Web browser based information presentation vs. standalone client: The main advantage of using browser plug-in Web 3D technology lies in the fact that no further software has to be installed besides a usually small browser plug-in. This should reduce the entry barrier for many users, as some of them might likely be reluctant to download and install multi-megabyte applications just for trying out a Web 3D experience. On the other hand,
standalone client software usually allows for more resource-intensive presentations, featuring more detail and graphical quality. Moreover, standalone clients are currently a must when special human interface devices like 3D mice, space navigators, or sophisticated VR displays like power-walls or even CAVE environments are to be employed. Abstract visualisation metaphor vs. closeto-real replicas: Regardless of their potential in visualising conceptual and/or abstract content, purely information visualisation based approaches can sometimes be rather non-intuitive to use and visually confusing, the latter especially when large bodies of text are part of the presentation. Careful visual and interaction design can, however, lead to impressive results. Close-to-real replicas on the other hand might be easier to comprehend and navigate, but might miss a lot of opportunities that originate from novel uses of the three dimensions. Single-user vs. multi-user environments: Multi-user environments can provide the feeling of virtual presence, foster communication and facilitate learning through shared experiences. Although these advantages are obvious, they heavily depend on participation. A multi-user environment can only be successful when visited by multiple people simultaneously for the social interaction to possibly take place. As this might not always be the case, they should be designed with the single-user in mind, in order to make even a lonely stay interesting enough at least until potential company appears. Pre-built vs. dynamically generated environments: Designing a dedicated environment for a virtual museum can be a time-consuming task that consumes lots of resources. Automatic and/ or dynamic content generation can help to reduce these efforts but might lack of human expertise and consistent storytelling, simply appearing to be too artificial. Semi-automated methods of content generation might offer the right trade-off between quality of content and resource usage.
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MOBILE WEB In parallel to the tremendous changes in perception and usage of the Internet leading to what we now call Web 2.0, the recent years have also brought exciting developments on the mobile device sector. Devices like Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Android platform are narrowing the gap between cell phones and laptops, enabling mobile users to browse the Internet and watch sophisticated multimedia content while on the go. In this Section we provide a review of some mobile applications in museum-like environments. Some of those, however, are still in a rather experimental state but nevertheless provide exciting hints on what might be available in the near future. These recent technological advances offer numerous possibilities for cultural heritage institutions to explore new ways of mobile user interaction and to reach audiences beyond the physical museum and/or its Web site. Indeed, a growing number of cultural heritage applications are currently being developed. Taking Apple’s iPhone as an example, a search for the term “museum” in Apple’s AppStore30 returns 130 hits, as of 6 January 2010. Figure 1 shows the cumulative development for these applications throughout the year 2009.
Within the cultural heritage sector, however, mobile devices have already been in use for quite some time, although their use was mainly focused on conveying (off-line) acoustic information about exhibits or locations of interest. These audio guides are nowadays offered for rent at the majority of the larger venues. In order to reduce the cost incurred by the maintenance of museum-owned devices, some institutions have also experimented with mobile audio tours that are either offered on-line to visitor owned cell-phones or in form of audio files that have to be downloaded to an MP3 player prior to the visit. Surveys like (Samis & Pau, 2009) however have shown that the majority of visitors using a mobile guide preferred to use devices that are provided by the institution rather than bringing their own. This might be related to the occasionally poor reception in cell phone networks and the normally horrendous roaming costs for tourists. The nine times higher usage rates of the downloadable MP3 audio files seemed to emphasise these assumptions. Yet, also the podcast approach was rather rejected by the visitors, probably because it required pre-visit planning. Another interesting finding was the fact that the usage rates of mobile museum guides rose from 3-4% to 20-61% after offering them for free to every museum visitor. However, offering
Figure 1. Cumulative number of released/updated iPhone applications 2009, search term “museum”
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museum-owned mobile guides free of charge for a growing number of museum visitors would lead to even more growing maintenance costs. Hence, a widely satisfactory solution for delivering mobile museum guide content to visitor–owned devices is still missing. The Getty museums for example introduced a sophisticated handheld device called the GettyGuide, integrating streaming-audio content with image and text information and assisted by location sensing technology tracking each user’s position within the museum’s premises. Yet, the project was discontinued because the “complexity and demands of the architecture are such that it may never operate at a sustainable and acceptable level, without constant supervision from museum IT and ITS staff”. 31 Regardless of the above-mentioned problems with successful deployment, a growing number of institutions is nevertheless involved in the development of more sophisticated multimedia guides. Throughout the recent years, a number of Web based forums, run by museum professionals, have emerged, dealing exclusively with the issues of mobile devices in a museum context. The Tate Handheld Conference32 for example maintains a wiki that was initially thought of as a preparation tool for upcoming conferences. By now it turned into a resource and repository for case studies and best practice in mobile interpretation for museums. Additional mobile features do, however, demand additional effort for the creation and the updating of the presented content. (Smith, 2009) for example argues that the adoption of the traditional tour-based approach that has been widely applied for the audio guide would leave out many opportunities that could extend the museum visit experience otherwise, namely using the mobile device as a digital surrogate, an assistant, rather than a tour guide. The author claims that the high cost associated with the audio content production has contributed to the present state where only a small subset of the theoretically available information is accessible on mobile devices. This
often stands in contrast to the institutions’ Web sites, which are currently transcending towards a more user-curated approach, offering the whole collection for browsing and searching instead of just presenting selected highlights as it is the case with most of the current audio guides. Therefore, institutions that are about to perform the transition towards more multimedia-enabled mobile devices are encouraged to make the entire collection available, to provide way-finding facilities, to offer recommendation services and to contextualise the presented information. While the previously mentioned suggestions might be valuable extensions to mobile devices that are used exclusively at the museum’s premises, this is not necessarily the case with online mobile museum content that can be accessed from everywhere and anytime, either being provided as a mobile phone application or as Web content optimized for mobile devices. In the Blog “Electronic Museum”33 it is argued that the mobile browsing experience is far inferior to the desktop browsing experience (Ellis, 2009). Furthermore, it is criticised that mobile museum content is often provided more on a because-we-can rather than on a because-we-must basis by simply putting museum collections online as they are in some kind of mobile format. However, mobile users are believed to prefer the following two usage paradigms according to (Ellis, 2009): • •
“find some information and get out as quickly as possible, and use the capability of the mobile bit of the experience to do something … ‘mobile’.”
The first statement refers to the opinion that the main purpose of a mobile device is to inform people on the go about opening times and directions how to get there and that there is no reason to provide sophisticated collection searching capabilities just to be performed on a two-inch screen of a mobile device. Any laptop or desktop computer is by far more suitable for that and there is no need to
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browse museum collections out on the street. The only exception to this is said to be if the “mobile experience adds something, if it augments the real experience rather than just providing a poor facsimile of an online experience” (Ellis, 2009). From that point of view it can be concluded that a mobile device might be very useful for providing additional information about objects or places that are currently visited in the real world and/or for recommendations on what to see next rather than to be used as a stand-alone tool. The developments in the mobile application sector might contribute a big step forward for reaching the state of the Ubiquitous Museum as envisioned by Kevin Sumption, which is characterised as “a comprehensive archive of material culture, capable of operating in all places and at all times” (Sumption, 2006). As it emerges from the ongoing discussions, however, care has to be taken about the context in which mobile devices are about to be employed. With that respect it might as well be useful to distinguish between indoor and outdoor mobile applications, the former being tailored for more or less exclusive use inside the museum walls, the latter offering general access outside a particular museum institution. With the CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Presentation) project34, a cross-disciplinary research project that combines aspects from cultural heritage with computer science, a prototypical mobile indoor application is under development. The CHIP project consists of the following three different components. An Artwork Recommender, where a user can browse through the collection and find artworks of interest to her. The Tour Wizard, where a visitor can create a tour through the museum to see the artworks that are of most interest to her. Finally, the Mobile Tour, a PDA-based tool that assists the visitor while she is on-site visiting the museum and give further information. The scenario for the visitor is as follows. The visitor logs on to the CHIP Web site and registers an account and creates a tour of all the artworks from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that she
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wants to visit later. With the help of the CHIP Artwork Recommender, different artists, styles and artworks from the same period of time can be examined and added to a personalised tour (Wang, Stash, Aroyo, Gorgels, Rutledge & Schreiber, 2008). The information can then be downloaded to a mobile guide and thus be taken into the museum, where the mobile guide directs the visitor through the Rijksmuseum according to the prior created tour and provides further description for the artworks. With the included recommender system, the mobile guide also offers the possibility for searching similar artworks on-site. Users are also able to adapt an ongoing tour by rating a currently viewed artwork, by setting the duration of the tour or by changing the number of artefacts to be viewed (Wang, Aroyo, Stash, Sambeek, Schuurmans, Schreiber & Gorgels, 2009). The mobile guide offers different types of adaptation on-site. The CHIP mobile guide is able to perform the following three major steps (Roes, Stash, Wang & Aroyo, 2009). •
• •
Filter out artworks from the previously selected tour that do not fit the other artworks on the tour. Add artworks to the tour that fit the usermodel of the previously selected tour. Reorder the artworks so to ensure an optimal visitation sequence within the museum.
The tour is adjusted according to implicit ratings like monitoring the visitor’s position and the time duration spent at an artwork, as well as explicit ratings like user ratings of artworks and the amount of time that a user wants to spend in a museum. Since museum visits are something that is often done in a collaborative manner, it is possible to combine the tours of two previously created user-profiles. A visitor can therefore add artefacts she is interested in from another userprofile into her tour, or a new tour can be created
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that combines both tours or even making detours for each visitor and include meeting points. The goal of the PEACH project, another recent indoor application, is to provide an intuitive approach for mobile guides (Rocchi, Stock & Zancanaro, 2006). The project follows two different principles. The first principle is obtrusiveness, i.e. the visitor should concentrate on the artworks instead of having to constantly manipulate the mobile guide. The second principle is delegation. The user is constantly able to interact with the mobile guide and express feedback. This led to the implementation of a graphical widget, the so-called like-o-meter, where the visitor is able to score and evaluate information that is presented by the mobile guide by expressing her degree of liking/disliking. This information is used to build a user-model that gives the system an idea of the visitor’s preferences and is therefore able to adapt the amount of information that is presented for other artworks. This way the visitor should get a mobile guide that is specifically designed for her. Since the intensity of experience is the highest when the visitor stands in front of an artwork, this would be the right time to associate feelings and facts as tags with the artwork. Art-sonomy allows visitors to associate tags to artefacts while they are on-site at a museum and in front of an artefact. Thus, allowing for the creation of a folksonomy on-spot by using mobile devices. In order to identify the artefacts, Art-sonomy makes use of QR-codes. QR-codes are 2D barcodes that can be decoded with any mobile phone that has QRReader software installed. Since there are many open-source programs available for all kinds of mobile system platforms, these programs are usually free of charge. The functionality of Artsonomy basically consists of three parts. The first part is the encoding and placement of a QR-code next to an artefact. In the second part the visitor has to decode the QR-code which is associated to an artwork and is then forwarded to the Artsonomy website. In the last part, the user is able to associate any kind of tags with the artefact
over the Web site. The new tag is then visualised in a tag-cloud together with other tags that are associated with the artefact (Ghiron, Medaglia & Perrone, 2009). Turning now to outdoor applications, one obvious advantage of mobile devices is the fact that they can almost always be carried with while on the go. The additional GPS features of recent smartphones enable the development of locationbased services or services that inform interested people about historic events that have taken place at any outdoor location or visualise how a place has changed throughout history. Moreover, the increasing presence of public art projects or artworks, especially in urban environments, tempts one to perceive the surrounding environment as a potential art museum by itself. The Urban Art Guide Berlin35 for example provides a platform for the presentation of Graffiti art that obviously does not fit within museum walls. An iPhone application using the embedded Google maps functionality displays the locations of various Graffiti art sites and thus assists potential visitors in finding interesting locations while roaming through the streets of Berlin. Images of newly discovered sites can be uploaded by the users either trough their iPhone or from a public Web site. All the presented artworks can be rated, commented on and recommended to others. Instead of guiding people to sites with real objects, the Museum of the Phantom City36 offers an iPhone application called Otherfutures, revealing interesting information about visionary architectural projects by people like Buckminster Fuller that were proposed for the city of New York, but never got realised. It serves as “a window onto the city that could have been”, and thus enabling visitors to “see the city as fantasised by architects and other visionaries throughout history.” The mobile application strictly follows a locationbased approach by only showing information to people really standing at the respective real-world location, otherwise presenting a somewhat ironical
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invitation to please venture closer to location to view this feature. Another outdoor museum project from Japan, simply called Ubiquitous Museum37 enables mobile phone users to get informed about various stories that have taken place at various locations, currently offered for the city of Onomichi/Hiroshima and the Tokyo district Marunouchi. This Web-based application presents the information after the user has read in a 2D bar code, performed a GPS search or entered a zone selection manually. The system also includes the functionality to leave notes with location-data by email. Hence, the “entire city becomes a live, on-site bulletin board that serves as a database of community memory. Historians in the future may use these layers of memories accumulated everyday, as an archive of live history.” Less focusing on hidden information about the surrounding environment, the iPhone application Narb – People Filtered Art38 provides a mobile Web site that lists exhibitions in various European cities and adds social features like filtering and discussion, rating and commenting. People using the mobile application can exchange opinions about the visited exhibitions, submit new venues and add photos of artworks. If the users like an artwork, they can add it to their personal virtual collection. Additionally, the developing company provides art institutions with an API that makes all the collected information available for further processing. In an interview (van’t Zelfde, 2009), the designer of the application summarises the first experiences with the deployment of the application at the Rotterdam Museum Night. There were many downloads of the application and site visits but just light usage of the commenting, rating and collecting features. The reason for that is believed to be that “users might not have understood what the service was about at all and that the museum night was so crowded with people that the human density factor squashed out use of social media.” The presented projects clearly indicate that there exist a variety of exciting applications for
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mobile Web devices in a museum context. Using handhelds as windows to ubiquitous information spaces facilitates experiences that are otherwise not possible from stationary computing equipment. It does, however, remain open how these offerings are and will be taken over by the potential audience, especially with respect to social media features.
DISCUSSION The main focus of our study was to show the current diversity of approaches for Web-based interaction between museums and their visitors. In general, museums realise that their Web presence today has to serve different goals compared to the time when evidence of existence was sufficient, and museums published selected highlights from their collection. This leads to a behaviour that (Schweibenz, 1998) calls “cultural window shopping”. The museum today competes for its share on the online-time of its potential visitor. Thus, issues of explanatory power, playfulness, and cooperation are gaining importance. As a consequence, the Web visitor is increasingly invited to contribute information. At the same time, with the movement towards offering access to the complete collection for the Web visitor, these contributions prove valuable to ease access for others. The lessons learned from the multi-institution endeavours Steve39 and Flickr commons40 clearly advocate the benefits of user-generated content in a museum environment. Basically, user-generated content provides a perfect way to bring the descriptions of artefacts closer to the reception of the visitor. Additionally, visitors may contribute their personal knowledge about artefacts and thus help to make the experience of the collection even richer. In practice, museums have created a separation of physical and virtual museum domains. The virtual and the physical museum are often acting as autonomous institutions. Both offer useful information yet do not really interact. One actual approach to combine the two spheres is the use of
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multimedia guides in the physical museum. Their main focus though is on explaining and giving further information about artefacts, but they do not necessarily take the online domain into account. One approach to build a bridge between virtual and physical museum is the use of augmented reality. As mobile devices become more technologically advanced, e.g. smartphones come equipped with an embedded camera, GPS-receiver and compass, they become useful as augmented reality devices in a physical museum environment. Additional information or other similar artefacts can be put on display while the visitor is looking at the actual artwork. Another interesting approach could be to bring virtual visitors in touch with the physical visitors of a museum. Information that was generated at the virtual museum could be imported into the physical museum. This could be realised as easily as showing information like tags or other user-generated content in the physical museum. This would provide the means of asynchronous communication between virtual and physical visitors. A more advanced approach would be to allow that virtual visitors see the location of physical visitors and enable interaction. Moreover physical visitors could be aware of what is going on at the virtual museum by using the multimedia devices as windows to the virtual museum. Together this might foster synchronous interaction between physical and virtual visitors. After the description of positive effects of museum presentation in the Web age, we have to point to some criticism arising from the increasing use of technological aids in a museum environment. It can certainly be argued, that an intellectual approach towards the presentation of art, the inclusion of social networking features and the use of mobile Web applications in-house, sometimes the feeling of technology use for its own sake remains. Visitors are equipped with heaps of background information omitting the space to admire the artefact itself. As the visitor might spend a substantial amount of time to
digest background information about the artists, cross-references to other artefacts and epochs, the time available for the actual admiration of the artefacts, its unique aura and charisma is reduced. Therefore the use of mobile multimedia guides can be especially criticised, since they are being used directly on-site of the actual artefact. Malfunctioning or non-intuitive mobile-guides might overstrain visitors and break their concentration and admiration of the artefact and therefore impair the museum visit. Since a multimedia guide should be used to give further information about the artefacts, it should be possible to see a difference in the duration of time spent in front of artefacts. As reported in (Bartneck, Masuoka, Takahashi & Fukaya, 2007) more than 50% of the visitors used the multimedia guide for five or less artefacts (with a total of 30 artefacts in the exhibition during the study). The system was used for 20 minutes on average with an average duration of the museum visit of 60 minutes. The study also revealed the interesting detail that the participants frequently used the mobile guide in the rooms close to the entrance and by far less in rooms that are further away. It therefore seems like the visitors used the guide after entering the museum and then stopped its usage. One reason for such a behavioural pattern could be that, due to being exposed to additional information, visitors experience a feeling of fatigue. Similarly, because of spending time exploring the contents of the multimedia guide, the time budget for the museum visit is consumed after only a couple of rooms. So, for the design of multimedia guides it is vital to analyse carefully various museum visitation patterns. We have highlighted various Web-based interaction ideas between museum and visitor. Of course, in order to fully exploit their potential, these ideas are not to be seen isolated but rather be employed collectively to bring the experience of a museum visit to a new level. Inviting visitors to participate in generating descriptions of artefacts as well as interlinking different artefacts, at
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best even transcending institutional borders, will generate a whole new holistic museum experience. Making use of mobile multimedia devices and 3D technology, more immersive augmented reality content can assist during the physical and virtual museum visit. Moreover, the schism between physical and virtual museum and its physical and virtual visitor can be bridged.
CONCLUSION In this chapter we have discussed current best practices in the interaction between museums and visitors on the Web. The Web allows cultural institutions to engage in a dialogue with the interested general public and thus provide an avenue to recognise the needs and interests of visitors. We have described various approaches towards interaction along different communication paradigms. Firstly, we have presented examples following a Web 1.0 approach that is characterised as a one-to-many communication paradigm. Here the museum plays the role of content provider whereas the visitors act as content recipients. The issue of prime interest in this case is on providing access to the collection of the museum together with educational material describing the particularities of artefacts. Hence, assistance in searching, browsing and interconnecting information is of vital importance. Secondly, a steadily increasing number of museums enter the dialogue with visitors in a Web 2.0 fashion. In this case, the visitor is invited to actively contribute content in various forms, e.g. visitor-generated descriptions of artefacts, or sharing and discussing private impressions and thoughts. In that, visitors and museum together form a social network based on common interests. In a nutshell, following a Web 2.0 approach means that the museum has the chance to maintain a cultural dialogue with its actual and potential audience in real-time. This, however, also means
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that the museum must accept to transfer at least a certain amount of authority on the contents into the hands of the visitors. Thirdly, we have discussed emerging possibilities of showing museum content in 3D virtual spaces. The width of applications ranges from 3D representations of particular artefacts thus enabling the visitor to look at the artefact from different angles and gain a much deeper impression, to multi-user virtual environments where online museum visits can be undertaken together with other people and still having the feeling of co-presence of the visitors, thus facilitating social interaction. The virtual installation of the museum exhibition provides a perfect environment to transcend restrictions found in the physical world. Artefacts can be regrouped dynamically on-demand. This can be used to present different exhibitions or present exhibitions from different thematic viewpoints for different visitor groups. Additionally, artefacts can be included in the virtual exhibitions that are not available for whatever reasons. All this will lead to a holistic experience for the individual visitor that can be shared with others. Finally, we have shown exciting examples of usage ideas for contemporary mobile devices in museum environments. Here, on the one hand, the visitor who is on-site of a museum can be assisted in getting more information on artefacts when needed thus contributing to a richer experience of the museum visit. On the other hand, mobile devices offer the chance to act as windows on ubiquitous information spaces outside the walls of a museum. To unleash the full power of interaction between museum and visitor, the various ways of interaction are to be employed collectively. Then, the Web-presence of the museum will provide both curated authentic information as well as a whole new experience of museum visit where the visitor is actively invited to contribute her experience in describing and interlinking artefacts. This will
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prove beneficial for both sides. The museum will get to know its visitors with their expectations and reactions better. The visitor will benefit from the new possibilities of associative browsing along user-generated content to ultimately explore material that may even bridge institutional borders.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable hints to improve the chapter. This work was funded by the FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung / Austrian Science Fund), Project No. L602, “The Virtual 3D Social Experience Museum”.
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Chittaro, L., & Ranon, R. (2007). Web3D technologies in learning, education and training: Motivations, issues, opportunities. Computers & Education, 49(1), 3-18. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j. compedu.2005.06.002 Chun, S., Cherry, R., Hiwiller, D., Trant, J., & Wyman, B. (2006). Steve.museum: An ongoing experiment in social tagging, folksonomy, and museums. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Albuquerque, NM. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http:// www.archimuse.com/ mw2006/papers/ wyman/ wyman.html Cody, S. A. (1997). Historical museums on the World Wide Web: An exploration and critical analysis. The Public Historian, 19(4), 29–53. Cosley, D., Baxter, J., Lee, S., Alson, B., Nomura, S., Adams, P., et al. (2009). A tag in the hand: supporting semantic, social, and spatial navigation in museums. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Boston, MA. New York: ACM. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://doi. acm.org/ 10.1145/1518701.1518999 Di Blas, N., & Poggi, C. (2006). 3D for cultural heritage and education: Evaluating the impact. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Albuquerque, NM. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2006/papers/ diblas/diblas.html Filippini-Fantoni, S., & Bowen, J. (2007). Bookmarking in museums: Extending the museum experience beyond the visit? In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, San Francisco, CA. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/ papers/ filippini-fantoni/filippini -fantoni.html
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Haley Goldman, K. (2007). Cell phones and exhibitions 2.0: Moving beyond the pilot stage. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, San Francisco, CA. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/papers/haley Goldman/ haleyGoldman.html Minerva EC Working Group. Quality, Accessibility and Usability (Ed.). (2008). Handbook on cultural web user interaction (1st ed.). Rome, Italy: Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://www. minervaeurope.org/ publications/handbook webusers.htm Mitroff, D., & Alcorn, C. (2007). Do you know who your users are? The role of research in redesigning sfmoma.org. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.). Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Albuquerque, NM. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/papers/ mitroff/mitroff.html Parry, R., Ortiz-Williams, M., & Sawyer, A. (2007). How shall we label our exhibit today? Applying the principles of on-line publishing to an on-site exhibition. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, San Francisco, CA. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 13, 2010 from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/papers/ parry/parry.html Proctor, N. (2005). Off Base or on Target? Pros and cons of wireless and location-aware applications in the museum. In X. Perrot (Ed.), Cultural Heritage Informatics 2005, Paris, France. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ publishing/ichim05/ Proctor.pdf
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Semper, R. (2006). From on-line exhibits to online experiences to on-line community: Thirteen years of science centers experimenting with the Web. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings, Albuquerque, NM. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2006/papers/ semper/semper.html Tallon, L., & Walker, K. (Eds.). (2008). Digital technologies and the museum experience: Handheld guides and other media. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Trant, J. (2006). Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 12(1), 83–105. doi:10.1080/13614560600802940 Trant, J. (2009). Studying social tagging and folksonomy: A review and framework. Journal of Digital Information, 10(1). Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http://journals.tdl.org/ jodi/issue/ view/65 Trant, J. (2009). Tagging, folksonomy and art museums: Early experiments and ongoing research. Journal of Digital Information, 10(1). Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http://journals.tdl.org/ jodi/ issue/view/65 Urban, R., Marty, P., & Twidale, M. (2007). A Second Life for your museum: 3D multi-user virtual environments and museums. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, San Francisco, CA. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/papers/ urban/urban.html
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mobile Web: Web applications optimised for mobile devices, increasingly using location-based services.
Multi-User Virtual Environment: A computer generated environment that is visualised as 2D or simulated 3D space on the computer screen. It can be visited simultaneously by multiple users, which are able to communicate with each other either asynchronously or synchronously. Social Media: Digital media created by users that is shared on the Web via various platforms. Social Tagging/Indexing: Social tagging refers to the collaborative creation of a classification system that allows users to annotate content with arbitrary tags. User-Generated Content: Web content that is created by users and shared on various dedicated platforms like Flickr, Youtube, Facebook. Web 1.0: The Web perceived as one-to-many communication model with few content creators and many content consumers. Web 2.0: The Web perceived as many-to-many communication model where each participant has the opportunity to create and/or consume content in an equal manner. Web 3D: Web applications using 3D user interfaces.
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Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://web.archive. org/. Facebook, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.facebook.com/. Twitter, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.twitter.com/. Flickr, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.flickr.com/. YouTube, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.youtube.com/. Second Life, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www.secondlife.com/. Kunsthaus Zürich, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www.kunsthaus.ch/. See the Wikipedia articles on the painter in different languages, the English language 163
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version retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich. Yad Vashem photo archive, retrieved 13 January 2010 http://www6.yadvashem.org/ wps/portal/photo. The Getty Vocabularies, retrieved 29 March 2010, http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/. Centre Pompidou collection search, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://collection.centrepompidou.fr. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Mapa del Tiempo, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.museothyssen.org/thyssen/linea_del_ tiempo. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ world-regions/#/ 06/World-Map. Art Gallery of New South Wales, ARTEXPRESS 09, retrieved 13 January 2010, http:// www.insideartexpress.com.au/exhibition/ walk_through. Facebook page of the Museo Nacional del Prado, retrieved 12 April 2010, http://www. facebook.com/museonacionaldelprado. Facebook page of the Musée d’Orsay, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www. facebook.com/pages/Paris-France/MuseedOrsay/112753340462. Facebook page of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, retrieved 12 April 2010, http://www. facebook.com/ metmuseum. Powerhouse Museum, Object of the Week, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www. powerhousemuseum.com/collection/blog/. Find the Powerhouse Museum on Flickr, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www. powerhousemuseum.com/flickr/. Flickr group page of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www.flickr.com/groups/metmuseum/. Twitter message sent by account Guggenheim on 6 January 2010, retrieved 13 Janu-
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Museum of the Phantom City, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://phantomcity.org/. Ubiquitous Museum, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://www.elp.or.jp/organization/ archive-wsa-dokohaku.html. Narb - People Filtered Art, retrieved 13 January 2010, http://narb.me/users/home.
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Chapter 8
Activating the Networked Object for a Complex World Fiona Cameron University of Western Sydney, Australia Sarah Mengler University of Cambridge, UK
ABSTRACT The ‘networked object’ is a concept that resonates with the notion of the operation of virtual collections within mobile fluids and flows of culture outside and beyond the specific museum context concerns of traditional documentation systems. It acts as a mediator between the museum world and public culture, as it circulates between these spaces, and in various cultural, social, political and technological formations, consumed in many different and unexpected ways. The context in which the networked object now circulates and interacts is what cultural theorist Mike Featherstone (2000, pp.166-67) described as ‘global variability, global connectivity and global intercommunication’. This chapter interrogates what happens when the networked object re-connects with public culture in an uncertain, complex and globalising world and how this process intersects with, challenges and re-works the ‘authoritative’ position of heritage institutions.
BACKGROUND Museum institutions historically operate according to three seemingly contradictory dialectics – a framing founded in an elite high culture, a mission promoting democratic education (Bennett, 1995, pp. 89; Prior, 2005, pp. 17) and a rationale that seeks to operate above society in terms of the production and dissemination of knowledge. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch008
These constructs developed alongside the state, and developments in science disciplines in the nineteenth century, along with these three aims reflect various trajectories of power between various actors – the museum, the state and public culture. Reconciling these historical frames and sets of activities with digital initiatives has produced a particular set of conclusions around current and future museum digitisation and online collection activities. For the museum as a sacred space in which notion of truth and facts based on a science
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epistemology has prevailed, digitisation initiatives enabling the reconnection of museum culture with public culture would seem to transform and unravel museum authority and expertise. On the other hand within a policy discourse emphasising the value of museums as centres for knowledge and education (dcms, 2006, pp. 6), digitisation and online access to collections offers a tool for museums to achieve democratic remits. Beyond this, digitisation and networked access enables a productive relationship between public culture and museum culture to emerge as a way of gathering a broader range of associations around collections, intimately connected to cultural, social and political formations, debates and events. Here the ontological relation between public culture and museum culture in knowledge creation and dissemination becomes permeable. The suggestions offered in this chapter do not reference the fleeting and ephemeral but rather, question what happens when collections interact online and the cultural frame of reference is widened beyond the authority of the state/museum trajectory to take into account what cultural theorist John Urry refers to as ‘hyper-complexity’. Hypercomplexity according to Urry is a contemporary world characterised by mobile, global flows and fluids of culture producing new levels of interconnectivity and interaction never seen before (Urry, 2006, pp. 111). As museum collections are inducted into this world of ‘hyper-complexity’ through online initiatives, they become subject to these mobile flows and fluids.
THE CONTEXT: NETWORKING THE OBJECT The Australian Research Council funded grant Reconceptualising Heritage Collections project in which the authors (Cameron as chief investigator and Mengler as researcher) were the lead investigators studied the ‘networked object’ within the context of the Powerhouse Museum’s collections.1
The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney is New South Wales government’s prominent state museum with over 385,000 objects in it collection, covering decorative arts & design; Australian history and society; engineering and design; sciences, Koori (Indigenous) history, and culture and transport. Like many cultural institutions, only a small percentage of works (around 3% at the Powerhouse Museum) can be displayed at any one time in exhibitions. Therefore the role of an online database occupies an important role in offering access to museum collections. At the Powerhouse Museum their online projects are ambitious, intriguing and both verify and challenge notions of the role of the museum and the relations between collections and knowledge production. This, coupled with the museum’s focus on community, creativity, design, and its relation to society and everyday life made the museum an interesting partner for the project. Moreover, the diversity of the Powerhouse Museum collection meant there were significant opportunities for cross disciplinary comparative studies. The induction of the museum’s collections more directly into public culture and into mobile flows arose in June 2006 with the advent of Google-enabled searches. Such an event allowed the researchers to closely observe how this initiative enabled new forms of interaction between the various public spaces existent in networked society, and that of the museum detailed later in the discussion. It also allowed the researchers to reconceptualise what these types of interactions might say about existing and potential documentation practices within these networked environments, and how cultural theory might inform this reconceptualisation. Google mediated searches enable the ‘networked object’ to play a role in political interventions in public culture. Iranian protesters for example angered over the Hollywood movie 300 launched in early 2007 and the representation of Persians in the battle of Thermopylae2 (Figure 1) mobilised museum collections through Google to
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Figure 1. Images of contemporary graffiti art posted by the Brooklyn Museum on Flickr http://flickr. com/photos/brooklyn_museum/
counter negative contemporary representations of their culture and politics and bolster a sense identity (Jones 2007). This highlights the fluidity, complexity, contested and political nature of cultural interactions and exchanges around what an object might mean. It also demonstrates how the divide between so-called high culture and popular culture, museum culture and public culture can spontaneously dissolve, and how easily people can bring museum collections together with other cultural formations (Ibid). This chapter moves away from post-structuralist and post-postmodern formulations, typically applied to museum critique and most recently to museum collections. It rather reconsiders museum documentation systems from a particular material and cultural (hyper) complex perspective as part of a new cultural turn. Here museum classification systems are forced to reconsider universal assumptions about truth value, linear temporality and progress, certainly and instead start from a context in which the ‘net-
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worked object’ now operates. Importantly we explore theories of hyper complexity and transdisciplinarity as a means to reframe ways of understanding the relations and organisation surrounding the ‘networked object’ in today’s hyper complex, non-linear world. Our investigation offers a conceptual framework for re-imagining collections interpretative and management practices as they might operate as complex systems in these new political spaces.
MOVING BEYOND THE IMPASSE: FROM PLURALISM, MULTI-DISCIPLINARITY, INTERDISCIPLINARITY TO COMPLEXITY The museum knowledge system as we know it is underpinned by an 18th century idea of classification and materiality based around objectivity and classificatory completeness. This system,
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‘locked in’ in the 19th century with the advent of disciplinary hierarchies, acts as a frame that endows collections with a descriptive schema and significance (Bennett, 1995, p. 2). The museum became fundamental to modernism’s notion of knowledge based on scientific objectivity and material evidence, organized systematically to legitimate particular views of the natural and cultural world (Pearce, 1995, p. 139). Material objects are treated as symbolic interfaces or ‘canons’ (Hopper-Greenhill, 2000, p. 21), with culture represented as linear, separate, closed and noninteracting. Stable categories for shaping cultural life and collective memory predominantly sustain ideologies such as national and individual identity rather than engaging with other dimensions of the social and habituated patterns of use and consumption. This is what Susan Hazan (2007, p. 136) referred to in describing the museum as ‘floating’ above the community. At the core of historical museum formulations, is a closed system of collection documentation. Here categorization is the process of systematically dividing up the world of experience into a formalised and a potentially hierarchical structure of categories, each of which is defined by a unique set of features (Jacob, 2004, p. 518). The formal museum nomenclature impacts museum documentation and hence the acquisition, storage and display of museum objects. As museum documentation categories have evolved into well-defined classes and nomenclatures, they lose their original flexibility and plasticity as well as the ability to respond to new patterns. Traditional classification systems in offline documentation systems are context dependent: because the relationships established by classification are invariant and persist across time and space. These systems are resilient to the context of use in a museum setting, however they severely constrain the individual’s ability to communicate with the system in a meaningful and productive manner (Jacob, 2004, p. 538).
This ‘museum order’ assumes that it is always possible to describe all human knowledge and culture in an orderly manner and that user responses can be directed and determined if museum values are known. Moreover, there is an assumption that a logical place exists for an object entry, one that obscures other possibilities. The aim here is to do away with ambiguity and uncertainty and to offer fixed, certain and rational explanations of the world. But notion of certain and fixed values is limiting and increasingly contested, particularly in exhibition critique. Museum theorist Andrea Witcomb (2003, p. 47), for example, commentating on two exhibitions in the USA–Australia Gallery of the National Maritime Museum in Sydney notes that while one exhibition spoke to a nationalistic conception of Australia’s cultural history, the other focused on the transnational flow of cultural goods and practices. In the latter case, the Pacific became a site of exchange in which identities were not fixed, but constantly mediated by the process of cultural exchange. Museum studies and the museum sector more broadly have approached cultural theory through post-structuralist and post-modern paradigms and the politics of identity and difference, drawing attention to the ‘constructed’ and ‘plural’ nature of objects (see Hopper-Greenhill, 2000, p.152; Mason, 2006, p. 18). The notion of plurality, of multiple views and values existing in parallel is widely embraced in museums today as a means to connect with the social and the culturally diverse nature of objects beyond disciplinary constraints. This technique is used to ensure that collections perform at a higher degree of complexity than previously considered possible. Yet this multivocality is often infused within a conventional narrative. Whether in documentation or exhibitions text, it tends to maintain the authoritative author, the museum at the centre of the discourse. Plural approaches remain essentialist prone. They use a range of perspectives or voices to represent the whole, such as a community identifier.
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They act as separate, non-interacting entities and set apart difference. While often having admirable intentions, these approaches tend to pay lip service to the idea of community dialogue. Such approaches safeguard institutions against criticism in the way they describe material objects while upholding their authority to make such proclamations. Tensions between museum and curatorial disciplinary specialisms and the complex reality in which museum and collections engagement operate need to be understood. Currently a number of museums are using the rhetoric of multi-disciplinarity to contextualize the complex object. It operates as a strategic device to overcome the problem of disciplinary fragmentation following the acknowledgment that the subject knowledge of a single discipline is inadequate to grasp the complexities to which material objects resonate. Contextualization according to this paradigm, however, is a form of pluralism, where separate, static disciplinary narratives are juxtaposed to describe the object. Museologist Eilean Hopper-Greenhill (1992) draws attention to the idea of multi-disciplinarity and the way it might operate in a museum collections context when she writes: a silver teaspoon made in the eighteenth century in Sheffield would be classified as ‘Industrial Art’ in the Birmingham City Museum, ‘Decorative Art’ at Stoke-on-Trent, ‘Silver’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and ‘Industry’at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield. (p. 7) Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, claims to form bridges across disciplines involving a greater or lesser degree of integration across the various disciplinary forms. Interdisciplinarity as it might be applied to museum collections documentation acknowledges that different facets of a complex object can be seen from different perspectives, each contributing insights that require integration to produce new meanings; the claim being that this approach enables an object’s complexity to
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be dealt with in its entirety. Social media is being harnessed to operate in this ‘in-betweeness’ – the spaces between disciplines – to engage with the more nuanced socially situated understandings of objects. For example, the ability for users to tag objects and create their own folksonomies through the Powerhouse Museum OPAC 2 collections interface operates within these in-between spaces and currently sits rather uncomfortably between curatorial disciplinary regimes. However, disciplinary segmentation and its integration through interdisciplinary practice should not be confused with the social, spatial, politico-economical and historical reality to be observed in the contemporary world, and in which material objects operate. This is because disciplinary regimes appear as an outcome of the processes of knowing about reality which (in order to operate) needs to define an object’s analytical dimensions. It is widely accepted that museums remove and recontextualize material life and replace them with analytical frames. The museum object, being always more complex than any of its disciplinary representations, is a product of this methodological reduction of reality. Here, complexity theory acts as a problem construct, as a tentative step on the road to reconnecting museum collections with the contemporary world. Clearly, existing museum collection metaphors and newer ones such as multi- and interdisciplinarity are inadequate to grasp the dynamics, complexities and disorderliness of the contemporary world and the interfaces between the museum and material objects. The challenge of the Reconceptualising Heritage Collections Project is to move from the ‘plural’ to conceptualizing museum collections practice as complex and networked. That is, from a predominantly closed to an open system of meaning making based on analytic forms characterized by unity, universality and certainty to incorporating other aspects, as mentioned by Tilley (2006, p. 1), such as relationality, unpredictability, indeterminacy, immanence or becoming, ambiguity and heterodoxy.
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DEFINING COMPLEXITY AND TRANSDISCIPLINARITY: AN ALTERNATIVE MUSEUM COLLECTIONS CRITIQUE The adjective ‘complex’, denotes a plural of both quantity and quality, has conveyed various specific meanings: in mathematics (complex fraction, complex number); in linguistics (complex sentence) and semiotics (complex term); and in music (complex note or sound) (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008, p. 68). The application of complexity theory has not permeated critical museum theory or collections practice. It instead occupied a different theoretical space between André Malraux’s Le musée imaginaire (1965[1947]) and that of a closed mausoleum. In both of these instances, the opportunity to discover and highlight object agency is foregone; in the musée imaginaire, objects become what Latour (2005) describes as ‘black boxes’, evidence in service of social meaning. Sustaining a mausoleum approach on the other hand results in Gell’s (1998) time–space stoppages. The terms ‘complex’ and ‘complexity’ are sometimes misunderstood as the opposite of simplicity. In this chapter, complexity pertains to the holistic, global or non-linear form of intelligibility needed to comprehend a phenomenon (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008, p.68). It refers to a dense, entangled dimension that appears rebellious to the normal order of knowledge. Hence, ‘complex’ is different to ‘complicated’, the former being more than the sum of its parts. The interdisciplinary nature of complexity theory can be readily understood from the fact that complex systems exist in natural worlds (fluids, ecosystems and weather), social worlds (organizations, markets and societies) and artificial worlds (technologies, institutions and languages). Complexity theory promotes a non-dualistic, non-hierarchical and non-linear approach, reframing ways of understanding contemporary issues (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008, p.78). Trends initiated around this body of research also invite a reconsid-
eration of a plurality of (old and new) disciplines by challenging their epistemological legitimacy. While complexity theory enables a critique of traditional modes of organizing knowledge, interdisciplinarity is a response to the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines. It involves the process of juxtapositioning, the first step in what Kearne (2007, p.182) calls ‘a human algorithm for generating new meanings’, drawing the mind to puzzle about potential connections between elements. In contrast, rather than ‘bridging’ boundaries, transdisciplinarity denotes the transgression of boundaries, defining a space ‘in between’. It involves stakeholders in the definitions of problems and in their resolution, searching for coherence rather than unity (Lawrence & Despres, 2004, p. 398). Transdisciplinarity is a system disorder, the known and the unknown, rationality and imagination, conscious and unconscious, and the formal and informal (Brandao, 2007, p. 335). Applying ideas of complexity and transdisciplinarity to museum documentation systems produces a number of initial observations. Dynamic online databases represent more than the act of private citizens accessing public museum spaces. The public and private dualism becomes obsolete, as important entities in the contemporary world are various ‘material worlds’ fusing human with machines and necessarily constituted across any public–private divide (Sheller & Urry, 2003). Here, the public museum and private internet user are not separate coherent units but are necessarily involved in discursive relations and struggles, of which the networked object is central. The challenge is to bring into being ways of communication, mobilization and theory that are both, and neither, public and private. This will highlight the way interactions define and constitute the museum, from one moment to the next, and enable a critique of dominant scholarly and state museum discourses. Thus, complexity concepts are powerful metaphors to describe or understand
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these collections activities and they provide a new vocabulary to interpret museum realities. Considering all this, and in the context of the Powerhouse Museum example, we asked how then can the museum move from a closed system to one that attempts to match its lived environment with all its incumbent contradictions, uncertainties and variabilities? The project sought to address more succinctly a more complex, contemporary formulation of culture and cultural practices for use in collections formation, description and consumption. That is, to put the complexity back into collections records in a way that resonates with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities to which collections now connect. This desire is an attempt to widen their social, cultural and disciplinary capital, in addition to guiding ongoing strategic and technical development of the Powerhouse Museum collections management projects and procedures.
HYPER-COMPLEX REALITIES AND MUSEUM COLLECTIONS The advent of participatory media, Web 2.0 and congregational spaces such as YouTube, Flickr and MySpace allow individuals to engage in debates on current issues and broadcast their private moments to a global audience. For example, a Web 2.0 application for collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content represents a complexity practice that might be considered rebellious to the normative rules of museum documentation. The most prominent websites using folksonomy are del.icio.us and Flickr . Folksonomy offers a new way to categorize information based on the needs of the digital space, an environment that involves huge amounts of data. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, in folksonomy, metadata are generated not only by museum experts but also by creators and consumers of the content, or ‘the community’.
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In folksonomy, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary and, unlike a taxonomy, it is not a form of subject-based classification and has no hierarchical structure. One of the strengths of a folksonomy is its ability to engage in serendipitous exchanges, resulting in an experience that is more about ‘browsing’ than ‘finding’. While there is no question that the expertise of the museum professional remains vital to the institution and its ability to communicate to the public, new classification systems such as folksonomy warranted exploration as a complexity practice. Folksonomy does have limitations, however. These include the potential for imprecision of terms and difficulty when searching rather than browsing. Nonetheless, formal classification systems have several restrictions as well. For example, they can be slow to change. They reflect and reinforce a particular world view and foreground an institution’s preoccupation with the management of meaning and location. Their origins are in the systems that created them. Through the study of ideas like folksonomy, forms of fluid connectivity can be viewed and opportunities for new kinds of momentary assemblages of people, objects and information emerge that contrast with the traditional museum documentation system. These are just a few of the elements that theorist John Urry (2003) describes as an emerging hyper-complexity. Urry (2006, pp. 111–14) articulates complexity practices as constituted as a self-organizing global network that is also responsible for spreading notions of complexity. He likeness these practices to ‘walking through a maze, the walls of which rearrange as one walks’ (Urry, 2006). Moreover, Urry characterizes complexity practices as instilling new structures of feeling, notably a greater sense of contingent openness to people, corporations and societies. The unpredictability of outcomes in time–space is another trait, along with greater interest and empathy towards objects and nature, changes in social relationships and an exponential increase
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in the hyper-complexity of products, technologies and socialities as described earlier. Unpredictability in time–space refers to the difficulties in assigning probabilities to outcomes of events, where problems can no longer be interpreted epistemically or as weighted possibilities. Museums are experiencing this complexity as objects enter the online environment and engage with practices such as folksonomies. First, museum collections are being inducted into this hyper-complex world through Google-enabled initiatives and links to YouTube, Flickr and MySpace. Interactions with collections, some planned, others serendipitous, are being conducted through these multiple and extended connections of people, ideas and objects, across long distances and national boundaries. Collections space is no longer fixed, given or separate. Instead, it is dynamic, becoming or travelling, slowly or quickly, through greater or shorter distances and within networks of both human and nonhuman agents. Second, these interactions can also be enacted through alternative, sometimes less privileged places such as cafes or while on a train (with access to the internet the only prerequisite), highlighting the ambiguity and extension of museum experience within public culture. And, third, the complexities of material culture and the way material goods are consumed within global networks and flows add another complex layering to be considered. To date, complexity practices have not been given sufficient attention in the way that museum collections documentation and engagement are enacted. Collections documentation systems still tend to produce a certain and stable material world with clearly defined cultural categorizations, although this is changing. This continues to sit uncomfortably with the increasingly complex interactions with collections that can be observed. All this poses a new set of challenges for engaging with museum collections, highlighting the complexities of cultural exchanges and interactions with complex objects, and the hybrid and, at times contested, nature of their significance and interpretation.
Bridging the gap between the forces and complexities of the contemporary world and museum order requires a rethinking of the metaphors that underpin museum collections interfaces and the ways this complexity can be articulated and embraced in a documentation context. Changes in the way museums operate are driven by their social contexts; therefore, understanding the social in this situation is an important element in how complexity might operate in museum collections documentation. In researching the ongoing problems of Sydney’s City Rail as a complex system, Bob Hodge (2007) stated: ‘Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying simplicity and order but potentially creative resources to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled and eliminated.’ Complexity can no longer be seen as a problem for collections documentation and engagement, and one to be eliminated. Rather, reconceptualizing museum collections as a complex field has the potential to be a creative force in mapping and assembling the social world to which objects resonate, and one to be understood and embraced by the sector.
MUSEUMS COLLECTIONS IN TRANSITION: ONLINE COLLECTIONS AND THE MUSEUM CULTURE–PUBLIC CULTURE NEXUS As institutions move beyond quantitative notions of access to their collections, online, new, diverse and dynamic spaces have opened up for engagement between institutions and users driven by the Web 2.0 revolution and developments in social media. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis (among others) have a presence on MySpace, advertising upcoming exhibitions and events. Users interact and arrange to meet at events and discuss memorable exhibitions in order to, as one MOCA user wrote, ‘revive the experience’. Numerous museum websites link
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their collections to the photo-sharing site Flickr (see Figure 2). Specific internal museum activities include the Every object interface at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), which concentrates on enabling users to express their own personal significances around objects. These experiments are viewed as extending visitors’ experiences following a physical museum visit, in addition to reaching the ‘indirect community’ of internet users looking for information and ways to share and communicate news, views and knowledge. There are also several recent projects that have attempted to address the semantic gaps between traditional documentation methods and professional language with a range of other contemporary meanings and interpretations. Revisiting Collections, a project of the Archives, Libraries and Museums (ALM) of London looks at the services expected by ‘consumers’ of museum information as a result of participative websites. The methodology has been built into the SPECTRUM standard, and linked to the Museum Accreditation Scheme. The Steve Project (based at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) centred around art historical museum documentation as written by and for art historians and used folksonomy4 to ‘fill gaps in current documentation practice’ (Trant & Wyman, 2006, p. 1). Its aim was to make art collections more accessible, to represent “other” perspectives and to open museum collections to new interpretations that reflect visitors’ perspectives rather than solely institutional ones. Preliminary explorations of this project found that professional perspectives differed significantly from those of ‘regular people’. Museum media researcher Jennifer Trant (2006) suggests that authenticity in collections and documentation is one of the perceived key values that the museum brings to an information environment. Museum scholarship is seen as the raw material. The museum’s role is to present primary sources in an accessible way. Such a perspective, however, limits the value and expertise of museum staff and the authority of a museum, while conceiving institutions as unproblematic brokers of information. Moreover, while the Steve
Figure 2. Forgotten Empire: the world of Ancient Persia, British Museum, http://www.thebritishmuseum. ac.uk/forgottenempire/
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Project focused on the one discipline of art history, working across collection areas brings new interdisciplinary problems. As public culture reconnects with the museum, museum web expert Sebastian Chan (2007a) described users developing new interpretations though complexity practices such as folksonomies are viewed institutionally as ‘barbarians at the gates’. The phrase is poignant in its reference to museum high culture and traditional divisions between serious scholar and casual observer, and the conceptualization of the ‘other’ in the museum. While folksonomies, for example, appear on the web collections’ interface as an alternative search mechanism, museums tend to manage these new interpretations by separating them from the record to maintain their curatorial integrity. The potential for expanding the collections record and its interpretative functions is potentially compromised. Here, the digitization efforts of libraries have been influential. For libraries, Web 2.0 is close to their tradition and mission – access to and the sharing of information (Maness, 2006). While the definitions of ‘information’ in fields of librarianship and information management can vary (Wilson, 2006, p. 659), the focus is invariably on information as a resource, independent of the physical form in which it occurs. Adopting such an information management stance, based upon the division of the object from its documentation, would seem to provide some comfort for museums as they re-think their roles as knowledge authorities to that of resources. In 2006, the Powerhouse Museum launched OPAC 2.0 (Open Public Access to Collections), an online public access catalogue aimed at making the museum’s collection more usable through Google-enabled initiatives. In August, Design Hub was launched as an online resource for the design sector. With its magazine format dhub provides an inroad to the Powerhouse Museum’s extensive design and decorative arts collection through a
range of articles, interviews, opinions and ideas. Object and subject taxonomies contained in the museum’s collection management system and developed over the past 20 years using personalization tools, recommend related objects to users on the basis of formal museum classification systems (Chan, 2007b). Users can tag objects according to their own descriptive terms, allowing for the discovery of objects difficult to find through the museum’s formal nomenclature. In addition, the Powerhouse Museum tracks and aggregates the behaviour of visitors to make a further set of search recommendations. Other innovations include the ability of users to search the collection through their browser linked to Google. The 1950s ‘Ubra’, in the Powerhouse collection (see Figure 3) for example became one of the museum’s most viewed online objects in late 2006, in contrast to its previous relative obscurity and at once highlighting how the borders between the museum and public culture are becoming permeable. This can be explained through Google searches linking this object to a consumer culture of shopping. Its popularity coincided with the re-invention and launch of the Ubra in stores, media coverage through Australian current affairs programmes such as Today Tonight and A Current Affair, and the efforts of consumers to purchase the item. Linking collections to Google has resulted in almost trebling online Powerhouse Museum collection visitation from 228,246 visits in May to 571,432 in December 2006, and to 2,600 enquiries. All these emergent complexity practices witnessed through the Powerhouse Museum’s website as the ‘networked object’ interacts online have led to a series of concerns and initial conclusions. The increased visibility brought about by the ‘networked object’ and the resultant widening of the contextual frame of the collections led to an exponential increase in the volume of enquires and to a higher level of accountability for the content of collections information. The museum context dependency of collections information was also critiqued as the ‘networked object’ cir-
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culates within mobile networks and flows, leading to a reconsideration of in-house documentation and knowledge production assumptions. As the networked object freely circulates within these flows, open to anyone to comment, collections necessarily become implicated in discursive struggles. Questions of authorship, authority and the control of the information created within the museum context arose. Moving the Powerhouse Museum object collection online had three positive consequences, immediately expressed by Powerhouse staff. Firstly, documentation online dramatically increased the volume and diversity of public contributions to documentation records. Museum staff acknowledged this positive development in focus groups: ‘Within the project, it was acknowledged that ‘there’s a huge amount of potential value there, always, in other voices, in other expertise, in different perspectives…particularly with materials outside our own culture that we want to document.’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). Secondly, in some areas of the collection, curators had extensive knowledge of the high level of skills of a particular public expert group, prior to this project.
The online initiative enabled such groups and individuals to more easily make a more significant contribution to specific object documentation records. The personal relationship already existing between museum staff and these stakeholders ensured that the contribution of groups to object documentation was validated and readily welcomed. As one curator explained, regarding the expertise of a specific group of collectors: ‘A lot of it depends on the origins of the stakeholder. If you’re talking about doll collectors, I think their information is much better than mine! You know, why wouldn’t you get them to document. I’m not going to debate with them about issues of doll identification, because that’s what they’re an expert in’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). Thirdly, by placing museum records online, the public was able to use the collection for a greater variety of means, including as a research tool, and, in the case to Dhub, as a news resource. These occurrences mediated through the OPAC 2 interface are eroding practices concerned with the prescribed needs to curatorial specialisms therefore forcing collaborations across curatorial disciplines as a means to engage a wider constitu-
Figure 3: Powerhouse Museum Collection object 93/391/66 Brassiere, womens, ‘Nu-U’, nylon / cotton / metal, Berlei, Australia, 1957 http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/index.php?ir n=135712&search=u+bra&images=&c=&s and advertisement for the 2006 Ubra, http://www.fantasylingerie.com.au/sexy-lingerie/adult-lingerie/U-BRA.html
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ency. Moves towards complexity and away from the more formal structured categories typical of a closed system of documentation but that also integrate timeliness, topicality and relevance into the documentation schema as a way of dealing with these issues are also evident. These activities can be observed through the enrichment of collections information that is more creative and flexible. For example, Powerhouse initiatives include the development of narratives and the grouping of objects under themes; the authoring of collections in different styles accessible to a range of constituencies involving interdisciplinary collaborations that cross curatorial areas; the inclusion of non-text-based data and options for public additions. Concerted efforts are being made to find out how interactions between public culture and museum culture can be managed on the borders of museum collections interfaces. The aim here is to ensure the maintenance of the sacrosanct space of museum collections documentation while allowing shared spaces for conversations for emergent knowledge. While many curators appeared versed in post-modern paradigms of subjectivity as concurrent truths evident in the approach to include multiple voices in documentation, the emphasis, however, is not necessarily on the value or interaction of these views. Clearly there are tensions between the desire to protect and control collections information, its form and uses, and the reality of the open-source circulating object that knows no boundaries. All these considerations, however, were discussed within the normative frames of pre-existing practices, a system inflexible to complex interactions.
RISK AND WEB 2.0: UNCERTAINTY AND CHALLENGES FOR THE MUSEUM AND COMPLEXIFYING PRACTICES The tensions between the desire to protect and control collections information was connected
to a range of perceived risks, more specifically, challenging conventional views of museums. Museums for example were established and operate as risk adverse institutions. They were conceived as places of precaution, as venues to control risk by authorising and managing knowledge, monitoring cultural conversations, and by setting moral standards and reforming behaviour (Cameron, 2010). Traditionally risks are seen as uncertain events which, should they occur, affect the achievement of an institution’s philosophy and objectives in particular challenge institution’s perceived value as places for certainty and factual accuracy. Conventional risk management theory seeks to identify, assess and control uncertainty and so do museums in terms of the latter. To do this institutions seek to be systematic rather than based on chance, an approach that forms the basis of a cultural organisation’s corporate risk management strategy. While the focus group discussion of the Reconceptualising Heritage Collections project indicated enthusiasm for the developments and increased public engagement surrounding objects, concerns about risk also permeated much of the discussion. The concerns about risk focused on two main issues around the circulation of museum information. First risk refers to the concerns about effects on the reputation of the institution by online engagement and, secondly, possible negative consequences on the roles, specifically the status of the curator within the museum. Within this discussion, gratitude must be expressed to the various participants of the focus groups. Their honest engagement avoided what Miller cautioned against in some fieldwork and focus group situations – a defensive language, restricted and carefully constructed readily prepared for such an encounter (2008, p.2). The openness of the project’s participants avoided such limitations and garnered meaningful insight into current collection practices and views. Concerns about possible risks to the museum’s status by placing incomplete documented objects
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online were clearly articulated by the curatorial focus group participants: I think that we have taken on a level of risk management by...putting the entire collection online... we could have just put the collection that has significance statements that also met our best documentation practice, our electric shock treatment machine from Arkansas and the object to the way it is described has come under fire from all sorts of people...public direction is important but it’s not always positive and one of our problems is our collection can be very poorly documented and that can annoy people because they think we have not done a good job (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). Another focus group participant expressed concern about the implications for the institution in terms of political risks posed by circulating collections information ‘The ones that use the site that are very discontent bother me…They can cause trouble and I’m sure that one day you will end up with questions in Parliament about something someone gets upset about just because it’s a risk we take’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). An ongoing theme throughout the focus groups, connected to risk management were concerns from museum staff about the current Web 2.0 structure, which as one staff member noted ‘allows anything to happen’. The internet is often idealised as an anti-authoritarian instrument, heralding freedom of information and expression. Equally, it is also seen as a mechanism for the proliferation of enclaves of extreme opinions and the dissemination of that knowledge (Born 2004, p. 512). The former was expressed by one museum staff member: ‘What strikes me with the web is that there is an awful lot of stuff out there but there is not an awful lot of very good stuff...that was also my concern with Wikipedia’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008).
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By placing museum information within spaces such as the web alongside less reliable sources of information and those deemed as driven by vested interests for some respondents was seen to undermine the institution’s seemingly apolitical position. As a focus group member noted: ‘We have to be very careful of its vested interests – there are a huge number of vested interests on the web and there are a lot of...commercial...companies that will write histories that are very favourable to that cause..what we represent that is different from a lot of the sites that you read in because they are all set up by commission’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). These emergent complexity practices are unsettling conventional methods of working within the museum and the role of the curator. One of most significant issues raised by the OPAC 2.0, and particularly in the staff focus groups, was the level of increased public enquiries and number of corrections to documentation records initiated by members of the public. Managing the data and verifying this additional information challenges the traditional accepted remit of museum staff, particularly the curator. Staff reported that prioritising responses to public enquiries could be difficult and they were cautious about accepting this perceived new role as ‘data controllers’, rather than carers and curators of objects. The sheer volume of enquires and collections information challenged the museum’s authority as one based around objectivity, which along with skill and expertise, helps to underpin the authority of museum activities such as exhibitions and more generally, their role as democratic institutions. One staff member articulates these changes through observations in practice in which the role of the curator as primary knowledge producer has been eroded over time within the space of the museum: There’s much debate in the literature on the role of curators…when I started here, there was no way I was allowed into the basement to view an object. The role of the curator has changed as
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knowledge has been democratised. Anyone can access a collection now through OPAC and anyone can question our expertise because they can read what we’ve said about them and that must ultimately lead to a change in our role. Perhaps working more collaboratively with others, like registrars. Perhaps not being the only providers of expert knowledge…the role of the curator is changing and in ten years’ time it will be very different to what it is now (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). The shift in knowledge production from a predominantly hierarchical structure to a more flattened ontology legitimising other sources of knowledge as expert and of benefit to the museum was also articulated by one participant: We’ve probably have less curators now that we’ve ever had. If resources continue to be cut, the argument to get other people to contribute has merit. We started off discussing the management of the collection and trying to keep those boundaries, you can see [the [curator’s role has been] whittled away in this argument ‘there is a whole range of experts out there – let them comment – we don’t need these people – it could be like ‘Wikipedia (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). For some curators, the clear risk mitigation response lay in prohibiting extensive public engagement and developing web based projects based on areas of collection strength: In my view I don’t think our formal record is something that you would debate and discuss to the public’. ‘I think the more you get on the web and you can imagine what it’s going to be like in five years time, the more expertise is called for and the better off we are served by not trying to meet everyone’s needs but by developing projects that are based around where our collections are wonderful and where we understand them and
have good knowledge about them’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). An interesting set of conclusions emerged about the role of the ‘networked object’ online from a focus group with designers (Designers Focus Group, 2008). Because Web 2.0, for example, has created the potential for a greater number of knowledge providers within a networked public culture, the question is how to manage these actual and possible interventions? Many highlighted the importance of the museum as a credible source of information seen as independent from commercial interests and design sector politics in which associations are considered to have benefits such as credibility, status and respect. Branding was seen as vital where an institution’s credentials as experts are understood, and where credibility was likened to accurate information. It acknowledged, however, the need for institutions to consider information as a commodity to be used and consumed as it circulates in flows. This move to the consideration of knowledge as a consumerable item now operates alongside an older notion of museum information as a truth statement. All these moves requires institutions to ‘let go’ of a level of control and to open their documentation processes up to other types of expertise and shared interactions: ‘information has become a commodity and institutions, not that they should become a free-for-all, need to show some kind of opening up to this kind of stuff because this is the way it is going... how do you allow for that?’ (Designers Focus Group, 2008) Many suggested that museums need to reimagine themselves as information spaces that take account of how people use, create and engage with information, involving alternative knowledge structures such as shifting, navigating, accessing, creating and viewing. One of the barriers to these flexible non-linear systems is the nature of the museum collections documentation space itself – that is, one that is slow, stable and enduring to include qualities that allow speed, fluidity and momentary
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encounters. Considering that museum branding denotes credibility and expertise – an important and discerning quality on the internet – participants in focus groups expressed the need for museum information to remain separate, instead creating different and clearly defined spaces for different types of expertise and interactions to occur.
COMPLEXITY: AN ALTERNATIVE COLLECTIONS DOCUMENTATION PARADIGM Rather than surveying the current online museum environment with its inventory of tools and technologies in mind, the focus of complexity and how this notion might be deployed purposefully is on emerging cultural practices and in understanding a logic currently shaping museums within a networked society. The particular quality of complexity relevant to this emerging museum logic as detailed is the idea of a museum collections interface as an open system. That is, as nonlinear, made up of a large number of elements that interact dynamically through exchanges with both direct and indirect feedback loops between the institutions and users, having both ‘memory’ and emergent properties (see, for example, Hannerz, 1992; Urry, 2003, 2005; Meek & Newell, 2005; Smith & Jenks, 2005). Here, museums act as an island of order in a network, a place where this poly-vocality can be performed. Engaging complexity as a theme therefore moves objects from a predominantly fixed certain and stable system to one of constantly changing relationships in which action and the conditions of action are mutually constituted during the same process. Engaging complexity as an idea allows objects to perform to a higher degree of complexity which a museum system conceptualized in a more simple linear way is unable to do (see Dant, 2006; Nowotny, 2005). Complexity approaches do not seek to ‘unpack’ possible meanings, for example, the ‘value of art’, a concept already implemented on
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museum websites (e.g. ) but rather engages with how these values are intertwined and interact with others. However, collections are still largely managed as if they were simple, linear, isolated and operating in equilibrium. Therefore, it is a case of coming to terms cognitively with how collections documentation and management systems might operate and how curatorial practices might be rethought and be managed bearing in mind that a complex collections system cannot be completely designed, controlled, understood or predicted in the way that systems have in the past. This approach still retains rigour and respect for museum expertise because complex systems are based on groups and sub-groups which interact repeatedly according to simple, local rules through various forms of exchange, creating various properties in the cultural order (see, for example, Cilliers, 2000, pp. 4–5). Creating access to a museum’s collection within the Web 2.0 environment as a complex networked system still requires careful thought. Conventional understandings of closing the socalled ‘gap’ between serious researchers and casual accidental visitors via online collections oversimplify the situation. The contested status of the complex object produces uncertainty on the side of museums and of society. There is also the potential for knowledge domains to clash on what has become a shared interface. On one side, there is the museum as a source of expertise and authority, possessing trusted information, certain knowledge, leading to specific future possibilities. As one participant stated: ‘my concern is if we are authoritative then we have to see our records as sacrosanct even though we recognize that they are not necessarily fixed... it is open to public correction but not public negotiation’ (Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group, 2008). On the other side, the participatory, democratic forces of the internet, in the guise of social media, potentially enable members of society to become content producers able to assert their
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own identity, to disrupt power relationships and re-constitute their own lives and futures (Fraser, 1997; Young, 2000; Rodriguez, 2004). The ‘disruptive’ tendencies were also noted in terms of challenging museum information. As in the case of the Thermopylae controversy, individual opinions via global networks can escalate swiftly into major political issues in an international arena. How can institutions account for, capitalize on and plan for the emergent and serendipitous nature of object engagement in light of the potential of emancipatory and participatory demands driven by Web 2.0 and social media? In what ways can museums become actors in linking collections to debates and events, and in gathering and capturing the associations present and emergent around specific collection items?
THE NETWORKED MUSEUM AND A COMPLEX COLLECTIONS INTERFACE Taking all this into account, it might be more productive to conceive of museum agency in online collections not just as a symbolic technology but as an influential force, as an attractor in a network bringing together serendipitous elements and as a border zone where heterogeneous systems of representation might meet. Latour’s (2005) idea of capable actor is also useful here. The museum as a capable actor as composed in a network is an agent translating, simplifying and integrating the heterogeneous elements, seeing each element as part of a chain that makes up the complex object. This poses new challenges for collections management practice. Museums operate in a hyper-complex world. Clearly a complex approach articulates a need to expand the meaning of objects beyond disciplinary boundaries that seek closure to a role as actors in the constitution of social relations by examining broader categories such as art, landscape, memory, technology, exchange and consumption. And to
rethink museum collections space as dynamic in the context of mutual relationships between a number of different actors, technologies and practices. There is also a need to deal with expertise in three aspects: museum, participatory, local knowledge, and jointly generated knowledge, all types that occur in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice. The challenge for this process is how to think of the metaphorical associations between the material, emotional, social and symbolic, and experiential, in a non-reductionist way and capture the liminality, fluidity and interactivity of categorization. In order to manage complexity and to sort out the desirable and undesirable effects of its increase, the museum system is challenged to re-align its cognitive and practical ordering of the world. Disciplinary-based documentation remains, however, a powerful framework for organizing and producing knowledge in museums, one that is deeply embedded and sustained by networks and communities of practice. The idea is not to do away with these specializations and the accumulated collections knowledge that museums hold but to add a level of complexity. That is, for collections information to act as open and dynamic spaces for the interaction and the ongoing translation of the complex object within the institution and communities within the public sphere. Contradictions must be regarded as acceptable. The aim here is to hybridize museum order, making the boundaries of classification and description, contextualization and significance permeable; and to acknowledge that there will be a degree of structural instability in the system of collections information and significance previously denied. The idea of the object interaction and translation makes the distinction between curatorial disciplines, internal (museum) and external (public sphere) less sustainable. One approach is to rethink object interfaces on the basis of a range of multiple, mobile metaphors – material, solid and linguistic to which various actors can contribute as a kind of transdisciplinary
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practice. Here, boundaries between disciplines are able to be transcended and knowledges assembled and integrated. Solid metaphors refer to the actional and biographical contexts, how an object is produced, sources, raw materials, exchange and consumption contexts, uses, sequence of events or factual qualities (Tilley, 1999, pp. 263–6). Conceptual metaphors are those taken-for-granted meanings that frame an object’s activities. Linguistic metaphors on the other hand are statements for describing significance and are often opinion based. The idea of citation or quote as opposed to ideologically inscribed order bridges the epistemological distance between views and exchanges and connects the more ephemeral, polysemous, serendipitous, fluid and mobile nature of object meaning. The aim is to produce a relational system that allows for knowledge coherence and the value of communication rather than knowledge unity to be performed, while allowing for some elements of uncertainty and complexity to which disciplinarybased knowledge alone cannot inform.
CONCLUSION Changes in the spatial and temporal structures of museum knowledge brought about by museum collections and their operation in a complex field challenge traditional images of documentation as a cognitive map with distinct territories, boundaries and borders. Visual representations of web information, like a wildly growing rhizome without a central root (Klein, 1999), offer a useful analogy for visually conceptualizing a complex documentation system, as an alternative cognitive map. As in other fields, the emergence of museum knowledge in a complex world will lead to discussions over the legitimacy of other types of knowledge, museum jurisdiction and systems of demarcation, regulation and sanctioning mechanisms. All these are issues yet to be resolved as museums move from the conceptualization and
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performance of knowledge shaped by older forms and images to the engagement of the object as a complex field in translation. This represents tensions between authority and expertise, permanency, instability and transition, linearity, multidimensionality and multi-directionality, certainty and unpredictability. These ideas will assist museums like the Powerhouse Museum make informed decisions regarding their future digitisation programmes. Such decisions include the level of personalisation they wish to offer on their website and through their collection. The commercial world of ebay and Amazon have used online personalisation very successfully, however it is still not certain whether this should be a priority for museums. Cultural institutions also face the ongoing challenge of deciding the scope of contributions they enable the public to make online and what level of control they wish to exert over the content. Developing more multisensory innovations also remains possible future focus. Connecting the museum more readily to other online sites, including other cultural institutions, via links and collection documentation integration remains an important issue for museums such as the Powerhouse Museum, where issues of control and risk must be balanced against the opportunities for possible increased understanding and dissemination of the museum collection. Such developments may force museum practitioners to question the raison d’etre of the museum. Other cultural institutions, such as the library and archives, face similar challenges, as the value of their expertise and authority is redefined, and as dialogue via online engagement seeks to challenge traditional interactions and even definitions of ‘information’. Public ownership of collections is a compelling argument to encourage online engagement, along with the opportunity to create a meaningful online community. However this has to be balanced against the risks associated with such activity. Engaging with these ideas sur-
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rounding the networked object, to understand the implications as well as the operations of the new technology, will ensure informed and beneficial decisions are made surrounding digitisation in cultural institutions.
NOTES 1. Reconceptualising Heritage Collections is a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council in association with the University of Western Sydney, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Technology, Sydney and the Powerhouse Museum. 2. The film 300 was based on a comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. A group of 300 Spartans lead by King Leonidas fought the larger, superior Persian army of Xerxes. Leonidas was finally betrayed and the Spartans lost with Leonidas becoming a Greek hero. 3. Web 2.0 was reportedly first conceptualized and made popular by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media in 2004 to describe the trends and business models that survived the technology sector market crash of the 1990s. The companies, services and technologies that survived, they argued, all had certain characteristics in common; they were collaborative in nature, interactive, dynamic, and the line between the creation and consumption of content in these environments was blurred (users created the content in these sites as much as they consumed it). The term is now widely used and interpreted, but Web 2.0 remains a term to describe user centred applications. 4. ‘Folksonomy’ refers to collaboratively generated content, resulting in open ended labels that categorize content.
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Chan, S. (2007b, April 11-14). Tagging and searching: Serendipity and museum collection databases. Paper presented at Museums and the Web 2007, San Francisco, CA. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/ papers/ chan/chan.html Cilliers, P. (2000). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge. Dant, T. (2006). Material civilization: Things and society. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(2), 289–308. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00110.x Department for Culture. Media and Sport (dcms). (2006). Understanding the future: Museums and 21st century life: The value of museums. London: dcms. Designers Focus Group. (2008, March 26). Reconceptualising Heritage Collections [Project]. Sydney, Australia: University of Western Sydney, Centre for Cultural Research. Dunn, W. (2004, October 26-28). Learning is understanding in practice: Exploring the interrelations between perception, creativity and skill. Paper presented at Sensous knowledge: Creating a tradition, Solstrand, Norway. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://sensuousknowledge.org/ wpcontent/uploads/2009/ 04/sk1_gunn.pdf Featherstone, M. (2000). Archiving cultures. The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 161–184. doi:10.1080/000713100358480 Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’ condition. New York: Routledge. Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organisation of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Hazan, S. (2007). A crisis of authority: New lamps for old. In Cameron, F., & Kenderdine, S. (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 133–147). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Henning, M. (2006). Museums, media and cultural theory. London: Open University Press. Hetherington, K. (2006). Museum. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2/3), 597–602. doi:10.1177/0263276406023002107 Hodge, B. (2007). The complexity revolution. M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/0706 /01-hodge.php Hopper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London: Routledge. Hopper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge. Jacob, E. (2004). Classification and categorisation: A difference that makes a difference. Library Trends, 52(3), 515–540. Jones, S. (2007, July 26-27). Building cultural literacy. Paper presented at New Collaborations, New Benefits: Transnational Museum Collaboration, International Council of Museums conference, Shanghai. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.demos.co.uk/ files/Building_Cultural _Literacy.pdf Kearne, A. (2007). Doing interface ecology: The practice of metadisciplinarity. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog (pp.181–5). New York: ACM. Kelly, L. (2006). Museums as sources of information and learning: The decision making process. Open Museum Journal, 8. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://amol.org.au/ craft/omjournal/ journal_index.asp
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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, R., & Despres, C. (2004, May). Futures of transdisciplinarity (Introduction). Futures, 36(4), 397–526. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2003.10.005 Mackenzie, A. (2005). Problematising the technological: The object as event? Social Epistemology, 19(4), 381–399. doi:10.1080/02691720500145589 Malraux, A. (1965). Le musée imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. (Original work published 1947) Maness, J. (2006). Library 2.0 theory: Web 2.0 and its implications for libraries. Webology, 3(2). Mason, R. (2006). Cultural theory and museum studies. In Macdonald, S. (Ed.), A companion to museum studies (pp. 17–32). Malden, MA: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996836.ch2 Meek, J., & Newell, W. (2005). Complexity, interdisciplinarity and public administration: Implications for integrating communities. Public Administration Quarterly, 29(3), 321–350. Nowotny, H. (2005). The increase of complexity and its reduction: Emergent interfaces between the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(5), 15–31. doi:10.1177/0263276405057189 Pearce, S. (1995). On collecting: An investigation into collecting in the European tradition. London: Routledge. Pinney, C. (2005). Things happen: Or, from which moment does that object come? In Miller, D. (Ed.), Materiality (pp. 182–205). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Powerhouse Museum Curatorial Focus Group. (2008, March 20). Reconceptualising Heritage Collections [Project]. Sydney, Australia: University of Western Sydney, Centre for Cultural Research.
Prior, N. (2005). A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 123–139. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2005.00050.x Reed, C., Bott, V., Grant, A., & Newman, J. (2005, October). Revisiting collections: Revealing significance—An ALM London project. London: Archives Libraries and Museums London and Collections Trust. Rodriguez, C. (2004). The renaissance of citizens’ media. Media Development: Citizenship, Identity, Media, 2004(2). London: World Association for Christian Communication. Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.wacc.org.uk/ wacc/publications/ media_development/ 2004_2 Sandell, R. (2007). Museums, prejudice and the reframing of difference. London: Routledge. Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. London: Penguin. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2003). Mobile transformations of “public” and “private” life. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(3), 107–125. doi:10.1177/02632764030203007 Smith, J., & Jenks, C. (2005). Complexity, ecology and the materiality of information. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(5), 141–163. doi:10.1177/0263276405057048 Tilley, C. (1999). Metaphor and material culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilley, C. (2006). Objectification. In Tilley, C., Keane, W., Kuechler-Fogden, S., Rowlands, M., & Spyer, P. (Eds.), Handbook of Material Culture (pp. 60–73). London: Sage. Trant, J. (2006). Curating collections knowledge: Museums on the cyberinfrastructure. In Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. (Eds.), Museum informatics: People, information and technology in museums. New York: Taylor & Francis.
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Trant, J., & Wyman, B. (2006). Investigating social tagging and folksonomy in art museums with Steve.Museum. Paper presented at Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006, Edinburgh. Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http:// conference.archi muse.com/jtrants/ stevemuseum_ research_report_available Urry, J. (2003). Global complexity. Oxford: Blackwell. Urry, J. (2005). The complexity turn. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(5), 1–14. doi:10.1177/0263276405057188 U r r y, J . ( 2 0 0 6 ) . C o m p l e x i t y. T h e o ry, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 111–115. doi:10.1177/0263276406062818 Usherwood, B., Wilson, K., & Bryson, J. (2007). Relevant repositories of public knowledge? Perspectives of archives, libraries and museums in modern Britain. Sheffield, UK: University of Sheffield, Centre for the Public Library and Information in Society, Department of Information Studies. Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http://lis. sagepub.com/ cgi/reprint/37/4 /219.pdf Wilson, T. D. (2006). On user studies and information needs. The Journal of Documentation, 62(6), 658–670. doi:10.1108/00220410610714895 Witcomb, A. (2003). Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge. Young, I. (2000). Inclusion and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Citation: A term used to refer to the more ephemeral, polysemous, serendipitous, fluid and mobile nature of object meaning.
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Complexity: Refers to the dense, entangled, global and non-linear form of intelligibility needed to comprehend the networked object. Conceptual Metaphor: A term used to denote those taken-for-granted meanings that frame an object’s activities. Folksonomy: A web 2.0 social networking application enabling the categorization of information and generation of metadata to construct a non-linear indexing system based on freely chosen keywords. Hyper-Complexity: A term used by cultural theorist, John Urry to describe the contemporary world characterised by mobile, global flows and fluids of culture producing new levels of interconnectivity and interaction. Interdisciplinarity: The bringing together of different disciplinary perspectives involving a greater or lesser degree of integration across the various disciplinary forms. Linguistic Metaphor: A term to describe statements used for describing significance and are often opinion based. Multi-Disciplinarity: The juxtaposition of a range of disciplinary perspectives to an object of investigation. Networked Object: A concept to denote the operation of virtual collections within mobile fluids and flows of culture outside and beyond the specific museum context concerns of traditional documentation systems. Object Interfaces: The interpretative interface between the museum and public culture Solid Metaphor: Refers to information and multi-media used to denote an object’s actional and biographical contexts, how it is produced, sources, raw materials, exchange and consumption contexts, uses, sequence of events or factual qualities.
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ENDNOTES 1
Reconceptualising Heritage Collections is a three year project funded by the Australian research Council with partners University of Western Sydney, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Technology, Sydney and the Powerhouse Museum.
2
The movie 300 was based on a comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. A group of three hundred Spartans lead by King Leonidas fought a larger, superior Persian army of Xerxes. He was finally betrayed and the Spartans lost with Leonidas becoming a Greek hero.
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Chapter 9
Heritage, Place and Interactivity: Rethinking Space Representation as Interface Design
Rodrigo Cury Paraizo Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and Federal Fluminese University, Brazil José Ripper Kós Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil
ABSTRACT This chapter examines the requirements for heritage spatial representation to suggest design guidelines for these interpretive environments. It focuses on the concept of play and its role in the construction of place, or meaningful space, by means of rituals and regulated actions. Examples are given not only from virtual heritage applications but also from other digital works, especially video games, whose implementations to foster user engagement must be regarded as possible key strategies towards creating virtual places in their broadest sense, that is, spaces of multiple possible meanings.
INTRODUCTION Virtual reconstructions, that is, 3D digital models of heritage buildings or spaces, have been an integral part of most virtual heritage applications, and are probably among the first things that come to mind when virtual heritage is mentioned – with Quicktime VR as a close second place. Its importance leads to the adoption and development of various technologies in order to obtain faster, bigger and more accurate renderings, preferably in real time. A recent trend has been the use of game engines, for instance, with their powerful graphDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch009
ics acceleration technologies enabling real time navigation in architecture icons such as Wright’s Fallingwater and Mies’ Farnsworth House (http:// archlife.skynetblogs.be/archivemonth/2006-01). However, these virtual environments, as detailed and user-responsive as they might be, lack important properties for heritage representation. Our analysis will address these aspects that should be present in virtual heritage applications, based on comparisons with the concept of history and digital history applications. With these characteristics in mind, the spatial paradigm behind most virtual reconstructions might simply not be the best choice for heritage
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objects. The very concept of space in virtual heritage should be clarified in order to improve its representation – and we here focus on the affiliated concepts of place and territory. Both deal with cultural aspects – meaning – of space, as well as with spatial restrictions and inductions on people’s behavior, so that their representation is of great importance for heritage purposes. The role of play in the formation of places – and territories – is discussed in order to enhance the possibilities of heritage representation. Examples drawn not only from virtual heritage applications but also from other digital works, especially video games, demonstrate implementations to foster user engagement that must be regarded as possible key strategies towards creating virtual places in their broadest sense, that is, spaces of multiple possible meanings. Two different interfaces, developed at Laboratory of Urban Analysis and Digital Representation of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (LAURD), are examined in deeper detail for further illustration of the theoretical framework: “Rio-H”, a digital history application which associates documents to spaces of the city, and the “Praça Tiradentes’ Guide”, in which navigation changes according to the predominant role the user chooses to assume at each moment.
VIRTUAL HERITAGE AND DIGITAL HISTORY For the most part, virtual heritage is a synonym for pre-rendered animated walkthroughs, interactive Quicktime VR panoramas or 3D visualization in real time in game engines, with interaction devices ranging from simple mouse and keyboards to headmounted displays and CAVEs. Early examples are the pre-rendered sequences of past configurations of a building and its surroundings of the Ename Abbey reconstruction (Pleticnkx et al., 2000); the reconstruction of the destroyed Synagogue Neudeggergase in Vienna (Martens et al., 2000)
and the visualization of unbuilt works from Louis Kahn (Larson, 2000). Interaction, in those cases, are usually translated as real time modification of the camera position, roughly simulating the user’s movements in the virtual environment. According to Addison (2006, p. 36), “virtual heritage” is “(...) the use of digital technologies to record, model and visualize cultural and natural heritage” (italics in original). The term echoes “virtual reality”, and is linked to the first uses of computers to display heritage. “Virtual” also signals that the image displayed is but one actualization of a complex set of possibilities, a virtuality: as Lévy (1996) notes, virtual is opposed not to real, but to actual. Any digital interface can be thought of a virtual world in itself, given the high degree of symbolic manipulation present. When it comes to virtual heritage, it usually refers to applications that depict a navigable geometric simulation based on historical evidence. Frischer and Stinson (2007) suggest, in this case, the use of the term “virtual reconstruction”, which corresponds both to interactive and static models. And even if it does not encompass all virtual heritage applications, it has precisely the advantage of referencing to a very specific and widespread form they can assume. Of course, a given application might consist of more than such simulations – in fact, they may not be present at all. Another appropriate term is “interpretive environments”, used by IEEE Multimedia editors in the 2001 April-June issue dedicated to virtual heritage. In fact, we will adopt “virtual heritage” as a synonym for “digital heritage interpretive environments”, the preference for the former justified mainly by reasons of economy and dissemination. By establishing a distinction between virtual heritage and digital history applications, as blurred as it may be, we would like in fact to highlight the differences between history and heritage. For, in spite of their resemblances, they are neither the same nor have identical objectives.
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History is the active knowledge of the past, built from empirically testable records that serve as basis for a socially constructed, integral yet contingent and continually revised version of the past, as seen in Lowenthal (2005) and Le Goff (2005). Le Goff defines history as the scientific form of collective memory, which he describes as mythical, deformed and anachronistic, but also the vivid interface between the past and the present; and which constitutes the very foundation of heritage. Heritage is a modern construct, dating from the 18th century, having evolved from the more universal and perennial concept of monument (Choay, 2001). As of today, heritage activity encompasses the protection and preservation of heritage objects of material and immaterial nature, as well as the transmission of the values for which they stand. These values – which can be derived from Riegl’s values for monuments (1984), such as value of antiquity, value of historic documentation, value of art, and the like – are socially attributed and emerge from narratives associated to these objects. Heritage updates our relationships with its objects and its attributed values based on present issues. It is aimed to the construction of a common framework of social values of identity in the present, providing stable elements of communication among collectivity members (Halbwachs, 1992). Heritage is by definition biased: it is committed to the creation of an emotional response, driven by present needs. According to Lynch (1972, p.39), these values are of traditional nature, externalized in a more or less stable form as heritage objects, and they play an important role in the creation and maintenance of cultural identities – in fact, the connections with these familiar objects are the true objective of preservation for most people. For heritage purposes, present relevance is therefore more important than historical information. It should create an awareness of the past and its importance to the present, rather than an intellectual apprehension of documented actions and facts from the past. This is not to say that
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accuracy or veracity do not play a role in heritage, but it is more subject to the faith of its heirs than to the logic and scrutiny of historians. From imprecision and error are constructed archetypical fables to nourish social cohesion. Anecdotal stories depict people from other temporal and cultural settings to whom those from the present can relate, hence their attraction over historical narratives. Malpas (2006, p.174) notes that the importance of heritage resides in showing people something about themselves, allowing the visitor to recognize something he or she already owns. As one of necessary improvements in the production of virtual heritage, Dave (2006, p.237) claims that such applications should be designed with their audiences in mind; that it should be clear to whom these projects are addressed, be they scholars, youngsters or preservation professionals, for instance. Virtual heritage and digital history account for different points of view. They are not mutually exclusive classifications, though, and applications respond quite often to both, but the clear definition of their primary goals – and audience – should help decision-making and focusing efforts in their development. The fair valorization of heritage, of course, must be followed at least by the notion that the study and interpretation of History helps relativise and deconstruct myths and discourses. Historical science also provides tools that make it easier to connect to other cultures and avoid ethnocentrism, either because of the intrinsic possibility of different interpretation of documents or the awareness of bias in accounts from the past – or yet because the past, as witnessed by its constant review under historians, is neither fix nor fully and perfectly acknowledgeable. The transmission of values – the relative importance of the heritage object and its narratives – is inherent to any activity related to heritage. This is true even to those activities related to the preservation of the object, because it is ultimately being preserved as a mean to communicate something established beforehand, not as a document to be reinterpreted. Virtual heritage tends to render the
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process of communication of values even more evident, because most of the time the object is absent from the location of the application – or simply because the object was already lost –, therefore being more dependent on the symbolic environment of computer language. Examples from the history of virtual heritage show that virtual worlds, or digital reconstructions, account for less open-ended heritage meaning; that is, virtual heritage meaning in such cases is decided beforehand and the application hardly accommodates changes. In the other extreme, databases can easily structure dynamic data, but its interpretation might vary to such a degree that it is hard to assure that less objective messages – such as those that rely on emotional response – are conveyed as intended.
THE PLACE OF HERITAGE Space in Architecture is basically what is defined by our perception – unlike, for instance, the abstract and isotopic postulated space of Physics. Our senses, mainly our sight, sometimes aided by artificial devices, provide stimuli that are actively selected and interpreted by our brains – regulated by a cultural and biological framework –, where this information is ordered in a way that allows us to decide how to react to the environment. In this sense, space is then a field of possible actions. According to Merleau-Ponty (2006), space is the medium not where things are simply disposed, but the medium by which their positions is made possible, not an abstract neutral ether, but as the connections it can provide among all things. Rasmussen (1986) acknowledged that many factors influence how we perceive space, changing its character, and noted how surfaces – their color, their finishing, even how they “ought to” feel to our tact – are important in this process. Trompe l’oeils, panoramas and LED walls, for instance, are all manipulations of experiential space.
Architecture space indeed does go beyond experiential space, but most of the time it is enough for description and construction. It happens that heritage space, as space where values must be conveyed, being a space of culture, requires further elaboration. Modeling software adopts the spatial paradigm of formalized Cartesian space, rooted on the notion of technical drawing as universal geometric language. There is an inherent risk of carrying this paradigm to represent every instance of space in which we live. However, that Cartesian space has no native properties to represent time and change, and therefore history. It also offers a weak support to the representation of subjectivity, precisely because it was designed to avoid ambiguity and imprecision. Even if nowadays any digital model should forcefully be built upon this geometric-mathematical scaffolding – and nothing indicates it will be any different in the near future –, it is always necessary to look after ways to subvert its rules to reach more subjectively expressive degrees of aesthetic experience, taking advantage of the fact that mathematical operations such as those carried by computers are in essence symbolic manipulations. In one example, Refsland and others (2000) describe the virtual reconstruction of Kinja Kuji temple in Japan as based not in accuracy, but in the artistic interpretation of the mystic qualities one finds when visiting it, for which they added to their night scene some fireflies – with their erratic behavior controlled by real time Nasdaq stock information. Cyberspace, after all, is a highly symbolic networked space, part of the humankind tradition of reality lived in multiple levels, such as Australian aboriginal “dreamtime”, Christian Heaven or fictional worlds in TV and literature, as pointed out by Wertheim (2001). The recurrency of correlations between virtual reality and mythical spaces, as pointed out by Grau (2007), seems to corroborate the nature and potential of symbolic manipulation in digital environments – or perhaps its ultimate nature.
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Contemporary virtual heritage works exploring meaningful space include the sophisticated stereographic panoramas of the PLACE-HAMPI project (Kenderdine et al., 2006). Its AVIE (Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment) was developed to display medieval capital city Vijayanagar, in Hampai, India, using interactive panoramic views with spatialized sounds and computer agents that react to the audience by means of multi-user motion capture. Allowing full body immersion, it reintroduces the human scale of spatial experience in such applications.
Place and Territory Place and territory have similar definitions as they both stand for space to which meaning has been added, reflecting the culture of an individual or a group (Duarte, 2002, p.76). They also deal with the behavior one adopts in a given setting. Their differences reside in the origin of such behavior: while the territory imposes its rules and laws – not only by governments, but also by people’s values, place has its uses and meanings fostered by individual poetics. Territory is a highly connected to the awareness of the Other, either from the point of view of a controlling institution or from those that are submitted to this control. A similar concept structures several traditional games – like chess, battleship, go – as well as in many computer games, relating somehow to the very essence of competition based games. Its representation is highly associated to maps, used by institutions to effectuate spatial control, through the inventory of spatial relationships among relevant items and their properties. Roncayolo (2005, p. 190-195) reminds us that territoriality expresses not only spatial attachment, the translation of the material and mental investment in a particular part of space, but also relationships among people, the organizing principles that shape territory, and are condensed into
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institutions like family, town, cities and communities, and their regulations and decision networks. The rules that configure a territory dominate its core, and regulate the behavior of those in it inscribed. The nature of the territory is simultaneously symbolic and authoritative, and its representation has a double objective: it is the instance where rules are formulated as well as the reification of its elements. The map is not the territory, it is sure, but it definitely participates in its formation. Place, on the other hand, is defined by Godin and Mühlethaler (2005, p. 36) as space inscribed, qualified and valorized. Tuan (2007) considers place as space that has become familiar (p. 73), that is, a part of space that acquires definition and meaning (p. 136). Unwin (2003, p. 25) defines architecture as the identification of places, being a place the configuration of elements perceived by an observer as being able to accommodate our human affairs: objects, people, activities and moods, for instance. The role of this observer is crucial: a person needs to be apt to recognize a place as such, or it will not exist for him or her. Places have more to do with human experiences than architectural configurations, hence they may have multiple interpretations. As territory, place is also defined in terms of possible actions. Gregotti (2004, p. 110) notes that a room is defined in terms of the possible actions that can take place there, to what extent its features contribute or refrain present and future actions and intentions. Merleau Ponty (2006, p. 297) claims that the body is oriented in terms of possible and needed (or desired) actions and tasks in space, and this system of possibilities configures a phenomenological place. In Vesely (2004, p.74-86), we find that the body movement is an expressive medium, coordinating the richness of events and the identity of space – that is, by movement, as the embodiment of actions in space that are source of identity and constancy, that the framework for the experience of space is formed.
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Games that deal with simulation (children’s make-believe, role-playing games) usually present in a clear way this mechanism of place formation in terms of interaction possibilities and rules. To a boy posing as a knight, his room is transfigured in a distant kingdom, complete with castles and dragons. In RPGs, players’ imaginary actions create an imaginary shared place in their minds, that is complemented by the actual gaming room, as well as by maps and miniatures. Freire (1997, p. 42) points out that the map is the antithesis of the labyrinth. A labyrinth is such an intricate construction that even when seeing it represented as a plan (or map), we must “enter” it with our eyes our fingers to find our way – it must be traversed to make sense, and this actualization makes it an efficient metaphor or symbol for the concept of place. Unicursal labyrinths, for instance, are ritual paths of deambulation the initiated should walk to reach enlightment, as we can see in the floor of the Cathedral of Chartres. In a labyrinth, it is the action that counts to turn undifferentiated space into places and references. Champion and Dave (2007, p. 226) highlight that our knowledge of place is heightened by our identification towards or against that place and the activities we perform there. This concern, associated with territorial spaces of symbolic exchanges with the Other, begins to appear in some virtual heritage projects. In “Digital Songlines” (Leavy et al., 2006), the user interacts with diverse elements in an aboriginal landscape. These objects trigger mythical narratives and traditional oral stories, allowing the user to examine the associations between these elements of memory and the landscape itself. Champion, Dave and Bishop (2003) describe their multi-user application for the representation of a Mayan archeological site in Mexico named Palenque. The aim is precisely to investigate place perception using progressively more elaborated interactions. These interactions evolve from active searching the scene to obtaining information from a virtual guide, and finally a
reenactment of the taken of Palenque where users can take action. One of the highlights of the CD-ROM “Circuito Mauá: Saúde, Gamboa e Santo Cristo” (Costa, 1998), about one of Rio de Janeiro’s first settelments located in today’s downtown, is the video testimonials from its dwellers, that help to establish the character of the place by sharing their personal stories. This application uses these videos along with hypertexts and linear multimedia presentations written by scholars, with a minimum of virtual world devices – and geometric formal architectural representation –, to create a vivid representation of place, in which the contact with other people fosters a sense of cultural presence. Cyberspace nowadays is far from isotopic, if it ever was. Speed varies with the proximity of servers, websites are censored in some countries, online games access depends on the user’s physical location: but these also demonstrate the conflicts between different territorialities. Apart from that, many elements of digital life are territorial in essence: passwords to enter a site, codes of conduct in forums whose inobservance may lead from reprimands to banishments, and of course social networking services, bridging differences in physical space and joining those who think (or feel) alike – but also reinforcing real world bonds of geographic origin. As mentioned before, digital space does not substitute real space, but is another level of this reality, considerably fit for the collective symbolic manipulation of thoughts and ideas. A specific meaning can be induced to a particular space, as in any architecture project, but it is up to users to recognize and acknowledge it, or to confront and ignore it. Heritage interpretation and management is also a determination of meanings to be fostered and forgotten. The institutional assessment of cultural space is by nature territorial, in the same way that individuals do it by poetic place creation – which may later become public, and politic, allowing comparison and appraisal.
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Online videogames make a strong point for the creation of digital places and representation of territories. Users invest through their interaction lots of time and effort, engaging in collective actions over a common space, assigning meeting points and geographical references, turning specific sections of the digital world more or less popular, fun, or remarkable – ultimately, making them more meaningful. In videogames, we observe that rules – what a user can and cannot do, and what he or she is supposed to do – are essential to foster those meanings. Digital interfaces are spatial representations in themselves, rather appropriate for symbolic manipulations, and not only when they explicitly mimic physical space. Nevertheless, it is in the connections they create with actual spaces that resides their value to heritage purposes. Enhancing the objects’ aura with diverse narratives, visitors can relocate these objects in their own cultural frameworks.
Territory and Databases In one hand, the representation of places associated to heritage must allow the user to address the expected behavior and identify values that are an essential part of the heritage object. It implies the representation of subjective and invisible aspects, as well as the many narrative lines that include somehow the object, varying from official historiography to dwellers oral testimonies. In the other hand, territorial representation includes the codes of conduct and its prohibitions as well as sets of objects in which a given heritage object is included, according to different classifications and systems of values, allowing the perception of relations among objects. Categories might range from “Brazilian Baroque churches” or “downtown Rio Art-Déco buildings” to more specific possibilities like “Machado de Assis’ Rio de Janeiro” and “Bohemian Downtown”. Virtual heritage databases deal with objects whose cultural nature make it difficult to adopt
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taxonomies or attribute numerical values, creating obstacles for sorting and comparison and preventing more thorough use of the information – value attribution, after all, is essential to heritage management. Creative uses should allow pattern identification, as well as an understanding on the relative position of a given object in a network of meanings – among different objects within the same cultural context or among similar objects from distinct cultures, for instance. Given the difficulty in establishing taxonomies, it is important to be able to recognize patterns and observe changes in the properties of the whole set as the data is being inserted and the database is still incomplete. For one hand, it may not be ever complete; for the other, this partial look could be used to refine the classification systems and their underlying concepts. This would help perceiving what Benjamin calls “constellations”, groups of fragments associated for similarities perceived after their inclusion on the system, also observing how the new representation suffers the influence of its predecessors when included in a given network of signs (Freire, 1997, p. 159). Rio-H (Kós, 2006) is a web-based system structured from a Macromedia Flash movie file connected to a Microsoft Access database using ASP to query the database and relay information back and forth. It is a digital history application that presents historical documents located in space. Rio-H’s database is hidden to the users who navigate through the 3D renderings of the historical models. Information is first accessed through an image of Downtown Rio, from a fixed point of view, in different time periods: 1650, 1713, 1750, 1808, 1850, 1910 and 1928 and 2000. Once users select an area or building into the map, the associated keywords to that time and place are shown, and the query is refined to show specific documents. One of the aims of the experiment is to use spatial information to bond historical fragments in a coherent narrative and also to strength historical continuity to the presentness of each user.
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Figure 1. Rio-H: prototype interface showing the Municipal Theater area around 1910 and its related documents. © 2003 José Kós
Space, based on users’s experience, becomes more important and less abstract than time. Therefore, historical narrative can be constructed in different formats facilitating a clear understanding of the city’s past and, furthermore, of the users’ present and future. Another objective of the system is to gather historical documents spread through difference sources such as museums, libraries and archives makig them available online. The spatial connection should strenghten the users’ interest to the historical documents and therefore to their connection to their city and their culure, which is actually the heritage’s ultimate goal. Although visitors could be interested in the system, the city dwellers are the main target.
INTERACTIVE PLAY AND CULTURAL PLACES Interactivity is a key element in most virtual reality applications; and, along with photo-realism, it is one of the main factors for immersion. However, it is necessary to differentiate immersion by engagement from immersion by rapture. In the first case, the user is involved by the possibilities of experimentation; in the second, it is the effect of superimposition of one spatiality over another that charms the beholder. Interactivity might even
create an obstacle to immersion in this case: a menu, during a simulation, is a reminder of its artificiality, a crack in the theatrical “fourth wall”. Spaces geometrically described, as generally devoid of vitality and presence, may trivialize the object represented and not generate meaningful engagement. According to Flynn (2007), virtual reconstructions take photorealistic 3D modeling as the unquestionable standard for sight, a sign of authenticity that results however in a lifeless and overly simplified world lacking human scale and socio-cultural presence. However, it is not easy to remain indifferent when playing a videogame, no matter its graphical quality – it is how one can interact with the environment that counts. Videogames present an intensive experimentation with navigational devices: from Pac-Man to Halo, including Sonic, Warcraft, Myst and SimCity, just to name a few, many games are about the navigation and control of a space. Even if is not the case of producing heritage-themed videogames in a strict sense – as in “Versailles 1685” (Cryo Interactive, 1997) –, it is about observing this field searching for potential opportunities based on the comprehension of how user engagement is produced. The adaptation of videogame features into virtual heritage applications is not new, dating back to at least 1999, when the project “Virtual
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Reality Notre Dame” (DeLeon, 1999) used game engines rendering capabilities to produce a low cost virtual reconstruction with real time navigation. However, there is more to absorb from videogames than that, since they provide a vast source of knowledge about user interaction and engagement. Games are based on performance and ritualized actions, as much as places are. Two works that use navigation as expressive medium in the depiction of a space are here described. Vídeo installation “The Calabozo”, developed by Carmen Aroztegui Massera (2006) as part of her doctoral thesis, presents several testimonies of women that were once prisioners of the Uruguayan dictatorship, describing life in prison. The installation space is based on a cell, where the walls are used to show video clips of the interviews or reenactements of specific situations with actors. Three LCD screens show vignettes in a given, although non-linear, order, randomly accessing clips within specific groups: “Routine”, “The story of a woman”, “Audio interruptions” and “Transitions”. Therefore, after a clip from “Routine”, comes a random video from “The story of a woman”. “Audio interruptions” might be accessed randomly at any time, indeed interrupting a testimony, so the audience experiences the arbitrariness and the lack of choice of life in prison. Prix Môbius winner of 1998, the CD-ROM “Jacks in Slow Motion”, from Kiko Goifman and Jurandir Magalhães (Goifman, 1998), also presents a purposefully truncated navigation to represent life in prison. The main menu, depicting a cell, has icons without legends, and environments (as the CD names its sections) not always have evident titles. Photos of Brazilian prisons constitute most backgrounds, and many of them give access to videoclips with interviews with inmates. Some of these environments are dark and must be illuminated with the mouse pointer, like a torchlight, making it difficult to know the entire setting. Its authors intended to show the slowness of life in prison, as well as its rigid-
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ity. It is no coincidence, given their themes and subsequent need to depict the lack of freedom and individual choice, that both works subvert navigational devices and usability guidelines to undermine user control and orientation. Game, as a cultural phenomenon, can be summarized according to Huizinga (2007, p. 147) as an activity that happens within a definite time and space, according to rules to which players agree to submit themselves, and is also characterized by rapture and enthusiasm, as well as fun and fiction, along with mystery and simulacrum. Caillois (1967, p.33) considers that if those last two overtake the activity, if the mystery is revered and the simulacrum wears signs of metamorphosis or possession, that it is no longer the case of game, but institution. Heritage activities also happen within secrecy and mystery, continually eroding them, by making them public – like games. The infusion of a notion of the presence of the past is done by the submission to the rules of the place. Within tourist visitation, by the way, the elements of fun and fiction play an important role. Among games’ objectives, actual physical training for the activities they somehow emulate or resemble is the least important in modern society: it is much more relevant to engage in play and interaction, learning how to live with competition and chance, social cooperation, rituals, and the overcoming of desires (life and death drives). Through games, there is a formalization of rules that organize the actions as well as a memory of articulated and schematic actions and reactions to be used on given occasions during gameplay, according to de Certeau (1990, p. 41). Although play and games are not exclusive to the human race, among us they become a source of meaning, and the playful elements are transformed into sacred mysteries and creative and regulated knowledge. Heritage knowledge is also to the initiated, those that somehow agree to commit with the legacy; both this knowledge and its ritual form of transmission, hence the performance and
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bodily engagement, are an integral part of heritage appraisal – which is easily perceived in cultural tourism. It is not enough to follow the rules, one must also possesses a degree of earned knowledge (especially in the form of narratives) to appreciate and be involved with heritage objects. Examining Caillois’ proposed classification of games is useful in order to widen gaming possibilities for heritage applications. Games are divided into four main categories, as in each one prevails competition (âgon), luck (alea), simulacrum (mimicry) or vertigo (ilinx). Besides, two poles exist, according to the level of structured rules: paidia, the principle of improvisation, of simple fun and turmoil; and ludus, the need of disciplinary conventions, the creation of obstacles that demand patience, skills and intelligence to overcome. Frasca (2003, p. 230) observes that the difference between paidia and ludus is not the lack of regulation – even make-believe has its rules – but only ludus has inherent rules that clearly define a winner and a loser. Mimicry and ilinx have a stronger connection to paidia, over the notion of displacement, which can be either the conscious make believe or the rapture and overwhelming of the senses. Ágon and alea establish by well defined ludus rules conditions for competition among equals, either left to their own merits of precisely because they can count on everything but themselves. The former pair founds the primitive rituals, with masks and secret initiations; the latter, by the assurance of clear rules for fair confrontation, is the backbone of civilization. Game therefore not only survives but openly lives amidst our cultural environment, in all of its forms, notably in every instance where it is necessary to assure a “pure” space of confrontation or interpretation. During a game, space is temporarily transformed by the agreement to follow a set of rules that dictate possible behaviors. Individual freedom of action – within these regulatory devices – is assured by the same rules, also ensuring variations in gameplay. It is the same type of freedom that
is characteristic of place, and its rules have the same nature as those that define territory. Place and territory are differentiated by the actions that may occur within them. Signified space is a space of game. Computers, particularly videogames, allow the manipulation of symbolic space, such as the space conformed by rules, as an expressive medium. Videogames deal primarily with the digital representation of a space composed by rules that has its meaning depending on user engagement. Hence the interest in studying them as sources for interface design in virtual heritage applications. The interface– along with the possibilities of interaction it fosters – is a virtual space in itself. According to the works of Huizinga and Caillois, “play” (and its counterpart “game”) is a fundamental concept of human societies, existing under many forms of social interaction such as rituals and traditions. It establishes at the same time top-down rules to which players must abide and leaves enough room for their bottom-up personal invention. Even if playing itself defines a temporary space for players to perform, heritage objects mark special spaces where some interactions may or may not take place. On the other hand, as one’s institutional engagement grows, more different actions will the person be able to perform and more spatial access will be granted. In video games we have situations where usual interface design rules are constantly subverted; information is partial or hidden, users’ choice of avatars affect their subsequent options and actions are sometimes complex rituals with precise order and timing in order to take effect. Yet mastering the interface is precisely what generates user engagement within this particular spatial representation. The social space, characterized by the presence of others, for instance, is rarely represented, even as ritual background performances. Ongoing studies at the Virtual Reality Lab (VRLab) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology try to implement computer controlled agents – single persons and crowds – to create digital “extras” with meaning-
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Figure 2. Praça TIradentes’ Guide: prototype interface in Scholar mode, showing connectionsamong heritage objects, departing from the statue of D. Pedro I. © 2009 Rodrigo Paraizo
ful behaviors for virtual environments. Champion (2006) proposes a virtual heritage environment where the user should emulate typical behavior of a given time period, trying to pass as native to that environment, and avoiding detection as an outsider. In 2008 PC game “American McGee’s Grimm” (McGee, 2008), the user takes control of the gnome Grimm, that, revolted with Disneyfied and politically correct contemporary versions of fairytales, decides to fix them to their original darker tones. It is the very action of wandering through these scenarios that alters elements to their “original” versions. Another application in development in LAURD is the “Praça Tiradentes’ Guide” (Paraizo, 2009), which can be described as a rule-based navigable space with the intention of showing different points of view about urban heritage. It is designed with a lay audience in mind, for better familiarization with Rio’s heritage objects and their relationships. It revolves around Tiradentes Square, in Downtown Rio, because, in spite of its heritage importance, it is still less valuable than its neighbors plazas Cinelândia and Praça XV. It has a strong connection with theaters and leisure,
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especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and gathered people from all walks of life. It is also worth noticing that the statue in its center does not depict revolutionary hero Tiradentes, but Dom Pedro I, son of Queen Maria I, who had Tiradentes executed for conspiracy to free Brazil from the Portuguese Empire. The prototype is being produced in Flash with an external XML database. The interface is divided in three areas: one is a board game-like map, where heritage objects are located. Under it sits the challenge area, where user interaction with pictures, drawings and texts takes place in order to unlock new objects and information; and, on the left side, we have the information area. It is initially occupied by the Guide/Journal, which alternates with the Book and the Newspaper. Above the map, there are icons of the three possible viewpoints to access the map and the information: the Tourist, the Scholar and the Resident, each with their own set of heritage objects. The Tourist, in fact, is the role of the user, who can resort to “consult” the Scholar and the Resident in order to find his or her way around the city. When the Resident is accessed, the Newspaper is shown and displays information that is
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not regularly available to outsiders – restaurants, parties, and the like. In the map, random new access points are displayed, including those that are not considered to be part of Tourist and Scholar sets of objects. The Scholar provides access to the Book, where academic information on the objects is found, and the map also changes to show objects that relate with the selected object, along with their connections, which can also be accessed. When “visiting” an object, the user is proposed a small challenge – solving a puzzle, finding a “hot spot” in a picture that includes the object in question, and so on – that, when won, gives access to further information about the object and changes the status of the object to “visited”, complete with a flag on the map and a photo (or ticket, or postcard) in the Journal, which slowly turns into a scrapbook recording the journey. The interaction is limited by “time slots” that are spent when any action is taken. Consulting the Scholar and winning its corresponding challenges wins some time back (as someone who has prepared before the trip finds his or her way around much faster). At this point, it should be stressed that using game and game-like structures as interface guidelines usually leads to challenging or at least overlooking some usual and well established interface design rules for user-friendliness, as pointed out by Preece, Rogers and Sharp (2005, p. 41). One example that can be normally applied to applications oriented towards regular information retrieval is related to usability goals such as efficacy, efficiency, safety, utility, learnability and memorability. They need to be carefully examined (or rethought) when it comes to examining heritage game-inspired applications – or any computer game, for that matter. Such heritage applications, not being computer games in themselves, or at least having goals other than being a game, must also be able to communicate meta-messages that remind users about their true nature. On the other hand, user driven goals like fun, satisfaction, emotional adequacy, motivating and such can be more easily perceived and designed, because heritage goals are
related to the emotional response towards objects from the past. As Economou and Tost (2006) point out, it is important to know the intended target audience in terms of previous knowledge of the subject, computer familiarity, propensity to use collaborative or individual tools, and different learning styles and types of learning, in order to design an effective application for the transmission of heritage values. To appropriately evaluate any heritage application it is also necessary to assess user engagement with heritage before and after using the application. Historical knowledge is of course part of it, but it does not tell the whole story, and more subjective aspects of the experience need to be addressed, including perception of heritage buildings in the urban landscape before and after using the application. Game-oriented (or game-inspired) navigation often carries an intrusive and non-transparent interface. It is precisely by learning the rules that engagement is to be created, with the interface emulating the bodily and spiritual engagement needed to learn heritage rules – or becoming a privileged starting point for the reflection about this process. For instance, part of the discourse in virtual reconstructions involves the benefits of the freedom of movement that users have. It is certainly a benefit for the architectural examination of the object, but even from this point of view it can be argued that privileged viewpoints and paths are part of the architectural discourse themselves, and should be at least pointed out. On the other hand, one of the advantages of digital constructs is precisely the representation of elements that are hardly visible or not visible at all, as structural forces, degrees of privacy, voids, infrastructural items and social and economical distributions, just to name a few. A game-based application to express the values of a place can have a series of non-intuitive interfaces, that is, an explicit option for the difficulty of access to information in which deciphering the interface is part of the actual expression of spatial character. When it comes to sacred places – and
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there is a strong connection between heritage and sacredness –, spatial interdictions are part of the narrative, just as unlocking new sectors or information is part of many videogames as a reward for user engagement within that virtual space. In a Greek temple, no one but priests entered it, as many active Catholic cloisters nowadays are not open to visitation or follow special access rules. These restrictions contribute to induce the apprehension of cultural characteristics of a given space. Urban spatial perception should also rely on what has been seen; a mental structure formed little by little by the visitor. Hence the need to have maps along with first-person virtual reconstructions – the lack of peripheral vision is an obstacle to acquiring orientation marks. A comprehensive virtual reconstruction was precluded from start in this prototype to foster alternative solutions as well as for conceptual reasons, since the boardgame being slowly populated according the user’s wanderings would illustrate well the change from undifferentiated environment to a place, as elements start to gain meaning.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Many possibilities exist to improve virtual heritage applications. The introduction of circadian variations in simulations, with different possibilities of action according to the time of day, for instance, or along different periods of the year. Higher investment in agents might also confer a deeper sense of social exchange. In the “Guide”, as in other applications, improvements include the possibility of sharing experiences and expanding the database of objects and their corresponding narratives. One of the reasons game engines were discarded for development of the “Guide” is their difficult handling of externally loaded long texts and hyperlinks, which would pose an obstacle for dynamic updates. Hence the need to study possible implementations of such a feature, or at least the
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combination with more text-friendly interfaces, to take advantage of the immersive capabilities of game engines. Game structures offer many other possibilities: resource management games, such as SimCity or the original Warcraft, in which map and territory seamlessly blend, could be used to express the decision-making process involved in heritage policies, deciding, at each round, for instance, how much goes to restoration, conservation, research, and the like. As a meta-comment, for instance, the lack of resources to an item such as interpretation could even end the game – for the game itself would be an interpretation product.
CONCLUSION Virtual heritage applications based on place and territory representations, using the concept of game as interface guideline, can develop aspects of user agency, engagement and sociability, contributing to the transmission of multiple heritage interpretations. Considering an interface as expressive medium, it is possible to justify instances where usual notions like transparency and user-friendliness can and should be challenged, avoiding neutrality. Indeed, this should be extended to heritage interpretation as a whole; not in the sense of propaganda and chauvinism; but because it highlights the institutional bias comprised in any heritage collection, and this even helps identifying (thus avoiding) forces of propaganda and chauvinism. Computers are essentially machines for symbolic manipulation. Using them to experiment with heritage values, observe how their attribution changes through time and space, or according to different social milieus, is a rare opportunity to understand our own role in attributing meanings to things. Computer games work as an evolving laboratory for the rule-based spatial navigation that characterizes place and territory, and other approaches are possible other than immersive-interactive
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camera movement in virtual reconstructions. Rules and algorithms constitute an expressive medium for performance, or action possibilities, as demanded by place and territory representation. The simplification demanded by such type of interaction implies the risk of presenting stereotyped visions – which are no strangers in heritage matters. But the fact that they must be used together should focus on the value of respecting different viewpoints instead. It is also important to promote more tolerant viewpoints and avoid chauvinism by addressing users’ skills to reflect about heritage and its meanings, and helping them not only to learn about heritage values, but to question them.
Affleck, J., & Kvan, T. (2006). Reconstructing virtual heritage. In Kvan, T., & Kalay, Y. (Eds.), New heritage: Beyond verisimilitude (pp. 82–93). Hong Kong: Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Champion, E. (2006). Explorative shadow realms of uncertain histories. In Kvan, T., & Kalay, Y. (Eds.), New heritage: Beyond verisimilitude (pp. 242–263). Hong Kong: Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong.
The authors would like to thank to CNPq (Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology) and CAPES (Brazilian Ministry of Education), for the research funding that made this work possible; to the PostGraduate Program of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PROURB-FAU-UFRJ), for hosting our research team; to professors José Barki and Naylor Villas Boas and especially to Roberto Segre, for providing orientation of the research team; and to our fellow colleagues of LAURD. A special thanks is due to professors Johan Verbeke and Rosangela Cavallazzi, for their support.
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Ennis, G., Lindsay, M., & Grant, M. (1999). VRML Possibilities: evolution of the Glasgow Model. In VSMM (pp. 475-483). Presented at the 5th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Dundee: VSMM Society.
MacCannell, D. (1999). The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California.
Eskelinen, M. (2007). Explorations in game ecology, part 1. Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, 5. Retrieved April 23, 2009, from http://computer philologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg05/eske linen.html Eskelinen, M., & Tronstad, R. (2003). Video Games and Configurative Performances. In Wolf, M. J. P., & Perron, B. (Eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader (pp. 195–220). New York: Routledge. Frasca, G. (2003). Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology. In Wolf, M. J. P., & Perron, B. (Eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader (pp. 221–236). New York: Routledge. Galli, M., & Mülhof, C. (2000). Virtual Terragni: CAAD in historical and critical research. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser. Huyssen, A. (2000). Seduzidos pela memória: arquitetura, monumento, mídia. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano. Johnson, S. (2003). Emergência: a dinâmica de rede em formigas, cérebros, cidades e softwares. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Kenderdine, S. (2004). Avatars At The Flying Palace: Stereographic Panoramas of Angkor Cambodia. In Digital Culture & Heritage. Presented at the ICHIM 04, Berlin: Archives & Museum Informatics Europe. Retrieved April 23, 2009, from ttp://www.archimuse.com/ publishing/ ichim04/ 1970_PachecoRezende.pdf Lévy, P. (1996). O que é o virtual? São Paulo: 3.
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Machado, A. (1996). Máquina e imaginário: o desafio das poéticas tecnológicas. São Paulo: Edusp. Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://www.manovich.net/ LNM/Manovich.pdf McMahan, A. (2003). Immersion, Engagement and Presence: A method for analyzing 3-D video games. In Wolf, M. J. P., & Perron, B. (Eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader (pp. 67–86). New York: Routledge. Meadows, M. S. (2002). Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Press. Molleindustria. (n.d.). Home Page [Commercial website]. Retrieved January 30, 2009, from http:// www.molleindustria. org/en/home Murray, J. H. (2003). Hamlet no Holodeck: o futuro da narrativa no ciberespaço. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural / UNESP. O’Rourke, K. (2004). A map larger than the territory. In Digital Culture & Heritage. Presented at the ICHIM 04, Berlim: Archives & Museum Informatics Europe. Retrieved April 23, 2009, from http://www.archimuse.com/ publishing/ ichim04/ 1970_PachecoRezende.pdf Penny, S. (2004). Representation, enaction and the ethics of simulation. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Harrigan, P. (Eds.), First person: new media as story, performance, and game (pp. 73–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Pratschke, A. (2004). PINHALDIGITAL, estrutura mnemônica e processos multimídia nas fazendas de café: história, arquitetura e tecnologia. In C. Scaletsky & I. A. M. Rocha (Eds.), O sentido e o universo digital, SIGRADI (pp. 197-199). Presented at the VIII Congresso Iberoamericano de Gráfica Digital, São Leopoldo: SIGRADI / Unisinos. Retrieved from http:// cumincad.scix.net/ cgi-bin/works/Show?_id =sigradi2004_200&sort =Default&search= paraizo&hits=5 Procedural Pompeii. (n.d.). CityEngine. Retrieved May 21, 2009, from http://www.procedural.com/ cityengine/showcases/ procedural- pompeii.html Project Place-Hampi. (n.d.). Retrieved May 21, 2009, from http://www.icinema.unsw. edu.au/ projects/prj_ hampi.html Riegl, A. (1984). Le culte moderne des monuments: son essence et sa genèse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Roegiers, S., & Truyen, F. (2006). History is 3D: Presenting a framework for meaningful historical representations. In T. Kvan & Y. Kalay (Eds.), New Heritage: beyond versimilitude (pp. 49-57). Presented at the New Heritage Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Media, Hong Kong: Faculty of Architecture - Univ. of Hong Kong. Roudavski, S. (2008). Staging Places as Performances: Creative Strategies for Architecture. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Cambridge. Retrieved April 23, 2009, from file:///D:/livros/Roudavski_Staging_Places_ PhD2008_onscreen_version_hilite.pdf Roussou, M. (2006). The components of engagement in virtual heritage environments. In T. Kvan & Y. Kalay (Eds.), New Heritage: beyond verisimilitude (pp. 265-283). Presented at the New Heritage Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Media, Hong Kong: Faculty of Architecture - Univ. of Hong Kong.
Silberman, N. A. (2007). The Ename Charter: the First Draft. In D. Callebaut & N. A. Silberman (Eds.), Interpreting the past. Volume II: Heritage, new technologies and local development (pp. 223247). Presented at the Conference on Authenticity, Intellectual Integrity and Sustainable Development of the Public Presentation of Archaelogical and Historical Sites and Landscapes, Bruxelas: pam Ename / Flemish Heritage Institute / Ename Center. Sirbu, D. (2003). Architectural multi-dimensional spaces: Digital exploration of the unbuilt. In Convergent Practices: New Approaches to Art and Visual Culture (Vol. 6). Presented at the CHArt Conference. Retrieved April 23, 2009, from http:// www.chart.ac.uk/chart2003/papers/ sirbu.html Stellingwerff, M. C. (2005). Virtual context: Investigating the characteristics and opportunities of digital visualisation media for situated approaches to architectural design in an urban environment. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Delft: University Press. Takagi, T. (2004). Crimson Room [Computer game]. Japan: FASCO-CS. Urry, J. (1999). O olhar do turista: lazer e viagens nas sociedades contemporâneas (2nd ed.). São Paulo: Studio Nobel / SESC. Vilas Boas, N. B. (2007). A Esplanada do Castelo: Fragmentos de uma História Urbana. Tese (Doutorado em Urbanismo). Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Wolf, M. J. P., & Perron, B. (Eds.). (2003). The video game theory reader. New York: Routledge.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Heritage: Objects from the past to which values are socially attributed.
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History: Active knowledge of the past, built from empirically testable records that serve as basis for a socially constructed, integral yet contingent and continually revised version of the past Hyperdocument: Non-linear document composed of nodes and links. Interpretive Environment: Space built or arranged for the purpose of displaying elements to be interpreted by an audience.
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Place: Space with individually attributed meaning. Territory: Space with institutionally attributed meaning. Virtual Heritage: The use of digital technologies to record, model and visualize cultural and natural heritage. Virtual Reconstruction: 3D modeling of heritage structures.
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Chapter 10
Representing Culture via Agile Collaboration Craig Dietrich University of Southern California, USA John Bell University of Maine, USA
ABSTRACT Creating software that supports cultural knowledge management brings developers face to face with issues they may not encounter when dealing with more general-purpose applications. Many times cultural specialists will have a unique understanding of the data, relationships, and special sensitivities that should be reflected in the interface and structure of software intended for use in a specific field. When general-purpose software is not able to accurately capture these subtleties of culture, experts and developers can work together to create small, focused solutions. This chapter discusses the special issues presented when developing software for cultural or creative organizations, the development philosophy behind targeted applications, and methods to design ecosystems of small applications that can be combined to meet a wide variety of needs.
INTRODUCTION Freely available Web-based publishing tools such as WordPress have made mid-level Web development considerably easier than previous write-your-own methods. Certainly, WordPress’s well-advertised “5 minute install” (WordPress.org, 2009) makes one wonder why all computer-related projects couldn’t be so easy. Yet the smallest changes to existing systems such as WordPress
create complex challenges. Adapting HTML, rearranging categories, or customizing publishing templates are changes that can be made superficially. Adding logic based on cultural parameters such as family affiliation, sacred status, or other requests require re-engineering. Culturally-sensitive software projects need not only a plan to manage content but also a complex set of protocols to represent culture. These complexities require technical innovation beyond what is possible with many general-purpose tools.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch010 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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The challenge faced by developers is that cultural protocols are rarely fully definable. Asking a programming or design team to create an application based on a bullet-point feature list or occasional conversation with experts is not likely to result in an application that reflects the culture’s nuances. Developers are trained to build software that is generalized and reusable because it is efficient, but what is often lost is the flexibility to incorporate new or outside-themainstream concepts. When a cultural specialist requires specialized software, other methods may be sought out to meet both the developer’s goals for efficiency and the expert’s need of flexibility. One possible method of reconciling these superficially contrary goals is to build loosely interconnected specialized tools.
ISSUES OF REPRESENTING CULTURE Ready-to-use content management systems such as WordPress feature user-friendly sets of administration pages and publishing templates for quickly deploying blogs. While WordPress includes widgets and plug-ins to extend its functionality, collectively they serve to annotate blog posts, not cultural paradigms. A blog is a serialization of linear thought: today I have an idea, tomorrow another. The structure imposed by the software turns life into a sequence of events: drove to work, met some deadlines, saw something interesting, and came home. If this oversimplification of daily routine does not sit well (certainly, life is more complicated than a series of events) then publishing tools might need to push their paradigms further to capture the breadth of human experience. Many developers of large-scale software do not interact sufficiently with the groups that use their products and therefore misjudge the needs of culturally-sensitive projects. When users have needs that require new functionality, they send feature requests to the off-site development team.
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Some teams see this separation as an advantageous business concept, allowing conformity and parallel development of features within the same project. For this reason, it is a model used by many industries, including retail where large chain stores stock standardized inventories of products manufactured in industrial centers. Bottlenecking goods and profits is great for efficiency but marginalizes those that might be seeking to use systems for purposes outside the mainstream. When representing culture, it’s a society’s practices–not profits–that risk being bottlenecked. Though business analysts might appreciate the efficiency of bottlenecks, for creators of culturallysensitive software bottlenecks threaten to squeeze out the same nuances they are hoping to represent. Many Indigenous communities, for example, see gender, sacred status, and family affiliation as important protocols to be included in digital archives. (Christen, 2008) Unfortunately, there are few existing archive systems that include these protocols in their sorting and access algorithms. In the face of oppressive digital rights management (DRM) imposed by media corporations (Fisher, 2007)–often seen as burdensome by consumers (Pepper, 2008)–further restricting access to content based on gender, sacred status, or family affiliation may seem like something to argue against. This issue was recently debated on technology hub Slashdot.org after the site posted a description of the Mukurtu Archive. The archive was built in collaboration with the Indigenous Warrumungu community in Western Australia and embeds the community’s protocols and restrictions directly into the interface. A Slashdot commenter argues, “The users actually want the rules to be enforced on them. It’s more to protect them against accidentally viewing stuff that they’re not supposed to while searching for other documents” (ArsenneLupin, 2008). While useful for the members of the archive’s own community, there are also implications for cross-cultural communication described by another Slashdot commenter:
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… the restrictions also allows [sic] you the visitor to better understand the culture. Why? You might think that the best way to experience that culture [is] to be shown all of it at once, but you should consider that men who live in this culture never get to see certain things. Think of it as a simulation of a culture. Use it to reflect on the assumptions you make about who is entitled to what information. (qaramazov, 2008) DRM tries to keep people out; culturally sensitive publishing tools try to bring people in–but only on terms that respect the material’s source. Content in the Mukurtu Archive maintains its context because the software was custom built to support cultural protocols. In turn, the archive is educating others about the community’s cultural practices. Future teams could avoid the additional costs of developing custom software by re-purposing and remixing the algorithms that drive the Mukurtu Archive, but in doing so they would inherit the cultural protocols embedded in the archive’s code. Not surprisingly, systems that decouple code from their intended purposes are often difficult to implement, and therefore, like the Mukurtu Archive, are not prevalent. Re-usability is hindered by systems that form rigid bonds between elements. In many applications, code is tasked with transforming database data into meaningful objects, access restrictions, and ultimately user interfaces. Code is needed to perform this transformation because data in a database table has little inherent logic or context. If data structures could be transformed to convey contextual information then the application code could be more easily re-used in places where data has other meaning. Fortunately, technology is emerging to make this process more accessible. Principal among the technologies achieving this goal are those that make up the Semantic Web. The movement towards a Semantic Web can be viewed as an argument between relational database models, where data is normalized into table structures, and new semantic systems where data
are sets of expressions mapped to local ontologies. Relational databases are tables of rows and columns linked by indexes. They hold large amounts of repeating data, tend to be comfortably similar to other relational databases for the developers who work with them, and can be nicely packaged and exported. Technologists working in the humanities often are forced to circumvent this inherent normalization with creative and sometimes bizarre schemas to support cross-connecting nuances. Alternatively, semantic stores already support open-ended yet structured links between data. In the Resource Description Framework (RDF)–a prominent technology of the Semantic Web–objects are created out of individual statements such as “Bob is male” and “Bob was born in Ogden, Utah.” Without normalization, anyone willing to put forth a claim can contribute diverse statements about Bob resulting in interdisciplinary connections between resources, objects, and archives. As Semantic Web expert Shelley Powers points out, the data is also re-usable: Rather than generating one XML file in a specific XML vocabulary for all of these different applications’ needs, one RDF file can contain all of this information, and each application can pick and choose what it needs. Better yet, new applications will find that everything they need is already provided, as the information we record about each resource gets richer and more comprehensive. (Powers, 2003, p. 16) If culture is a body of events organized by interaction rather than simple linear progression, then RDF, which maps diverse contributions, is an example of a successful technological representation of culture. In RDF, relationships between information, their origins and semantic meaning can be kept in the data model, not squeezed into a rigid database schema or integrated software layers. When agility is built into the structure of online tools, it leads to agility in their use. Users often
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find ways to adapt tools outside of their intended parameters. Social networking site Twitter, for example, is being used at conferences for “back channel” conversation during conference presentations. Commentpress, a plugin for WordPress, has been leveraged for academic peer review (Wardrip-Fruin, 2008). Many seemingly singlepurpose tools have become platforms for diverse applications on the strength of the simplicity of their design. Combining such tools can allow complex functionality. If the connections between tools are kept to a minimum then any tool in the system can be modified, upgraded, or completely swapped out for a more effective piece of software without adverse or unintended consequences. Archives such as the Variable Media Questionnaire and The Pool, described below, were designed by interdisciplinary collaborations working to solve their identified needs. Interestingly, they are linked by a team at the University of Maine (USA) to form part of a comprehensive system for managing several aspects of art and humanities production. The linkage system they developed, dubbed the Metaserver, facilitates the creation of links between archives that have a variety of foci. It provides a small plugin that integrates into each archive’s front-end user interface. Since the local archives themselves do not store relationships to other archives, Metaserver functionality can be added with only minimal changes to existing applications. The Metaserver, described in more detail below, is agnostic to the underlying architectures of the archives and can consequently support a range of databases schemas and even propriety systems such as FileMaker Pro. Small, spontaneous collaborations that build projects based on specific parameters are well suited to develop cultural tools. They involve individuals with diverse skills working together to focus on specific cultural needs. Their innovations–small and compartmentalized–can be incorporated into other groups’ projects.
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AGILE COLLABORATION When producing Spiral Jetty (1970), Robert Smithson asked a local Utah construction worker to grab his dump truck and tractor for the project. Bob Phillips used his machinery to move six tons of rock needed to create the work in Salt Lake, Utah. Looking around, one can find reference to Phillips but credit for the idea to build the obtuse lake intrusion is provided to Smithson (Pagel, 2008). Less important in art history is the means of execution by the more ambiguous skill of operating a tractor. Leaping forward to the twenty-first century, digital art-making often requires team members with diverse proficiencies. As technological complexities in digital production grow, the specific knowledge needed to craft a pioneering artwork also increases. Server operations, web services, mobile device syndication, programming languages and paradigms, and design all fit under the “programmer” umbrella. With unique technical innovation required to reach completion in the digital humanities, collaborations between humanists and technologists have become commonplace. More importantly, creators are realizing that formally including the Bob Phillips’ of the world in the creative process leads to unexpected and new results in art and humanities. Collaborations between technicians, cultural specialists, and artists are valuable to all aspects of cultural planning, production, and preservation: software paradigms provide new insights for humanities researchers, and vice-versa; conservationists working closely with technicians open doors to combat degradation caused by changing video, audio, software, or hardware standards; involve performance artists in documentation, and ephemeral, experiential, and performance-based content can be re-produced in ways that preserve their original intent. The networks built through these collaborations promote re-use and combat degradation. Consider software-based humanities projects featuring less of the “programmer for hire” model
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where cultural specialists send requests to off-site developers and more situations where developers and specialists are working as equal collaborators. The deflation of the creator-technician hierarchy is similar to organizations that have emerged in the software industry; some of California’s Silicon Valley dot-com companies place engineers at the top of the corporate food chain. Technical innovation is in the hands of software engineers, and the companies understand that they too can make company policy and predictions. In the humanities, this notion seems alien: centuries of crediting the single artist makes collaborations difficult to document. But groups are working to change perceptions, including the Variable Media Network, whose members are rethinking broad strategies for citation, preservation, and interpretation. In Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, individual contributions are given equal protection. Contributions in RDF are claims that are no more or less important than other claims. Given that humanities projects are often representing cultural semantics (and indeed, starting to incorporate semantic technology), it makes sense that the collaborations themselves operate semantically. Balancing the knowledge of scientists, humanists, artists, and technologists is an important first step towards finding common ground between their specialized sets of knowledge. In RDF this is part of the process by which ontologies are created and is conceptually similar to the process of finding common ground between collaborators. Imagine a set of tools built using RDF concepts and technology. Each tool contributes to a knowledge base in a unique way: one tool annotates videos and images with text, another tool organizes annotations into sequences, and a third visualizes the data in a map. The tools are crafted and used by different collaborations: video artists work to create and annotate video, scholars and archivists organize the annotations, programmers and anthropologists create visualizations of the data. Parts may be sliced, remixed, and exported
in other forms, but the results could also be formed into a final published project. A team at the University of Southern California’s Vectors Journal is doing just this, developing a semantic rich media framework named Scalar, where authoring widgets add up to flexible published front-ends. In the semantic model, contributors add their input into a knowledge base. As RDF expert Shelley Powers describes, the resource “gets richer and more comprehensive” as new knowledge is added (Powers, 2003, p. 16). Because the knowledge is separate from the project’s structure, the processes that create a final work may also be reconstituted into other works. Using the online publishing system WordPress, authors are able to add content based on features laid out by the WordPress community. However, with a semantic system new content changes the nature of the underlying knowledge, creating a dynamic new model that might accomplish a different task. The system of creation–not simply the system of publication–is therefore democratized. Linus Torvalds points out that a focus on small contributions has further advantages, including uptake: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. (St. Pierre, 2005) Torvals should know: he created Linux, the UNIX-like open-source operating system that has been adapted for desktop computers, servers, and a range of mobile devices and scientific applications. The notion of bottom-up, de-centralized production is at the core of Linux and other opensource projects. He continues, “And if there is anything I’ve learnt from Linux, it’s that projects have a life of their own, and you should not try to enforce your ‘vision’ too strongly on them.
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Most often you’re wrong anyway, and if you’re not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you’ll never get anything good done.” Indeed, especially in the face of recent tightening of funding for arts and humanities, flexibility opens doors to finding uses outside the intended set of results. Linux, like much of open-source, is built with contributions in the form of individual components. Over the years Linux has grown into a complete operating system comparable to Microsoft Windows and Apple’s OS X. An important distinction is that, due to the compartmentalized nature of Linux, certain parts may be readily pulled out and used for other applications. Mobile devices–which have smaller storage capacities and a need for more streamlined architectures– can use a chunk of Linux and leave the rest out. Digital video recorders for television run on Linux (Turner, 2005). Someday soon Android, an operating system based on Linux, might drive our washing machines (Hansell, 2009). This ease of modification leads to much different results than trying to shrink large top-down systems, such as Microsoft’s efforts to scale its operating system into Windows Mobile, described as a “half-hearted rehash of an OS we’ve seen all too much of” (Topolsky, 2009). While open source may not be able to provide a single set of tools to support all work in the humanities, the models for creative collaboration that have flourished in the open source community serve as inspiration. Along with Linux, other examples include the variety of open source tools designed to manage community contributions to a single project. Part archive, part message board, and part management tool, sites like SourceForge. net meld project development with open access and documentation. Version control software like git and subversion facilitates asynchronous collaborations between contributors by standardizing how their work integrates. If the creative community documents their work in as structured a manner as
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coders have, and with the same eye toward future integration with the work of others, it will be a boon to those trying to preserve and build upon the cultural artifacts created today. In the same way new production techniques change the requirements for tools supporting cultural production, new network-based tools lead to changes in the way artifacts they describe are perceived. A system that acknowledges the importance of both conceptual and technical creators deemphasizes the idea of the single author “genius,” re-integrating all types of contributions to the creative process. The tools described below accept these principles in both concept and execution: they are designed to harvest the perspectives of many different sources as a way of better accomplishing their individual goals, and they are also intended to work together to synthesize an expansive view of the work they document.
The Pool: Project Generation The Pool is a database system intended to document and assist the distributed production of creative work. Users who register their projects in The Pool gain access to a community of fellow creators who give constant feedback about every stage of the project development process. Designed to take the ethos of the Open Source Software movement and translate it to a broader range of creative output that includes art and text, The Pool’s community of users often form impromptu collaborations based on the skill sets needed to complete a given project. Information systems are often described in such broad mission statements as the quote above, only to find themselves eternally languishing in development as feature-creep sets in and programmers try to address every aspect and interpretation of their mandate. The key to the successful development of The Pool (Still Water, 2009) is that it has one primary mechanism that defines what it should do, and any new expansions or feature additions must always be in support of
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that single idea upon which the entire system is built. For The Pool, that mechanism is iterative community feedback. Of course, many development systems integrate feedback or discussion mechanisms into their feature set. In most cases though, they are added to the system as a stock component: a message board, blog comments, or perhaps even just an email link. The Pool’s developers treat feedback as the central idea for the entire system, creating an interface, data schema, and community rules all with the goal of enhancing its ability to communicate feedback from viewers to creators. It is based in the philosophy that constant feedback from a community will lead to better projects. Feedback alone is not enough, however; the goal of The Pool is to give useful feedback to project contributors, which demands more in-depth thinking and investment. To make giving useful feedback easier The Pool imposes a structure upon the projects that are developed within it. Each project is broken down into three stages: intent, approach, and release. An intent is just a general idea, and can even be nothing more than a paragraph of text. Approaches begin to define the means and methods of implementation, and a release is literally a public release of the project. Project contributors can describe or link to the intents, approaches, and releases of their work during any phase of creation and receive feedback that can be folded into their continuing development. (Ippolito, The Pool | FAQ, 2009) Even within those stages, though, The Pool continues to try to guide users toward providing better feedback. Instead of just asking for general comments, reviews in The Pool are divided into ontological prompts, asking for feedback in categories like technological, conceptual, or perceptual merit. It asks for both numerical ratings and textual comments in each category so creators can see both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the different aspects of their work. (Ippolito, The Pool | FAQ, 2009) The software then takes these piecemeal ratings and reintegrates them us-
ing trust metrics to provide an overall impression of the project. Deconstructing the work into stages and aspects was not a primary goal of The Pool developers; it was a data structure that was designed to solve the problem of enhancing viewer feedback. Similarly, the interface of The Pool was designed to make understanding that feedback simpler and more transparent (see figure 1). Breaking with the traditional page layout models of other webbased applications, The Pool is centered around a graphing system that lays out projects based on their feedback and ratings. By default projects that have been rated highest and most often appear at the upper right hand corner of the graph, while lower or fewer ratings move a project to the bottom left. The axes can be controlled individually so a user who, for instance, wants to see examples of projects that are highly rated conceptually and technically can adjust the base interface to see that data graphically. Individual projects are presented in panels that divide them up into stages and aspects so review information can be browsed easily. Any user in The Pool can review any other, and the voices of experts will be heard alongside the voices of amateurs. Since credibility is an important concern in any such open system, The Pool includes measures to help distinguish between the two. Numerical reviews are balanced using metrics that take into account the aspectspecific ratings of the reviewer; for example, someone the community has determined is technically weak will have their technical ratings of others weighted less in the overall calculations. (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 2008) The rules of the community, as defined in its software, are again set up to help make feedback more useful for creators. As important as the features that made it in to The Pool are the features that were left out. The traditional tools of project management–Gantt charts, to-do lists, file and document archives– are not included in The Pool. Though they could
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Figure 1. The main interface for The Pool. Each name on the graph is a different project displayed in a position based on its reviews. (© 2009, Still Water. Used with Permission)
easily fall under the aegis of assisting the distributed production of creative work, they have little to do with getting project feedback from the community and including them would only take away resources from the development of more mission-centric features. The Pool’s interface and structure, highly optimized to expose review data, would not be appropriate for other types of project development tools. Such a specialized tool is only possible because its creators acknowledge that it is just one piece of software in an entire ecology of project development tools. The freedom granted by that acknowledgement means The Pool can choose one thing to be very good at and let other aspects of project development be handled by other, similarly focused programs.
Metaserver: Distributed Implementation The Metaserver (Forging the Future, 2009) is a type of connective tissue for distributed applications that want to deal with art. It is a database that holds almost no data of its own, only a few basic relationships. What it does store are pointers and links to information stored in other databases. Like
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a specialized version of early editions of Yahoo!, the Metaserver’s only purpose is to wait for users to tell it where information is stored and generate an index of those locations. Unlike Yahoo!, the Metaserver deals with discrete database records instead of web pages, and makes them available through a public interface that allows automated systems to easily share data with one another. Within the model of using many targeted applications the most critical aspect of the overall system is the layer of standardized data exchange protocols that binds the individual pieces together. The most basic protocols are almost completely content-agnostic, like the TCP/IP protocols that are the basis of the Internet. Slightly more complex are protocols that give structure to data and allow it to be used programmatically, like XML. But when sharing complex data, structure alone is often not enough; there needs to be a protocol for standardizing the data itself that allows each system to create meaningful relationships with other systems. Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and particularly OWL, have been created to add meaning to data and connect resources but require each system to follow certain protocols and are linked using complex ontologies. The Metaserver
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has been developed to avoid the complexity of redesigning systems to conform to the Semantic Web model, allowing existing database systems and architectures to attain a similar functionality without being completely rebuilt. The Metaserver was designed to be a storehouse for relationships between databases. Like the common ISBN identifier for books (International ISBN Agency, 2009), the Metaserver creates a unique identifier for artworks; stakeholders like artists, estates, and cultural institutions; and the vocabulary terms used in critical analysis of art. Though the Metaserver ends up containing an index of the art that it identifies, the data it stores is of little use on its own. A user browsing just the data in the Metaserver will learn little more than which artist created which artwork. In creating a common, unique identifier, the Metaserver allows other databases to correlate their data across systems. It goes further than just providing an ISBN-like identifier, though; it also allows other databases to store references about each identifier on the Metaserver, essentially turning every system that connects to it into a single giant relational database. If ISBN had a similar structure attached to its identification system a user would be able to find the information stored
about a given book at every bookseller, library, or review site that references it. Since different bookstores are likely to all have the same basic information about a book, connecting to every bookstore is likely of little use. But connecting a bookstore database to a review site database could be a powerful relationship to create because, even though both are discussing the same book, the type of data that they store on each book is very different. Similarly, the Metaserver’s biggest potential is to connect applications that store different types of data about the same work together, with each node in the system providing context for all the other nodes (see figure 2). Efficiency is achieved by sharing data between small peers instead of forcing data to conform to a reusable, monolithic standard. The Metaserver uses a simple web service model, so reading a record or adding a new data link requires nothing more than sending an HTTP query. An easily accessible interface is critical to allowing as many clients as possible to connect to the system. Simplicity of data is important as well: a search on the Metaserver returns only what is necessary to unambiguously identify a work or artist. This is data that is also necessary for client systems to have, no matter what their area of
Figure 2. The Metaserver was designed to connect the Franklin Furnace Database, the Digital Asset Management Database, and the Variable Media Questionnaire in the Forging the Future project, allowing each system to focus on its own strengths. (© 2009, Forging the Future. Used with Permission)
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specialty, and thus makes as few assumptions about the client database as possible. The Pool and Variable Media Questionnaire are both systems that implement the Metaserver interface and provide a good demonstration of how it works. When a new artwork is added to the VMQ, it runs a search on the Metaserver to see if the work already has an ID; if it does not, the Metaserver creates a new one and returns it to the VMQ. When that artwork is saved in the VMQ, a link to the work’s variable media record is saved back to the Metaserver. In The Pool, the same work may later be entered as an art reference to be reviewed. When it is, The Pool will search the Metaserver and find not only the work’s ID but also the link to the VMQ, which the user writing the review can read for additional information on the piece. Data links stored in the Metaserver are provided on a best-effort basis, and it therefore depends on its client systems to ensure that the links are valid. As in the RDF model, anyone can make a claim; the philosophy behind the Metaserver is that it is better to have too much information indexed than none at all, and determining the quality of that information is left to the client systems and users. The fact that the Metaserver does not attempt more validation is not a claim that it is unnecessary, just that it is not the Metaserver’s job to do that validation. Like the systems that it connects together, the Metaserver is of intentionally limited scope and is designed to do nothing more than its core mission.
The Variable Media Questionnaire: Cultural Preservation The Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) is a system designed to generate interviews that provide guidance for those trying to preserve art that requires more than just storing a box on a climate-controlled shelf. Ephemeral, technologically obsolete, or physically degraded works benefit from clear documentation of exactly what
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aspects of the work are most critical to maintain and what aspects can be modified or recreated in the spirit of the original if it becomes necessary to save the overall piece. The third version of the VMQ asks everybody connected with a work–from the artists and assistants, to conservators, to people who have just seen the work on display in the past–the same set of questions in an attempt to understand how to recreate an experience rather than just maintain an artifact. Any artwork, whether a painting hung in a climate-controlled museum or an ephemeral happening in a New York City apartment, will eventually degrade until it loses its original vibrancy and power–the only variable is time. With a rising number of digital works and pieces based on technology that is subject to failure or obsolescence the half-life of artwork is rapidly shrinking. The Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) (Forging the Future, 2008) is an online database designed to help understand how an artwork may be best preserved when its initial form decays or expires. The VMQ interviews a variety of stakeholders in an artwork to discover whether the artwork itself is gone when its materials fail, or if only the medium is dead and the art can live on in another form. (Ippolito, Accommodating the Unpredictable: The Variable Media Questionnaire, 2003) These interviews are the core data that the VMQ gathers for preservation. Using this tool, an archivist or cultural institution is able to add statements by creators on how they want their work to be preserved. The statements are intended to be forward looking thoughts, accepting the pragmatic view that the materials of their work will someday fail and prescribing acceptable remedies for when they do. Though it allows external links to supporting information like photographs or descriptive texts, the focus of the VMQ is on the interviews themselves. Each set of questions attempts to get interviewees to characterize the experience of the artwork that they wish to preserve (see figure 3). Asking how to preserve art that can be based in any number of different physical materials is
Representing Culture via Agile Collaboration
Figure 3. Interview questions in the Variable Media Questionnaire are organized by the functional components of an artwork and can have multiple answers with varying weights. (© 2009, Forging the Future. Used with Permission)
a large enough question in itself; adding works based on performance, interaction, or idea makes the task monumental. The solution used in the VMQ is to sidestep the details of each tiny piece of an artwork and ask bigger questions that can be answered holistically. For example, rather than record the dimensions of a CRT in centimeters, the VMQ might prompt an interviewee to think about what the work would look like on a differently sized monitor or on a completely different display technology once CRTs are no longer produced. (Bell, Opening the Source of Art, 2009) Working at the conceptual level bypasses details that are not only unpredictable at the time when the VMQ itself is made but may in fact be obsolete by the time an artwork in the VMQ needs to be preserved. The third version of the VMQ introduced an epistemological shift from the previous two versions by viewing the functional components that go into an artwork’s construction as its most fundamental units. Each component is treated as a
paradigmatic set of possibilities, with the answers given in the interviews defining the boundaries of the set. (Bell, VMQ Schema Descriptions, 2007) Making this change allowed the VMQ to ask specific questions about how these components interact, and those interactions form the structure of the work that the VMQ attempts to maintain. In an attempt to capture as many impressions of the work as possible, questions are posed to not just the artist whose name is on the wall next to the piece but also the curators, conservators, assistants, and even viewers who have experienced the work. But the modern reality of art is that it is not enough to treat an artwork as just a collection of physical parts, and so the VMQ also recognizes environments, user interactions, motivating ideas, and external references as aspects to be surveyed and considered when preserving or recreating the piece. Expanding the scope of the data collected by the questionnaire moves it beyond the realm of a collections management tool and begins to provide the sort of information required to legiti-
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mately update or reinterpret part of an artwork if it should become necessary. With all of these changes in data scope and structure, the VMQ is not effective as a traditional collections management program that tracks the physical property of a museum. It was never intended to fulfill that role. The VMQ was designed as one part of a set of tools bound together by the Metaserver. Other tools created by the same coalition of cultural heritage institutions, dubbed Forging the Future, focus on physical, digital, and archival management, leaving the VMQ to specialize in creating and recording variable media interviews.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Earlier in this chapter we contend that generalized tools conform knowledge rather than adapt to meet specific cultural needs. In the case of WordPress, content is placed into a temporal series of blog posts annotated by supporting plugins. We then elaborate that this process bottlenecks culture’s nuances similar to how chain retail stores bottleneck goods and profits. Of course a primary difference between WordPress and chain retail stores is that WordPress is open source. Backed by progressive notions of ownership including the Creative Commons license, teams can re-purpose, update, and re-model the code of open source software. But when the majority of users don’t write code themselves, open source can equate to holding a few shares of corporate stock. Nevertheless, when systems are agile, even users without advanced technical skills are more able to adapt them or tinker with their operations. An intriguing direction that has emerged in digital technologies is the release of network-based APIs. Popular in social networking applications like Facebook and Twitter, these APIs go a step beyond sharing data and begin to share logic and processes. Twitter in particular has been successful
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largely because its simple, open API allows other people to reuse the base Twitter network for their own purposes with a minimum of programming hassle. Projects like the Metaserver have begun to take these principles and apply them to more specialized tasks. The projects are not full cloud applications, though; instead, they seek to create a network of cloud functions that can be accessed by other programs. Billed as the future of the Internet, a true Semantic Web is still a largely theoretical concept. Many systems are using the two major technologies that enable it–XML and RDF– more as a flexible data syndication medium than a full semantic framework. The Vectors Journal, a unit at University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, is doing a little of both. Working with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, they are leveraging the syndication properties of RDF to merge metadata from external video archives while also applying ontological principles into the front-end interface. In their soon-to-be-released academic publishing platform named Scalar, classifications of content (immeasurably expansive in academia) can be added to the RDF model without requiring a programmer to update database tables to represent them. The class data is then available to new interface widgets made by their development community. Influencing Scalar’s development is a project developed by filmmaker Alex Juhasz with the Vectors team in 2009, named Publishing Learning From YouTube. Juhasz recently conducted a college course on and about YouTube, with both Juhasz and students producing videos. She found YouTube’s interface too cumbersome for effective scholarship, describing YouTube’s inter-media links, community exchange, and search features as “inexcusably poor” (Jenkins, 2008). Juhasz and Vectors re-imagined the interface as an environment with tours, triage pages, and better balance between text and video. The team realized that, depending on the length of the text, number of videos, or topic,
Representing Culture via Agile Collaboration
the arrangement (“view”) of the content should change between pages. The text-centered and media-centered views of Juhasz’s project are similar in design but provide enough distinction to meet the needs of the content. This led to a concept key to the future of Scalar: rather than conforming content to a single universal template, Scalar will feature an option for users to change views of content on the fly within the page. Users will see text, image, and video displayed in different orientations chosen from a pulldown box, including grid and graph views. The symbiotic functionality of different views provokes viewers to re-consider the interfaces to knowledge that users have come to expect. When users ponder interface as the surface node of a large network underneath, they begin to understand the influence that computing paradigms have on their interpretation of information. The idea that the structure imposed by a functional paradigm influences understanding is common in fields such as linguistics but needs further exploration in data systems. Nicole Starosielski, who researches undersea data cables, sees the Internet infrastructure as more than binary code and software: Cable infrastructures, which often remain out of view on the bottom of the seafloor, are often visualized as dematerialized network flows. We don’t see the spaces that they are routed through, and cannot see where local cultural forces end up influencing network structure. For example, local fishermen in California and New Zealand regularly contest cable development as it interferes with their use of the ocean as a resource. (Starosielski, 2010) Nicole’s stance points towards an environmentalist mentality where we can interrogate not only our virtual spaces but our physical environment. Re-integrating understandings of media and physical ecologies could shed new light on both. Jon Ippolito describes, “As nature teaches, in
any swiftly changing ecosystem there is safety in numbers (think of spawning fish), in adaptability (think of amphibian DNA, which turns male or female depending on water temperature), and collaboration (think of the clown fish and anemone, or the tickbird and rhino). Media art that is capable of all three means of self-preservation will flourish in the media ecology of the twenty-first century.” (Ippolito, 2008) Software that adopts the agility of nature’s multivariate interactions will have an evolutionary edge over that which remains monolithic and staid.
CONCLUSION Finding a balance between capturing every outlying piece of data and building a generalized but efficient information system is not easy. Though the conventional wisdom of programming suggests that building a large, generic system is the most efficient way to manage knowledge, the projects profiled here demonstrate how many small, targeted systems together can match the overall flexibility that the single system seeks. Such small systems provide an opportunity for developers to work together closely with domain experts and grant them the ability to incorporate nuances that could never survive in a generalized system. The final goal of such a collaboration is to better capture the full range of experience that is often lost when massaging data to fit a monolithic standard.
REFERENCES ArsenneLupin. (2008). Re: Easily hacked? [Comment on post: Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM]. Slashdot.org. Retrieved October 2, 2009, from http://tech.slashdot.org/ story/08/01/29/2253239/ Aboriginal-ArchiveUses-New-DRM
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Bell, J. (2007, September 18). VMQ Schema Descriptions. Variable Media Questionnaire. Retrieved September 12, 2009, from http://variablemedia questionnaire.net/ media/vmq_schema _narrative_v03.3.pdf Bell, J. (2009, October 2). Opening the source of art. Open Source Business Resource. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.osbr.ca/ ojs/ index.php/ osbr/article/view/ 980/943 Berkman Center for Internet & Society. (2008, July 28). Can creativity be crowdsourced? Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://cyber.law.harvard. edu/node/4498 Christen, K. (2008). Working together: Archival challenges and digital solutions in Aboriginal Australia. The SAA Archaeological Record. Retrieved March 28, 2010, from http://www.saa. org/ Portals/0/SAA/ Publications/thesaaarch rec/ may08.pdf Fisher, K. (2007). DRM advocates getting nervous about consumer backlash. Ars Technica. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from http://arstechnica. com/ tech-policy/news/ 2007/09/drm-advocates -getting-nervous-about -consumer-backlash.ars Forging the Future. (2008, August 20). Variable media questionnaire. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://variablemedia questionnaire.net/ Forging the Future. (2009, September 10). New tools for variable media preservation. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://forging-the- future.net/#tools -metaserver Hansell, S. (2009). Why Android could be headed for the laundry room. Bits. Retrieved October 29, from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/05/28/ why-android -could-be-headed-for-the-laundry -room/ International ISBN Agency. (2009). ISBN FAQ. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://www. isbn-international.org/ faqs/view/5
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Ippolito, J. (2003). Accommodating the unpredictable: The variable media questionnaire. In A. Depocas, J. Ippolito, & C. Jones, (Eds.), Permanence through change: The variable media approach. Retrieved September 19, 2009, from http://variablemedia.net/ pdf/Ippolito.pdf Ippolito, J. (2008). Death by wall label. Still Water ThoughtMesh. Retrieved April 10, 2010, from http://thoughtmesh.net/ publish/11.php Ippolito, J. (2009, September 12). The Pool | FAQ. The Pool. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://pool.newmedia. umaine.edu/ faq.html Jenkins, H. (2008). Learning from YouTube: An interview with Alex Juhasz (Part One). Confessions of an Aca-Fan [Blog]. Retrieved April 14, 2010, from http://www.henryjenkins. org/2008/02/ learning_ from_youtube_an _inter.html Pagel, A. (2008). The immobile cyclone: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. National Parks Service. Retrieved April 18, 2010, from http://www.nps. gov/ archive/gosp/ tour/pagel.html Pepper, N. (2008). Protecting consumers from DRM. Public Knowledge. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from http://www.public knowledge. org/ node/1694 Powers, S. (2003). Practical RDF. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associate, Inc. qaramazov. (2008). Before complaining consider _why_ this was done [Comment on post: Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM]. Slashdot.org. Retrieved October 2, 2009, from http://tech.slashdot.org/ story/08/01/29/ 2253239/Aboriginal-Archive -Uses-New-DRM St. Pierre, P. (2005). Linus Torvalds: “Desktop Market has already started” interview. Linux Times. Retrieved December 21, 2009, from http:// web.archive.org/ web/20050404020308/ http:// www.linuxtimes.net/ modules.php?name=News &file=article&sid=145
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Starosielski, N. (2010). Avoiding a cultural bottleneck: Networked, distributed, and agile collaborations. HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations. Retrieved April 17, 2010, from http://ichass.illinois.edu/ hastac2010/HASTAC_2010/ Presentations/Entries/ 2010/4/15_ Avoiding_a_Cultural _Bottleneck__Networked,_ Distributed,_and_Agile_ Collaborations.html Still Water. (2009, October 1). The Pool. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://pool.newmedia. umaine.edu/ Topolsky, J. (2009). Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark. Engadget. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://www.engadget. com/ 2009/02/18/editorial- ten-reasons-whywindows-mobile -6-5-misses-the-mark/ Turner, J. (2005). A Linux DVR is no myth—It’s MythTV! Linux Journal. Retrieved November 20, 2009, from http://www.linux journal.com/ article/8562 Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2008). Expressive processing: An experiment in blog-based peer review. Grand Text Auto. Retrieved November 15, 2009, from http://grandtextauto.org/ 2008/01/22/ expressiveprocessing -an-experiment-in-blog -based-peerreview/
Berners-Lee, T. (2009, August 27). Web services overview - Design issues. W3C.org. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/ DesignIssues/Web Services.html Dumbill, E. (2002, August 1). Support online communities with FOAF. XML Watch. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://www.ibm.com/ developerworks/ xml/library/x-foaf2.html Foster, A. (2008, May 30). New-media scholars’ place in ‘the Pool’ could lead to tenure. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://chronicle.com/ article/ New-Media- Scholars-Place-in/10928 Galán, F., Sampaio, A., Rodero-Merino, L., Loy, I., Gil, V., & Vaquero, L. M. (2009). Service specification in cloud environments based on extensions to open standards. Proceedings of the Fourth International ICST Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware. New York: ACM. Hanhardt, J. G. (2003). Case studies: Nam June Paik, TV Garden. In Depocas, A., Ippolito, J., & Jones, C. (Eds.), Permanence through change: The variable media approach (pp. 70–78). New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications.
Wordpress.org. (n.d.). Installing WordPress: Famous 5-minute install. WordPress.org. Retrieved November 12, 2009, from http://codex. word press.org/ Installing_Word Press#Famous _5-Minute_Install
Haughwout, M. (2006, April 3). A reflecting and/or refracting pool: When a local community becomes autonomous online. First Monday. Retrieved October 10, 2009 from http://firstmonday. org/ htbin/cgiwrap/bin /ojs/index.php/fm/ article/ view/1322/1242
ADDITIONAL READING
Hockey, S. (1998). An agenda for electronic text technology in the humanities. Classical World, 91(6), 521–542. doi:10.2307/4352157
W3C. (2009, December 9). W3C Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved December 22, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Ippolito, J. (2008). Video introduction to The Pool. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http:// pool.newmedia. umaine.edu/ pool_screencast/
Beckett, D. (Ed.). (2009, December 23). Planet RDF. Retrieved December 23, 2009, from http:// planetrdf.com/
Ippolito, J. (n.d.). Pool walkthrough. Retrieved September 12, 2009, from http://pool.newmedia. umaine.edu/walkthrough/ #approach-rights
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Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we Twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (pp. 5665). New York: ACM. Klamma, R., & Spaniol, M. (2003). Supporting communication and knowledge creation in digitally networked communities in the humanities. ACM SigGroup Bulletin, 24(3), 55–59. La Bella, L. (2010). How globalization works. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group. McCown, F., & Nelson, M. L. (2009). What happens when facebook is gone? Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS Join Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 251-254). New York: ACM. McCune, Z. (2008, July 28). Q + A with Jon Ippolito and John Bell on open source art. Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://cyber.law.harvard. edu/ node/4489 Niepert, M., Buckner, C., & Allen, C. (2007). A dynamic ontology for a dynamic reference work. Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Join Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 288-297). New York: ACM. Rellermeyer, J. S., Duller, M., & Alonso, G. (2009). Engineering the Cloud from software modules. Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing (pp. 32-37). Washington DC: IEEE Computer Society. Stringari, C. (2003). Beyond “conservative”: The conservator’s role in variable media preservation. In A. Depocas, J. Ippolito, & C. Jones (Eds.), Permanence through change: The variable media approach. Retrieved September 19, 2009 from http://variablemedia.net/ pdf/Stringari.pdf
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Vesna, V. (Ed.). (2007). Database aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Bottleneck: Scenario where many processes depend on the operations or results of an individual or few. Digital Humanities: Broad term describing a field that combines the analytical and critical methods of humanities disciplines with computational analysis, design, and multimedia. Distributed: For digital systems, placing data, components, and processes across a geography or network to limit dependency on a single, large system. Ecology: Relationship of systems to their environments and each other. Network ecologies often mimic nature in their complexity of interaction. eXtensible Markup Language (XML): A specification for the formatting of data in plain text files using tag blocks, descriptors, and attributes. Open Source: A movement to allow access to the source code of computer applications to facilitate the enrichment of software by encouraging collaboration. Semantic Web: Model for the World Wide Web where the meaning of data is stored and transferred. In this model, computer systems can understand data and infer action without human intervention. Variable Media: New forms of cultural production where traditional views of authorship are difficult to define.
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Chapter 11
Evaluating the Use of Virtual Reality and Multimedia Applications for Presenting the Past Maria Economou University of the Aegean, Greece Laia Pujol Tost University of the Aegean, Greece
ABSTRACT Virtual reality applications offer various possibilities for cultural heritage interpretation, such as giving users the feeling of immersion and appealing to all their senses, making their experience lively and memorable. In order to test their effectiveness for assisting learning and successful integration in exhibitions, the authors carried out an extensive evaluation study using three case studies: the exhibition “Immaginare Roma Antica” at the Trajan Markets, Rome; the permanent displays at the Ename Museum, Belgium; and the VR displays at Hellenic Cosmos, Foundation of the Hellenic World, Athens. The chapter analyses how the applications were used, the type of learning different systems supported, how this was affected by the conditions of use, and their suitability for different groups. It also offers guidelines on evaluation methodology when studying the use of ICT in cultural settings. The study contributes to the construction of a substantial body of empirical and methodological knowledge aimed at guiding future designs and evaluations of ICT tools in exhibitions.
INTRODUCTION Virtual Reality (VR) applications provide various possibilities for use in cultural heritage interpretation. They offer users (to varying degrees, depending on the type of application) the feeling
of immersion in a multimedia environment, giving them the sense that they have been transported to the recreated space, be it the streets of an ancient city or the stadium where the original Olympic Games took place. At the same time, VR applications can appeal to all the users’ senses, which contributes to making the experience lively and
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch011 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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memorable. Some of these possibilities have been used for informal education purposes, aiming to encourage mainly younger audiences to learn about the past, history and ancient cultures. However, the suitability of these technological tools for assisting learning and integrating effectively in exhibitions should be tested with systematic evaluation, as their use can also raise several issues. For example, research has shown that although ICT applications can be effectively used in formal educational environments, they are sometimes poorly integrated in informal ones, such as museum exhibitions, as they follow a different communication paradigm. In order to test the effect of various VR and multimedia applications on the visitors’ experience, the Museology Laboratory of the Department of Cultural Informatics of the University of the Aegean, Greece carried out an extensive evaluation study using different case studies in different cultural institutions in three European countries, Italy, Belgium and Greece. The main part of this research was integrated in CHIRON, the Cultural Heritage Informatics Research Oriented Network1. The case studies examined in the research were compared with other similar ones from around the world, from both formal and informal educational environments, taking into account each time, the particular setting and aims of each case. The chapter will discuss the results related to the type of learning different VR and multimedia systems support, how this is influenced by their conditions of use, their integration in museum exhibitions, and their suitability for different visitor groups, particularly children and young people,. It will also analyse the guidelines we reached on evaluation methodology and the best way to study the complicated set of parameters involved in cultural heritage visits, as well as use of ICT applications.
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THE EVALUATION STUDY: AIMS AND APPROACH The wider aim of the research programme was to understand the particular role of ICT in cultural heritage settings and to evaluate their effectiveness. More specifically, the programme aimed to investigate the effect of ICT applications on the visitors’ experience and on their learning in informal settings. It also wanted to compare the effect of different types of ICT applications and investigate the role of the particular conditions of their use, such as the role of a human mediator and the effect of particular types of interfaces. The study started with a critical review of existing research in museums and formal learning environments (Economou & Pujol, 2007), from which we outline very briefly here the summary of main findings. Previous studies in museums have shown that new technologies can trigger an interest and motivate visitors to examine more carefully displays and exhibition themes. On the other hand, they create problems as they: •
•
•
do not always support group interaction (as they usually follow the one-to-one communication paradigm of the personal computer. often conflict with the other exhibits (as they are a medium within another medium) but also with the other original objects (digital surrogate compared to original), while sometimes, their communication and learning objectives are compromised due to usability problems (related with their design and with the users’ experience).
On the other hand, research studies in formal learning environments (schools, universities, etc) have shown that in cases of discovery learning, ICT applications allow self-evaluation and testing and increase motivation, attention and memorisation, while they can often encourage social interaction.
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They are also suitable for presenting complex, abstract, not visible phenomena or subjects and can encourage the adoption of a wider perspective. In order to test these findings and develop them further, we decided to carry out an extensive evaluation study in different European museums, covering different user interfaces (interactive kiosks, immersive virtual reality, augmented reality, multiple users interfaces, etc), dates of design (ranging from 1995 to 2008) and museological approaches. The international dimension of the CHIRON project and the contact with the other partners allowed this variety and helped us to investigate different aspects of a complex phenomenon. The variety of institutions and technological applications included in the study allowed us to test their use in different settings and to identify particularities and common characteristics. It also offered valuable insight on how these applications can function in exhibition spaces, playing a different role each time. The three case studies selected for the second phase of the research were: 1. the exhibition organised at the Trajan Markets of Rome by the Istituto per le Tecnologie Applicate ai Beni Culturali (ITABC) from September 15 to November 20, 2005 entitled “Immaginare Roma Antica” which presented a selection of the different applications related with the ancient city of Rome, the Roman Empire or innovative research implementations. 2. the permanent exhibition at the Ename Museum (Ename, Belgium) which uses three different types of ICT communication models in three respective parts of the exhibition, and 3. Hellenic Cosmos, the exhibition centre of the Foundation of the Hellenic World in Athens, where we studied the use or two different VR systems and a related exhibition.
The methodology used for our evaluations included qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data gathered through in situ observations and visitor tracking, interviews with museum staff and face-to-face interviews with visitors, as well as self-completion questionnaires. The basic methodology built initially for Rome was systematically adapted to each case and improved thanks to the lessons learned practically. We will describe the relevant details in each case. This study adopted an integrated approach, combining observational interpretative methods and statistical analysis, in order to obtain a better understanding about the specific advantages and disadvantages of ICT for heritage presentation in exhibitions. The study of the social interaction with exhibits would normally be considered as “qualitative”, in contrast with learning or other aspects of the visit which are measurable through tests. However, as some authors have pointed out (Heath, vom Lehn et al., 2005; Mantovani, 2001), previous quantitative methods (e.g. timings, learning [tests] or usability tests) have proven to be insufficient for offering a real understanding of what really happens with high-tech exhibits in museum galleries. This is why we believe that evaluation of ICT should focus more on the way people behave at and around ICT applications, which implies the development of an observational methodology, since it is one of the most powerful means to describe or verify fundamental hypothesis about the process of constructing meaning through social interaction. On the other hand, the observation of social interaction should not be classified a priori as “qualitative”, implying the study of a non quantifiable subject and the use of purely descriptive and non-systematic methods, which consequently lead to non-generalisable or even dubious conclusions. Neither observation is per se non-systematic, nor is social interaction a non-quantifiable subject. This is why the methods we developed and tested in all case studies try to transform the observational, descriptive aspects of social interaction into nu-
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merical and standardized categories of behaviour that can be later treated statistically in order to infer patterns and provide explanative hypotheses.
The Temporary Exhibition “Immaginare Roma Antica” In Rome The fieldwork started with the evaluation of the temporary exhibition “Immaginare Roma Antica” which was organized by the Italian Research Institute for the Application of Technologies in Cultural Heritage (Istituto per le Tecnologie Applicate ai Beni Culturali (ITABC)2 which is part of the CNR) at the Trajan Markets in Rome in 2005 (Figure 1) (Forte, Pescarin, & Pujol, 2006; Pujol & Economou, 2006; Pujol & Economou, 2007). The exhibition included a variety of applications which were part of the Virtual Heritage project. This was the result of a joint initiative carried out
by several institutions (the Rome City Council, the Imperial Roman Forum Museum, UNESCO, Region of Lazio Funding Group, the Italian National Research Centre and LUISS University), which organized a call for projects applying ICT for the analysis and presentation of Cultural Heritage related to Rome and the Roman Empire. More than 50 projects were selected and 14 of them were displayed through the appropriate installation in each one of the rooms composing the market. The exhibition offered the opportunity to study visitors’ perception about the use of ICT and the way different visitor groups used different types of ICT displays (from multimedia to different types of VR) and interfaces (from mouse and joystick to haptic arms) in an informal learning environment. At the same time, it helped us build an evaluation methodology specifically designed to take into account all the factors involved in this
Figure 1. The exhibition at the Trajan Markets. (© 2005, L. Pujol Tost. Used with permission.)
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use, and which until then had been analyzed separately: the interface features, the visitors’ characteristics and the context (spatial configuration and social interactions). The methods used in Rome were observation, tracking and interviewing. During observation, the researcher remained in the room where the ICT application was located and studied the way this was used by visitors (Figure 2) and generally, how visitors behaved. Additionally, she followed different visitors groups, as they wandered in the exhibition spaces, timing their stops and recording their route and behaviour. In both cases an observation sheet was used, combining traditional methods from visitor studies and a simplified version of usability tests (Asensio & Pol Méndez, 2001; Desmarais, Duquette, Renié, & Laurier, 1998; Kuittinen, 1998; Scanlon et al., 1998) which was suitably adjusted, as was the case with other studies that observed visitors’ engagement, collaborative learning and conceptual change with high-tech displays (e.g. Podgorny, 2004; Roussou, 2004). In this case, we recorded comments and behaviours in relation to four groups of variables: personal behaviour, social behaviour, technologi-
cal interaction and learning, as we believe that the interaction between these has a considerable effect on the museum visit. Interviews with visitors followed a pre-established questionnaire and were carried out at three different moments: •
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Before the visit: open and multiple choice questions aimed at obtaining demographic information about visitors, as well as their experience expectations about museums/ the exhibition and their opinion/knowledge about the use of ICT in the Cultural Heritage field. After the visit: open and Likert scale questions aimed at collecting visitors’ opinions about the exhibition (things they liked and disliked; most enjoyable, immersive, interactive and good for learning exhibits); i perception of ICT use in museums; and recall of contents. During the visit: open and Likert scale questions aimed at gathering information about visitors’ experience in each of the exhibits (with regard to engagement, usabil-
Figure 2. A couple interacting with a multimedia application at the [Immaginare Roma Antica] exhibition in Rome. (© 2005, L. Pujol Tost. Used with permission.)
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ity, group interaction, realism and learning) and about their opinion concerning the usefulness of technology for learning and the presentation of cultural heritage. We carried out 117 interviews in total and observed 186 visitors, which led to the recording of 610 interaction incidents with the different ICT applications. This combination of methods allowed us to obtain through observation and tracking an independent view of the way visitors used the applications and interacted with other members of their group and with other visitors. This could be compared with the data from the interviews, which allowed us to investigate in greater depth the reasons for visitors’ behaviour, their impressions and preferences. This exhibition, in which audiences were able to interact with different high-tech exhibits, offered the invaluable opportunity to undertake a first exploratory survey (Forte, Pescarin et al., 2006; Pujol & Economou, 2006) aimed at assessing visitors’ perception about the use of ICT in the Cultural Heritage field and the way different kinds of technological displays are used in the informal learning context. Indeed, it provided a first general idea about the subject. We understood that visitors perceived ICT as tools for the enhancement of learning, but that this function, shared with other low-tech resources within the repertoire of the exhibition’s communicational means, might be undermined by problems of usability (as it was not always clear in an easy and intuitive way how the user interface functioned) and by the limitations of the interface to support social interaction. The variety of different applications in the exhibition offered a rich picture of visitors’ perceptions, opinions and behaviour, but on the other hand, did not allow a more systematic comparison of the applications, as we could have carried out, for example, if the same content was presented in different applications, with different software and interfaces. Nevertheless, the evaluation demon-
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strated the importance of comparing the answers given by visitors in the questionnaires with the observed behaviours and timings. With regard to timings, it had traditionally been assumed in visitor studies that there was a correlation between the time spent at an exhibit and the degree of learning and enjoyment it offered. In the case of ICT applications, it would be erroneous to conclude from the increased time spent at them that they are necessarily better than traditional communication means or that they improve collaborative learning, because our research in Rome showed that visitors mainly spent their time trying to understand the operation of the interface. As observations demonstrated, only in the cases where visitors had experience with this kind of environment they could really concentrate on the exploration of the content.
The Exhibition at the Provincial Archaeological Museum Of Ename In order to continue deepening in our understanding of the specific contribution of computational virtuality for the presentation of cultural heritage and its problems of integrating in exhibition, we selected our second case study, the permanent displays at the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Ename, which is closely related with the Ename Expertise Centre (one of the CHIRON partners)3, at the village of Ename, near Ghent in Belgium. This also allowed us to continue developing the integrated method of analysis used in the previous evaluation, combining observational interpretative methods and statistical analysis. Ename constituted a useful case study since it also presented archaeological content using a variety of museographic solutions, which allowed us to compare them in order to understand the specific contribution of ICT for the presentation of cultural heritage. The Museum, which opened in 1998, uses three different museographic models, each one suggesting a different way of approaching the
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exhibits and using the technology, for interpreting the history of the site through the surviving material culture (Pujol & Economou, 2007) The first exhibition gallery contains a sinuous sequence of showcases and texts aimed at explaining the historical evolution of Ename and the related medieval abbey (Figure 3a). At the opposite wall is located the “Timeline”, a touchscreen application aimed at contextualizing some of the main archaeological findings within a virtual reconstruction of Ename with the abbey as the main protagonist. The second room is dedicated to the “Feast of a Thousand Years” (from now on, the Feast) (Figure 3b), an exhibit composed of different resources. At the entrance of this gallery, there is a round interactive glass case containing twenty four archaeological objects, which can be selected by pressing the buttons around the case. Each one of these objects is linked with one of twenty four mannequin figures dressed in period costumes in a nearby diorama. The figures sitting at the feast table represent historical characters or everyday people from Ename’s history (spanning about one thousand years from the present), whose personal story is narrated by real actors dressed in period costumes and performing in short video segments projected on the big screen behind the table. A light illuminating the specific museum object which has been selected from the round display
case, a similar spotlight highlighting the related mannequin figure, a wall panel and an additional printed sheet help to link all the elements. The Feast tries to bring the objects to life by showing the personal stories within the historical context. In the last room of the Ename Museum is the “Archaeolab” (Figure 4), a hands-on area aimed at showing the basic techniques and methodologies used for studying and measuring archaeological finds and for obtaining the information presented in the museum. This uses information and resources from the research and excavations undertaken at Ename. Adapting the methodology we developed for Rome, at Ename we used, apart from observation and interviews, self-completion questionnaires. This time, the observation was carried out via the Museum’s security camera located at the front desk, whose use posed sensitive ethical issues about respecting the privacy of the visit (despite the related written note at the entrance of the Museum). On the other hand, it also allowed the collection of rich data and the concurrent observation of several visitors without the obvious presence of the researcher which could have affected their behaviour in the small galleries of the Museum (as was the case, in some of the small spaces in Rome).
Figure 3. The “Timeline” application and the “Feast of a Thousand Years”, Ename Museum. (© 2005, L. Pujol Tost. Used with permission.)
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Figure 4. The “Archaeolab” at the Ename Museum. (© 2005, L. Pujol Tost. Used with permission.)
For the interviews we used a questionnaire which included questions of different types (simple, multiple choice, open, Likert scale) in order to record three types of information: visitors characteristics (demographic, knowledge of and opinion on ICT, interest in the past and cultural heritage), preference about means of presentation in museums and opinion about the displays. Because of the Museum’s low visitation (47 independent visitors in a period of 18 days in autumn 2006), unlike our other two case studies, we decided to also use self-completion questionnaires in English and Flemish in order to record the opinion of more visitors during the days that the researchers were not in the Museum. We established a set of 35 questions, based on our previous work at Rome but adapted to Ename’s specific features. Finally, because of the small number of independent visitors to the Museum and the importance that schools and organized groups have in this case, we introduced a third method of data gathering: an interview with all the guides and with two school teachers and an observation of their guided visit. The interviews were aimed at obtaining information about how they conducted
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the visit, used the exhibits and which was their opinion about the usefulness of the technology. These conversations took place after the observation of their visits. As the guides interact every day with visitors and exhibits, they could provide very useful information about visitors’ opinions and reactions towards the technology that could later be verified through the questionnaires and/ or observation. We collected 24 observations in total (10 of which were combined with an interview) and carried 9 further interviews, while we collected 10 self-administered questionnaires. Because of the low sample, we were careful in the analysis of the results and treated them as part of an exploratory investigation which raised issues which needed to be tested with a larger sample. From a methodological point of view, the evaluation at Ename provided useful lessons, because it allowed us to obtain very good data from observations and link them with the corresponding interviews, thus enabling us to carry out two things. First, to undertake a full statistical analysis of behaviours, with which we inferred trends and explanative hypotheses about the use of exhibits. Second, to make a full use of
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triangulation, which demonstrated the need of contrasting the data coming from all methods in order to obtain a better comprehension about the subject (the questionnaires provided explanations for visitors’ behaviour and the observations verified their answers). The evaluation of the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Ename allowed us to understand which was, according to visitors’ opinion and to their real use, the specific contribution of hightech exhibits and more specifically of VR to the presentation of cultural heritage in the exhibition. VR has a lot of potential for supporting learning as it allows a quick, flexible, personalized exploration of rich visual information in a very small space. According to the views of visitors, guides and teachers, the VR application provided a general, quick idea of the abbey’s evolution in time, which was easy to obtain because it was transmitted by visual means. The guides specified that it helped people to understand the archaeological remains: if they had previously seen the VR application, they understood better the correspondence between the ruined walls on the site near the Museum and their original function because they remembered the reconstruction. The enhancement of understanding through visualization is one of the main reasons for the introduction of this technology in museums. On the other hand, this study, like previous ones (see Economou & Pujol, 2007 for a review of several studies) showed that the images alone can not convey easily abstract historical information without the support of verbal means of representation. This is one of the reasons that human mediators, the guides in this case, play such an important role at the Museum as they provide the complementary verbal explanations about the historical facts associated to cultural heritage. The results of the observations and interviews showed that the use of the technology by itself does not always offer the immediate benefit that audiences and curators sometimes expect. As a matter of fact, visitors (of all ages, genders, level of education or interests) to the Museum
expressed their greatest satisfaction with regard to the original objects as witnesses of the past, and with the “Feast”, because it was considered the easiest to use, the most engaging, the one which accommodated best the group needs (as visitors could sit at a bench and watch the video segments with the actors) and also the most interactive. In this case, the use of VR technology could not achieve an empathic engagement (like in the case of the “Feast”) because it lacked immersion, the presence of human agents and did not include any of the human stories related to the objects it showed. Secondly, the virtual simulation could not substitute the interaction with real objects (like the one offered at the “Archaeolab”), which is very useful to learn about the practical/methodological aspects of sciences or life. Therefore, it was shown that one of the specific advantages of VR for the presentation of cultural heritage is the possibility offered by its computational virtuality to reconstruct and manipulate elements or phenomena which are no longer available. But while in many cases of spatial/ geometrical content it can be used alone, because the images are self-explanatory, in the case of historical processes, images need to be supported by a verbal discourse if there is no representation of human actions. However, before all this can be applied, it is necessary to solve the usability problems, because as this evaluation demonstrated once again, there can not be any learning or understanding or the content, unless users have a complete and easy control of the interface.
The Hellenic Cosmos, Foundation of the Hellenic World, Athens Based on the results from Rome and Ename, we decided to deepen and broaden our research on how visitors use ICT for learning about the past in museum exhibitions, using one more case study. This examined the VR applications and the related exhibition at the Hellenic Cosmos, the cultural centre of the Foundation of the Hellenic World
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in Athens4, during 2006-07. This case allowed us to keep the common parameter of archaeological/historical subject (as the Foundation focuses on preserving and disseminating the Hellenic culture, historical memory and tradition and includes several displays on ancient Greece), but to investigate more systematically different VR applications, with a varying degree of interactivity, immersivity and social interaction (Pujol and Economou, 2008). The Foundation of the Hellenic World is a Greek privately funded non-profit cultural heritage institution. It uses VR technology in two ways: as a tool for research and as a tool to disseminate this knowledge. The latter is mainly done through the Hellenic Cosmos (Figure 5a), which was founded in 1998 and is based in a former industrial area of Athens now gradually being regenerated. At the time our research took place, the Hellenic Cosmos(hence, HC) had three main exhibits using ICT: a) Kivotos (ark in Greek), inaugurated in 1999, is the oldest VR application. It is a CAVElike system composed by four back-projection screens delimiting an area of 3m3, where a group of maximum 10 people is immersed in different shows, mainly reconstructions of archaeological sites, such as Olympia or the ancient city of Miletus. Users of Kivotos wear stereoscopic glasses which create a real 3D effect. The interaction with the system is controlled by the museum educa-
tor, who navigates within the virtual world with the help of a wand and a tracking system on her head and explains the buildings and actions on display. b) Tholos, the latest VR application, was inaugurated in December 2006. This is a virtual reality theatre consisting of a semi-spherical screen inclined 23º and a surrounding a room with 132 seats, each one equipped with a joystick and four buttons. The evaluated application, the first one designed for this system, presents a reconstruction of the ancient agora of Athens in three different periods. The interaction with the system takes again the form of a spatial navigation and is led by a museum educator with the help of a wand, while another educator provides the archaeological content (description of the buildings’ functions). c) Finally, the exhibition, which complements the Tholos’ content, entitled “Meeting at the Ancient Agora” (Figure 5b), provides information about the evolution of the ancient site, its historical meaning and institutions, and how these have been transmitted until today. It combines different types of exhibits, both high and low-tech, which allow different kinds of exploration and degrees of collaborative interaction: In the case of the HC, our research concentrated specifically on two issues that had already appeared in the two previous projects: first, the role of the human guides and of immersion in virtual reconstructions (for the VR systems);
Figure 5. The Hellenic Cosmos in Athens and the exhibition “Meeting at the Ancient Agora”. (© 2005, L. Pujol Tost. Used with permission.)
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second, the specific advantages and inconveniences of high-tech applications for cultural heritage presentation and learning in exhibitions (for the exhibition).This project also gave us the opportunity to continue improving our integrated method of evaluation, combining interviews with the guides and with the visitors and the observation of their interaction with exhibits in order to obtain a better understanding of the subject. In order to achieve these goals, we collected different kinds of data, combining qualitative (interpretation of open answers and behaviours) and quantitative methods (statistical analysis of the previous). The methods used in this survey were observations, interviews with visitors and interviews with the museum educators. Observations were conducted at the VR systems and at the exhibition. Because visitors’ interaction with the technological displays takes place through the guide, the observations were designed to gather information about verbal exchanges and body gestures (physical and intellectual reactions to the images), but the pilot testing demonstrated that the conditions inside the Tholos and the Kivotos were too poor for obtaining useful results and that a lot of the information sought could be better obtained through the interviews with the guides. This was also confirmed by the sessions of participant observation we carried, where the researcher took the role of one of the visitors and joined the group interacting in the Kivotos. Consequently, we decided to concentrate the observations on the exhibition, where a standardized sheet with a floor plan and behaviour codes were used in order to record visitors’ timings at each exhibit, paths and behaviours, as was used in Rome and Ename, but adapted to the needs of the current case and adjusted to simplify and fine-tune the recording of behaviour categories. The second method of data gathering was the interview with the museum educators. At Rome, we noted that human guidance was very important because visitors requested a member of staff in case of difficulties with the interface. At Ename, it was
evident that the guides enhanced the interpretation of the exhibits and complemented the VR displays with their discourse. At the Hellenic Cosmos, the guides are not an option but a necessary condition for the functioning of the VR systems, since they are in charge of the navigation and the interpretation. Consequently, it was important to record their views about the interfaces and about the visitors’ reactions, for which we used a semi-structured interview. Due to the guides’ availability, it was possible to carry out interviews with 10 of the 17 in total. The information from the interviews was interpreted and subsequently used as a basis to compare with direct evidence provided by observation and interviews with the visitors. The third method of data gathering was semistructured interviews with visitors. The questionnaires, both in Greek and in English (for non-Greek speaking visitors), asked general questions about the HC, comparative questions about the feeling of presence and the factors affecting this, preferences in media and means of communication for learning, specific questions about the exhibition, demographic data and previous experience with heritage, computers and any similar centre. After pilot testing of the questionnaire and observations in spring 2007, interviews with visitors were conducted for 15 days in July 2007. We carried out a total amount of 97 interviews, 75 in Greek and 22 in English, mainly with tourists. According to the museum educators of HC, VR allows seeing and understanding places that cannot be visited because they are not accessible or because they have disappeared. They thought that its visual and experiential character makes heritage interesting for those who are not initially attracted by it, and especially for children. In this sense, they found it more suitable than books and thought that the museum educator could not be substituted by a pre-recorded explanation because the capacity of adaptation would be lost. They thought that the Kivotos allowed a closer relationship with visitors, while the exhibition enabled them to develop their role as museum
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educators more and rewarded them through the visitors’ reactions. Visitors appreciated the living narration of the museum educators in the technological exhibits, the possibility of participating and the feeling of “being there”, because they considered that this was a novel and useful way to understand what the place looked like in ancient times. The reconstructive capacity of the technology was a major attraction for younger visitors. Visitors declared they would absolutely recommend visiting the Hellenic Cosmos to a friend and the main reasons were its originality and experiential character, the relationship with Greek history or heritage, and the suitability for children. The Tholos left a strong impression on visitors (both positive and negative), because of its technology (real time rendering, size of the screen) and capacity to give a global idea about Agora in a limited time. Its capacity to visualise complex processes (something we had already seen at Ename), together with the possibility to experience it while sitting made it “less tiring” (both in psychological and physical terms) for some visitors, although this reduced its capacity to produce a sensation of presence. The Kivotos
was specifically appreciated for its ability to offer a sensation of presence (thanks to its realistic 3D effects, immersivity and direct interaction). Because of the setup at the HC, the exhibition did not receive a lot of visits compared to the other two exhibits, but in all cases, and especially by older visitors, it was highly valued because its different exhibits allowed a multi-sensorial, interactive and self-controlled exploration aimed at obtaining knowledge about the social and political meaning of the agora. It appears that visitor satisfaction and effective social interaction was not related with whether an exhibit was high or low-tech, but with its specific design and placement in the exhibition. On the other hand, the perception of technological exhibits was not related so much to the users’ age but more to their previous experience with computers or with the subject, which raised their expectations. We did not record any difference in visitors’ reactions related to gender. The following diagram (Figure 6) summarises in a schematic way the factors influencing learning at the three different exhibits at the HC, as we deduced them from the visitors’ answers. The visitors’ answers indicated that the technological exhibits need to be intuitively interactive,
Figure 6. Factors affecting learning at the three Hellenic Cosmos’ exhibits (T=Tholos, K=Kivotos, E=exhibition)
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visually realistic and include some form of human presence. The lack of the latter made older visitors complain that they had not felt they were travelling to the past in most parts of the applications. This confirms, as other authors pointed out (Gaitatzes, Christopoulos, & Roussou, 2001), that VR has created big expectations, which act as a powerful audience attractor but due to its high cost, technological limitations and lack of sufficient research and integration in the CH field, it has not yet accomplished all its promises. The majority of visitors preferred to have an active self-controlled role in the exploration of the virtual reconstructions because they believe this is better for learning. However, in case this is not possible, they choose to be guided by a museum educator because this allowed a warmer experience and offered a greater capacity of immediate adaptation. This confirms the results from both Rome and Ename, where visitors tried a direct interaction but, in case of difficulty and especially in the case of older visitors, they preferred to be helped or even guided by a member of staff.
LESSONS LEARNED In methodological terms, the experience from all three studies confirmed the importance of using triangulation (to verify the information provided by visitors in the questionnaires and to explain the information obtained by the observations) and of combining qualitative and quantitative methods (in order to obtain a comprehensive, integrated image of the use of ICT in exhibitions). The results from all studies showed that ICT are perceived by audiences as a tool for learning about cultural heritage. VR’s specific contribution is its capacity to provide a quick idea about a place at a particular time and about spatial information in general, thanks to its visual and experiential character. However, in the case of historical development and processes, the visual information needs to be supported by a verbal discourse or
other means of representing human actions. All our evaluations confirmed the importance of human mediators in the use of technology. On the other hand, multimedia applications are good for providing a lot of information in a layer way and in multiple formats (which allow the reinforcement of the message) but the links between different complementary representations need to be clearly shown, particularly for non-expert users. At the same time, it is important to note that in the visitors’ mind, learning was still associated more with interaction with real objects (which was also related to greater enjoyment) and with more traditional means of interpretation, such as textual information and exhibitions. This is probably due to the fact that these allow different kinds of learning, depending on the content, the level of interaction and the means of representation. Furthermore, it appears that the technology can often still overpower the message because of its novelty and the visibility of the interface. Therefore, in order to be suitable for learning, VR needs to fulfil certain requirements: provide more than just visual information (through verbal explanations and true interaction); contain human active presence, presenting a subject that is relevant for visitors, have an intuitive and transparent interface, and finally, but not as importantly, be visually realistic (e.g. because of characteristics such as three-dimensionality, immersion and navigation style). On the other hand, multimedia applications need to be simple, that is: to provide short sequences of screens; to avoid containing too many layers of information (because visitors do not spend a long time exploring museum exhibits); and finally, to use intuitive environments, where all the possibilities are visible and indicated by universal symbols.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS These evaluation studies allowed us to gain a more detailed picture of the multifaceted experience of
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the museum visit and to improve our understanding about the complex factors which affect visitors’ behaviour and the way ICT affect the informal learning process. It would be useful to explore these issues further with future studies studying different types of interfaces (e.g. tangible, wearable, mobile), types of interaction (particularly ways of accommodating different kinds and sizes of groups), ways of being integrated in cultural heritage exhibitions (their relation with the objects and the themes presented, their role in the museographic setting), and types of users (e.g. organized school groups, families, particular age groups of independent visitors). It would also be beneficial to compare these findings with the growing body of research about mobile computing and location-aware devices in similar settings. Work in this direction would allow the extraction of more generalisable conclusions and guidelines for the design of these potent but resource-demanding tools, their more effective integration in exhibitions, and the full exploitation of their potential by different users.
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Economou, M., & Pujol, L. (2007). Educational tool or expensive toy? Evaluating VR evaluation and its relevance for virtual heritage. In Kvan, T., Kalay, Y., & Affleck, J. (Eds.), New Heritage. New Media and Cultural Heritage (pp. 242–260). New York: Routledge. Forte, M., Pescarin, S., & Pujol, L. (2006). VR applications, new devices and museums: Visitors’ feedback and learning. A preliminary report. In M. Ioannides, D. Arnold, F. Niccolucci & K. Mania (Eds.), The e-volution of information technology in cultural heritage. Where hi-tech touches the past: Risks and challenges for the 21st century, Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, VAST2006 (Full papers volume, pp. 64-69). Nicosia, Cyprus: Eurographics. Gaitatzes, A., Christopoulos, D., & Roussou, M. (2001). Reviving the past: Cultural heritage meets virtual reality. In D. Arnold, A. Chalmers, D. Fellner (Eds), Virtual reality, archaeology and cultural heritage. Proceedings of the VAST2001 conference, Athens, Greece (pp. 103-110). New York: ACM Heath, C., vom Lehn, D., & Osborne, J. (2005). Interaction and interactives: Collaboration and participation with computer-based exhibits. Public Understanding of Science (Bristol, England), 14, 91–101. doi:10.1177/0963662505047343 Kuittinen, M. (1998). Criteria for evaluationg CAI applications. Computers & Education, 31(1), 1–16. doi:10.1016/S0360-1315(98)00002-5 Mantovani, F. (2001). VR learning: Potential and challenges for the use of 3D environments in education and training. In Riva, G., & Galimberti, C. (Eds.), Towards cyberpsychology: Mind, cognitions and society in the internet age (pp. 207–226). Amsterdam: IOS Press.
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Champion, E., & Dave, B. (2007). Dialing up the past. In Cameron, F., & Kenderdine, S. (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 333–348). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cosley, D., Lewenstein, J., Herman, A., Holloway, J., Baxter, J., Nomura, S., et al. (2008). ArtLinks: Fostering social awareness and reflection in museums. In Proceedings of CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 403-412). New York: ACM. Damala, A., Cubaud, P., Bationo, A., Houlier, P., & Marchal, I. (2008). Bridging the gap between the digital and the physical: Design and evaluation of a mobile augmented reality guide for the museum visit. DIMEA 2008, 3rd International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (pp. 120-127). Retrieved December 13, 2009, from http://cedric.cnam.fr/ publis/rc1594.pdf Dewalt, K. M., & Dewalt, B. R. (2002). Participant observation: A guide for fieldworkers. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Diamond, J. (1999). Practical evaluation guide: Tools for museums and other informal educational settings. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Economou, M. (2008). A world of interactive exhibits. In P. Marty & K. Jones (Eds.), Museum Informatics (Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science, pp. 137-156). New York: Taylor & Francis. Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. (2000). Learning from museums: Visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. (2002). Lessons without limit: How free-choice learning is transforming education. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.
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Gay, G. (2009). Context-aware mobile computing: Affordances of space, social awareness, and social influence. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Grinter, R. E., Aoki, P. M., Hurst, A., Szymanski, M. H., Thornton, J. D., & Woodruff, A. (2002) Revisiting the visit: Understanding how technology can shape the museum visit. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, New Orleans, LA. New York: ACM. Retrieved December 20, 2009, from http:// www2.parc.com/ csl/projects/ guidebooks/ publications/ cscw02.pdf Grudin, J. (1989). Why groupware applications fail: Problems in design and evaluation. Office: Technology and People, 4(3), 245–264. Haley-Goldman, K., & Schaller, D. (2004). Exploring motivational factors and visitor satisfaction in on-line museum visits. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2004 International Conference Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Honeyman, B. (2001). Real vs. virtual visits: Issues for science centers. In Errington, S., Stocklmayer, S. M., & Honeyman, B. (Eds.), Using museums to popularise science and technology (pp. 107–110). London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Hsi, S. (2004). I-guides in progress: Two prototype applications for museum educators and visitors using wireless technologies to support science learning. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (pp. 187-192). Los Alamitos, CA: Computer Society Press. Korn, R. (1994). Studying your visitors: Where to begin. Historical News, 49(2), 23–26. Parry, R. (2007). Re-coding the museum: Digital heritage and the technologies of change. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203347485
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Roussos, M., Johnson, A., Moher, T., Leigh, J., Vasilakis, C., & Barnes, C. (1999, June). Learning and building together in an immersive virtual world. Presence (Cambridge, Mass.), 8(3), 247–263. doi:10.1162/105474699566215 Roussou, M. (2008). The components of engagement in virtual heritage environments. In Kalay, Y., Kvan, T., & Affleck, J. (Eds.), New Heritage: New media and cultural heritage (pp. 225–241). New York: Routledge. Roussou, M. (2009). A VR playground for learning abstract mathematics concepts. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 29(1), 82–85. doi:10.1109/MCG.2009.1 Sauer, S., Osswald, K., Gobel, S., Feix, A., Zumack, R., & Hoffman, A. (2004). Edutainment Environments- A Field Report on DinoHunter: Technologies, Methods and Evaluation Results. In David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (Eds) Museums and the Web 2004 International Conference Proceedings. Edited. Semper, R., & Spasojevic, M. (2002). The electronic guidebook: Using portable devices and a wireless Web-based network to extend the museum experience. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Proceedings of Museums and the Web Conference, Boston, MA. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Tanikawa, T., Ando, M., Wang, Y., Yoshida, K., Yamashita, J., Kuzuoka, H., & Hirose, M. (2004). A case study of museum exhibition: Historical learning in Copan ruins of Mayan civilization. In Ikei, Y., Gobel, M., & Chen, J. (Eds.), VR 2004 Proceedings. New York: IEEE. Thom-Sentelli, J., Toma, C., Boehner, K., & Gay, G. (2005). Beyond just the facts: Museum detective guides. Re-thinking technology in museums. Paper presented at the Experiential Approaches Workshop, Limerick, Ireland.
Evaluating the Use of Virtual Reality and Multimedia Applications for Presenting the Past
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Augmented Reality (AR): A type of Virtual Reality that uses different interfaces (sometimes wearable) in order to superimpose an interactive simulated 3D environment on a view of the surrounding physical environment. Cultural Heritage Settings: Places such as museums, archaeological sites, interpretation centres, theme parks and natural or urban environments that have been purposefully preserved in order to disseminate knowledge of historical and cultural importance. Formal Learning Environments: Educational or training organisations (like schools or universities) where learning is the main goal and therefore activities are structured, systematized, chronologically and/or hierarchically organized and leading to some form of recognised certification. Immersive Virtual Reality: A variant of Virtual Reality that creates an environment within which the users can completely immerse themselves, having the impression that they have ‘stepped inside’ the artificially created world. Informal Learning Environments: A variety of places (e.g. museums, zoos, home) where learning occurs through the contact with the environment and therefore is non-structured, nonsystematic, spontaneous, sometimes even involuntary and does not result in a formal qualification. Multimedia Applications: Computer applications which combine different content forms (e.g. text, images, graphics, sounds, video), which can be explored in an interactive and usually nonlinear way. Museography: The methods and techniques related to the practical function of museums. It often refers to the way objects are displayed in exhibitions.
Museology: The discipline which studies and reflects about the museum, its historical evolution, its role in society and the activities linked to it, such as management, conservation, research and communication. Virtual Reality (VR): An interactive and usually immersive computer-generated environment which simulates real or imaginary worlds.
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CHIRON (Cultural Heritage Research Oriented Network) was a Marie Curie Early Stage Training (2004-08) research project funded by European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme with contract number MEST-CT-2004-514539. More information is available at www.chirontraining.net. Our research was also funded by the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology. Dr Maurizio Forte and Dr Sofia Pescarin, then Director and researcher of ITABC respectively, offered valuable support throughout this project. Marie-Claire van der Donckt, Curator of the Ename Museum, and Dr Neil Silberman, then Director of the Ename Centre, kindly supported this study, while the staff at the front desk of the Museum offered assistance during the data collection. The staff of the Foundation of the Hellenic World offered valuable help in this study, particularly Dimitris Efraimoglou (Managing Director), Giannis Paschalidis (Exhibition Planning Coordinator), Alexandra Xintara (then Head of Museum Educators Dept) and all the museum educators.
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Chapter 12
Context-Aware Cultural Heritage Environments Eleni Christopoulou University of Patras, Greece & Ionian University, Greece John Garofalakis University of Patras, Greece
ABSTRACT Cultural heritage environments, like museums, archaeological sites and cultural heritage cities, have gathered and preserved artefacts and relevant content for years. Today’s state of the art technology allows the shift from traditional exhibitions to ones with reinforced interaction among the cultural heritage environment and the visitor. For example, mobile applications have proved to be suitable to support such new forms of interaction. Effective interaction exploits information both from the cultural environment, the visitor, and the broader context in which they occur. The aim of this chapter is to present the value of context in applications designed for cultural heritage environments and to demonstrate an infrastructure that effectively exploits it.
INTRODUCTION Nowadays, cultural heritage environments, like museums, archaeological sites, cultural heritage cities, city authorities, etc, select to disseminate and present the artefacts and relevant content that they have gathered and preserved for years not only via traditional exhibitions but also through the web and multimedia applications. The aggregated content is extensive both in topics and in depth; semantic web technologies, like ontologies that are DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch012
the most prominent technology for cultural-related information and knowledge representation, have been applied in order to annotate and organise it. So far, the presentation of cultural content focused on web applications, like web portals. In the 21st century web remains the primary platform for content access, but the desktop as a means for access has diminished influence. Lately, there has been a shift towards on site content access using feature rich portable devices, like enhanced mobile phones, netbooks, pdas, etc. The advent of the ubiquitous and mobile computing technologies has led to the development of various mobile ap-
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plications for cultural environments that enhance the experience of visitors via improved interaction with exhibits and content. These applications follow Weiser’s vision (Weiser, 1991) for ubiquitous computing as their aim is to seamlessly integrate into the environment, to take into account the natural human environment and to aid visitors to interact with the cultural heritage site. Effective interaction exploits information both from the environment and the visitor; in the broader sense from the context in which it occurs. Context-aware cultural applications exploit context to adapt their behaviour and offer seamless interaction to support the visitor’s activities. In the case of indoor cultural heritage environments, like museums, the relevant context is mainly determined by the profile of the visitor, his location on the site, the path he follows, the capabilities of the device that he uses, etc. When the cultural heritage environment becomes citywide, the main context parameters remain the same; however there is abundance of context providers. Effective exploitation of context affects both the selection of relevant content for the visitor and the selection of suitable interaction methods. Cultural heritage environments seek to offer more attractive interaction with the visitors; thus a number of context-aware cultural applications have been developed to provide this. The aim of this chapter is to present the value of context in cultural heritage applications and to demonstrate an infrastructure for creating contextaware cultural applications. This chapter initially discusses context-awareness in cultural heritage applications by defining what context is in cultural heritage environments and how it can enhance a visitor’s experience. Following, an infrastructure for context-aware cultural heritage applications is presented; this infrastructure is based on an ontology-based context model, which allows the decoupling of context capture and management, and on a context management system that exploits a reasoning process.
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A VIEW ON CONTEXT-AWARE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT APPLICATIONS The concept of context-aware computing was introduced in (Weiser, 1991), where Weiser describes ubiquitous computing as a phenomenon ‘that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.’ He also shaped the fundamental concepts of context-aware computing, with computers that are able to capture and retrieve context-based information and offer seamless interaction to support the user’s current tasks, and with each computer being able to ‘adapt its behavior in significant ways’ to the captured context. The term “context-aware” was first introduced by Schilit and Theimer (1994), who defined it as software that “adapts according to its location of use, the collections of nearby people and objects, as well as changes to those objects over time”. Schilit, Adams and Want (1994) defined context as “the constantly changing execution environment” and they classified context into computing environment, user environment, and physical environment. Schmidt (2000) also considered situational context, such as the location or the state of a device, and defined context as knowledge about the state of the user and device, including surroundings, situation and tasks and pointing out the fact that context is more than location. An interesting theoretical framework has been proposed by Dix et al. (2000), regarding the notions of space and location as constituent aspects of context. According to this framework context is decomposed into four dimensions, which complement and interact with each other. These dimensions are: system, infrastructure, domain and physical context. One of the most complete definitions for context was given by Dey (2001); according to whom context is “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity
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is a person, place or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves, and by extension, the environment the user and applications are embedded in. A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task”. When studying the evolution of the term “context” one notices that the meaning of the term has changed following the advances in context-aware applications and the accumulation of experience in them. Initially the term “context” was equivalent to the location and identity of users and objects. Very soon, though, the term expanded to include a more refined view of the environment assuming either three major components; computing, user and physical environment, or four major dimensions; system, infrastructure, domain and physical context. The term did not include the concept of interaction between a user and an application until Dey (2001). This evolution is also evident to the exploitation of context in cultural environments applications.
Context-Aware Cultural Heritage Environments A number of cultural heritage environments and applications tend to be context-aware; two significant surveys in this field are from Kray and Baus (2003) and Raptis, Tselios and Avouris (2005). Kray and Baus (2003) give an overview of existing mobile guides comparing them on five aspects: basic features, situational factors, adaptation capabilities, user interaction and architecture. From this survey it was evident that at that time only few mobile guides took context into account. Raptis et al. (2005) present a survey on mobile applications for museums based on the following four dimensions of context: system, infrastructure, domain, physical context, which are in accordance to the term of Dix et al. (2000).
In such applications location is the most commonly used variable in context recognition as it is relatively easy to detect. Systems like the GUIDE system (Cheverst et al., 2000), the Electronic Guidebook (Fleck, 2002), the one on Marble Museum of Carrara (Ciavarella and Patterno, 2004) and the ImogI (Luyten & Coninx, 2004) provide information to visitors based on the location and proximity. On the other hand systems like the Sotto Voce (Woodruff et al., 2001), the Points of Departure (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and the Antwerp system (Gool, Tuytelaars & Pollefeys, 1999) depend on the user selection. More recent approaches include the application of RFID tags accessible with portable readers (Rudametkin et al., 2008) and the exploitation of 2D barcodes to anchor digital information in the physical environment like in the case of the local heritage application developed with Struer city museum (Hansen & Gronbaek, 2008). A number of location-aware cultural heritage projects that demonstrate that the physical non-institutional environment is a great setting for appreciating cultural content and inducing active user participation.are presented in (Dijk, Kerstens, & Kresin, 2009). Similarly the Explora project presents a system that offers specific points of interest with related text, navigation points, quizzes, maps, and content organized by theme (Tarasoff, Hutcheson, & Rhin, 2009). Apart from location, important aspect of context is the distance between the visitor and an exhibit as well as his direction. For example, the PEACH project (Rocchi, et al. 2004) estimates the distance between the visitor and the exhibit and presents different messages. The Hippie project (Oppermann & Specht, 1999) provides the visitor with an electronic compass to navigate to the next selected exhibit and by taking into account the direction the visitor is moving it can understand which exhibit the visitor is looking at. In the Active Media (Roffia, et al., 2005) project context is divided in physical and logical coordinates; physical represents the position and orientation
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of the visitor, whereas logical represents the current level of detail explicitly requested by the user. Nowadays, detecting direction and orientation seems to become much easier with the widespread integration of electronic compasses in smartphones (Jones, 2010). The visitor profile and preferences, either explicit or implicit, are taken into account in a number of systems in a variety of ways. The ImogI (Luyten & Coninx, 2004) system rearranges the information presented to the visitor according to what he chooses most. In the PEACH (Rocchi, et al. 2004) project the visitor selects among a variety of personal virtual guides each one focusing on different aspect of the exhibits. In the Antwerp system as well as in the Tokyo University Digital Museum (Koshizuka & Sakamura, 2000) the visitor’s selection changes the level of detail of the presented information. The Rijksmuseum project (Wang et al., 2008) explores different users’ characteristics and personalises users’ museum experiences within the virtual and physical collections. A personalised context-aware recommendation is provided by the SMARTMUSEUM (Ruotsalo et al., 2009) system, which exploits a user profile consisted of three segments: user ability information, preference/interest information and visit history. A strong feature that appears in some of the systems is the inter-visitor communication, as in cultural heritage sites people are usually in small or larger groups, e.g. ranging from a family to an organised group visit. The Electronic Guidebook (Fleck, 2002) provides the communicator functionality, which allows visitors to discuss the exhibits and help each other. In the MUSE project (Garzotto, Cinotti & Pigozzi, 2003), the WHYRE system (Cinotti, et al., 2004) is used to create a “memory” of the on-site visit. The Campiello system (Grasso, Koch and Snowdon, 1998), which focuses on outdoor cultural heritage sites, encourages the creation of connected communities by using public displays on which visitors comment on their experience. The MOMO system (Jaén,
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2005) allows visitors to communicate and send messages to each other in order to share similar interests, ideas and opinions during their visit. The Sotto Voce system (Grinter, 2002) allows three kinds of intra-group activities: a shared listening, a service where a visitor can follow another’s activity and a service where a visitor can get context information of another visitor. The PIL system (Kuflik, 2007) provides communication and alerting for both individuals and groups mainly by messages. The context information that has emerged from other visitors can be very important in cultural heritage environments; the typical function of which is to host many visitors with varied interests. Context parameters captured in context-aware application can only be effective if a suitable model supports their representation and exploitation. A number of informal and formal context models have been proposed in various systems; the survey of context models presented in (Strang & Linnhoff-Popien, 2004) classifies them by the scheme of data structures. Given that ontologies are a promising instrument to specify concepts and their interrelations (Gruber, 1993; Uschold & Gruninger, 1996), they can provide a uniform way for specifying a context model’s core concepts as well as an arbitrary amount of subconcepts and facts, altogether enabling contextual knowledge sharing and reuse in a Ubicomp system (De Bruijn, 2003). A number of researchers use ontologies to represent context, like the Smart Spaces framework GAIA (Ranganathan & Campbell, 2003), the Context Ontology Language (Strang, LinnhoffPopien & Frank, 2003), the CONON context ontology (Wang, Gu, Zhang & Pung, 2004) and the COBRA-ONT (Chen, Finin and Joshi, 2004). Cultural heritage portals, according to (Hyvönen, 2009), is an especially promising domain for the application of semantic web technologies; similarly mobile context-aware applications in cultural environments already exploit semantic web technologies and especially ontologies. A number of cultural heritage applications that use
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ontologies to represent context are the iMuseum (Yu, et al., 2008), the ImogI (Luyten & Coninx, 2004), the Active Museums (Jbara et al., 2007) and the SMARTMUSEUM (Ruotsalo et al., 2009).
Context in Cultural Heritage Applications Considering the definitions and the use of context in cultural heritage applications discussed in the previous sections we will present our perspective on the parameters of context that are necessary for such applications. In order to figure out these parameters we have to identify the concepts that constitute the environment in which such applications exist. The primary concepts are visitors, places, objects, time and physical environment. An application is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information to users or to enable services for them; relevancy depends on a visitor’s current task and profile. The user context issue has been addressed by many researchers of context-awareness (Schimdt, 2002; Crowley, et al., 2002); however, the key for context-aware cultural heritage applications is to capture visitor’s activity and preferences. Apart from knowing who the visitors are and where they are, we need to identify what they are doing, when they are doing it and which object they focus on. Stahl (2006) proposes a model that represents a user’s goals, activities and actions; he suggests that the distinction between an activity and an action lies in the fact that an activity takes a time span, while actions occur instantaneously. The system can define visitor activity by taking into account various sensed parameters like location, time and the object that they use or focus on. For example, when the visitor enters an exhibition hall and approaches a specific exhibit or when the visitor follows a specific path in an open air cultural site. User preferences are also very important but it is difficult for a system to define them. Users have to incorporate their preferences into the application on their own, although the system can also gather
information from the interaction with them in order to acquire experience based on history. The system can either extract from the user preferences the level of detail of the presented information or conclude it from the visitors’ previous activities and selections. In visitor’s profile it is very important, especially for cultural heritage applications, to include the visits’ history, as from this context the system may infer knowledge about what the visitor has already seen or which exhibits attracted his attention. By exploiting system experience the application may also infer a user’s mood, a factor that cannot be measured by any sensor. The context of a user has to represent whether he is alone or in small or larger group; visitors that guide themselves individually have totally different needs than organised group visitors. So the social role and the interactions among the visitors have to be represented into the user context. In order to identify visitor location various technologies are being used. In outdoors applications satellite supported technologies, like GPS, or network supported cell information, like GSM, UMTS, WLAN, are mainly applied. Indoors applications use 2D barcodes, RFID, IrDA and Bluetooth technologies in order to estimate the visitors’ position in place. Although location is the determining factor in identifying where visitors are, orientation is also a very important parameter; the system has to know what users are looking at or where they are going to. In order to efficiently exploit the information on user location and orientation a representation of the layout of the place in which users are is also necessary. Particular care though should be taken as the layout of the place may be insufficient, especially in indoor spaces where exhibits depending on the current exhibition might be rearranged. Spaces can be classified into the following types: public, private, an area in which restrictions may apply, transient, places where people do not congregate easily or frequently, like hallways and corridors, social, public places where people arrange to meet, like coffee shops, informative, places that are used for
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public announcements (Mitchell, Race & Suggitt, 2006). A space can also be divided into districts, for example a museum may have ancient Greek, painting and modern art sections, as well into zones, such as lower left, upper left, etc. All the objects, like exhibits, mobile devices, displays, that are used in cultural heritage sites are the most crucial context sources. Exhibits in an indoor site or landmarks in an open air setting are the most valuable content providers; the visitor expects to view information relevant to them. Visitor can use mobile devices, like mobile phones and PDAs, either loaned from the cultural site or personal and can also exploit e.g. public displays. In order to present the visitor with the appropriate information in the best possible form, the system has to know some physical properties of the objects that may be used, for example the display size of the mobile device is determinant for the modulation of information, or in the case of a landmark its size determines at what distance relevant information begin to appear to the visitor. Additionally, the types of interaction interfaces that objects provide to the user need to be modelled; the system has to know if a device can be handled by both speech and touch techniques or if a mobile phone can vibrate. Based on information on the device’s physical properties and capabilities, the system can extract information on the services that it can provide to the user; this is considered to be the most crucial context information related to devices. The application, for instance, has to know if a device can also play sound. Time is another significant parameter of context as it can play an important role in order for the system to decide what it should recommend to visitors. For example, if the visitor has less than an hour left the system can propose a quick path that covers the major attractions. Taking into account the calendar the system can also recommend to the visitor current special exhibitions. The time can also be used so that the system assists the visitor to avoid crowded halls specific periods of a day. Time can be used in various forms such as hour
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(daytime), night, day, weekday, week, month, season and year. Finally, context from the physical environment may include current weather conditions, illumination, noise level, overcrowding. Taking into the weather forecast the application may decide to propose a more appropriate outdoor path for the visitor, or if the visitor is in a noisy exhibition hall the system may decide to provide him with text information than sound. Using the context elements depicted in Figure 1 we can create systems that promise to take action autonomously, to sense the situation and act appropriately. Many researchers, though, are sceptical and concerned because of the problems that may emerge from context-awareness. The fear that control may be taken away from the user (Barkhuus & Dey 2003) is a main issue of concern, as users are hesitant against the proactiveness of such systems. Users are especially reluctant to disclose personal information to public systems (Christensen et al., 2006). According to Erickson (2002) a context-aware system is not possible to decide with certainty which actions the user may want to be executed, as the human context is inaccessible to sensors and is difficult to model it with certainty. Additionally, context information may be imperfect (Bardram, et al., 2006), inaccurate or ambiguous.
CONTEXT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DESIGN A system that can support context-awareness in cultural heritage environments and address the issues raised above is following presented. The main challenge of our system is to decouple the process of context acquisition and interpretation from its actual use; an acknowledgement shared by the majority of researchers (Biegel & Cahill, 2004; Dey et al., 2001; Ranganathan & Campbell, 2003).
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Figure 1. Context in cultural heritage applications
The Ontology-Based Context Model The context model that we have designed for cultural heritage environments is an ontology-based model that has evolved from previous works; a context model for mobile applications (Christopoulou, 2008), the GAS Ontology (Christopoulou & Kameas, 2005), which describes the semantics of the basic concepts of a ubicomp environment, and the PLANTS Ontology (Goumopoulos et al., 2004), which extends the concept of context in order to allow for the inclusion of plants as components of ubicomp applications. The context knowledge represented by the ontology is divided into two layers: the lower one describes the basic concepts of context and their inter-relations while the upper one represents specific instances of these concepts. The lower level ontology can be regarded as a shared language that can describe the concepts that participate in a cultural environment application. The upper level of ontology describes the current state of the environment by expressing the state of specific visitors, devices, exhibits, etc. The lower level ontology is depicted in Figure 2 and defines the basic concepts of a context-aware cultural application as classes. The PointOfInterest is a super class that represents either an Exhibit or a Landmark; it has attributes like identification, description, a URI, etc. The Exhibit class
has more attributes like a creator, era, artistic style, etc, while the Landmark has an owner, GPS coordinates, architectural style, etc. The PointOfInterest is located at a Space; each Space apart from location, has a type, etc. A Space can be an indoor ExhibitionHall or an OutdoorSpace. Relations like next to and close to can relate two points of interest of two spaces. A Collection, a notion that refers only to museum applications, contains many Exhibits and has attributes like its title, era, creator, etc. The Device class represents all devices that can be exploited in such applications like smartphones, displays, etc. Any Device has a number of Sensors that measure specific Parameters, like GPS coordinates, orientation, etc, and provides a number of Services, like display images, text, videos, play sounds, etc. The Visitor carries his Device in the cultural environments and may exploit other Devices. The Visitor may focus on a specific PointOfInterest and be located at a certain Space. The Visitor class describes user abilities and interests using the widely accepted ontology GUMO (Heckmann et al., 2005). All context knowledge is expressed in OWLDL, which is the ontology language with the most powerful expression ability to guarantee the reasoning completeness. Segments of the lower level ontology follow; they represent attributes of an exhibition hall and an exhibit, as well as the
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Figure 2. Ontology schema for cultural heritage applications
relation “close to” among points of interest and the relation that a point of interest is “located at” a space.
Segments of the upper level ontology that represent instances of a specific exhibition hall and an exhibit follow. < ExhibitionHall rdf:about = “ExhibitionHall_45”> 5 < Exhibit rdf:about = “Exhibit_4567345”> 767895 Guernica
The Context Management Process The context management process of our system aims to decouple the process of context acquisition and interpretation from its actual use. The raw data measured by sensors for a given context parameter may be expressed in different metric systems; decoupling measurement from interpretation offers a level of abstraction and transferability. The context provided by a single provider may be too trivial, but in combination with other context or by applying reasoning on it semantically richer information and knowledge may be concluded. The context management process of our system is depicted in Figure 3. At the lowest level context comes from sensors; it can be a value read from an RFID or an Infrared receiver, a clock, etc. Such values may be expressed in a variety of metric systems and thus need to be interpreted. Additionally they may be ambiguous and need to be clarified; for instance an RFID reader may receive an id number that needs to be clarified if it denotes an exhibit or an exhibition hall. Low level context information may be aggregated and fused in order to derive semantically richer information; for instance combining the exhibition hall id of the previous and the current hall can give us the actual position and direction of the visitor in a hall. The high level context is the interpreted low level context information acquired from various sensors. Having acquired the necessary context a device or an exhibition hall can assess its state; adopting the definition from Artificial Intelligence, a state is a logical proposition defined over a set of context measurements (Russell & Norvig, 2003). Updates in the state trigger a reasoning process; reasoning may result to the activation of a responsive action. The reasoning may be based on the context that is available in a single entity or may need to combine context from various sources.
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Figure 3. Context-management process
For example, when a visitor enters an exhibition hall his personal device interprets the hall id and assesses that the visitor has moved to a certain hall. This state update triggers a local reasoning and the personal device asks for information on the certain hall. Another view on local reasoning is that the information that the personal device asks depends on the level of detail expressed in visitor’s profile. The updated state of the personal device may be propagated as context by a simple reaction informing that a new visitor entered a hall; this context can be regarded as a low level context for the system and its interpretation changes the number of visitors in the hall and trigger an update of the exhibition hall state defining it as crowded. The activation of a service may require a degree of global reasoning, especially when a service requires the use of a shared utility. For instance, a visitor may request through his personal device to view some content on a large public display;
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in such case the system has to coordinate access to the display.
Rules for Decision Making In the context management process, depicted in Figure 3, the steps of state assessment and reasoning are based on rules described in Jess format; rules fall into three categories. Rules for state assessment; the left part of such rules denotes the parameters that affect the state and the thresholds or the values for these specific parameters that lead to the activation of the rule, while the right part denotes the state that is updated. These rules support the “interpretation” of low level context (values of parameters measured by sensors) to state assessment; they may also incorporate the interpretation from low level context to high level context (e.g. perform a set of operations to values measured by sensors like estimate the average value).
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Rules that reason on context propagation and service activation based on local knowledge. These rules exploit exclusively local knowledge; their left part denotes the states that must be detected and their possible update levels and their right part denotes the requests and reactions. Rules that reason on decisions and actions based on global knowledge from the environment. These rules are similar to the rules based on local knowledge. Their main difference is that these rules have to take into account the states of various entities and their possible reactions so that to preserve a global state and satisfy multiple visitors’ needs.
System Architecture The architecture of our context management system appears on Figure 4. The core modules of this system are the Ontology manager, the Rule manager and the Inference Engine. The Ontology Manager is the responsible module for the management of knowledge represented into the ontology. Specifically, it can only query the lower level of the ontology, since it
cannot be changed. On the other hand, it can both query and update the upper level of the ontology, which holds the context state. The Ontology Manager collects input from context providers, e.g. sensors measurements, context propagated from other providers, interprets this context and updates the instances described in the upper level of the ontology. One of its basic functionalities is to provide the other modules of the system with knowledge stored in the ontology by adding a level of abstraction between them and the knowledge base. The Rule Manager is the module that manages the rule base and it is responsible for both querying and updating it. The rules stored in the rule base may only contain parameters, states and services that are defined into the upper level of the ontology. For the initialisation of the context management process apart from the rules a set of initial facts are necessary; the Rule Manager is also responsible for the creation of a file containing the initial facts based on the upper level of ontology. The Inference Engine supports the reasoning process and it is based on the Jess rule engine (Java Expert System Shell). In order to initialise
Figure 4. System architecture
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its process execution, the Inference Engine needs the initial facts, which are defined by the Rule Manager, and the rules stored in the rule base; the rules are stored in Jess format. The Inference Engine is informed for context changes and updates; such changes trigger the execution of all the rules in the rule base. When a rule is activated new knowledge is inferred and reactions are determined.
Applying Scenarios Following we present a number of scenarios that can be effectively applied to our system.
Scenario 1: Museum Tour Nefeli, a 23-years old student, enjoys museum visits and has particular interest in modern art. During an excursion to Madrid she decides to visit the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art. As she strolls around the exhibition halls information relevant to the closest works of art appear on her mobile phone. Approaching the Picasso´s “Guernica” more information has to be presented as Nefeli has a particular interest in Picasso and this appears on her profile; her mobile phone is not adequate to present such information thus the system identifies a screen close to her and projects all information that could be of Nefeli’s interest. For this scenario to work the museum has to provide context to the visitors; context can be information on works of art and artists as well as information of visitors location. Nefeli in her profile has selected the level of detail in order to receive short information on her mobile phone as she enters an exhibition hall. The system exploits her profile and decides to present more information when she is close to the Picasso´s “Guernica”. Examples of rules that can be used to implement this scenario follow. At the lowest level as Nefeli walks in the museum and points at QR codes her mobile phone interprets the QR codes into IDs. At a local level when Nefeli’s mobile
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phone reads a new ID it asks for the relevant description taking into account also the level of detail that she has selected. Such rules are sufficient for a stroll around the exhibition halls and a quick view of the exhibits. When Nefeli points at the QR code of the Picasso’s “Guernica” more elaborate rules can be exploited in order to display more information on a shared museum display; the interest attribute of Nefeli’s profile that shows her interest in specific creators, e.g. Picasso, is compared to the exhibit’s creator, e.g. Picasso’s “Guernica”, when they match the level of detail is risen. For this level of detail the mobile phone is inadequate thus it asks for a bigger screen and the information is projected on it. An issue that emerges in this scenario is that even though Nefeli is proactive and has defined that she wants to view short information on her mobile phone, the system needs to overcome this in order to exploit her profile and present her more information on Picasso. Thus the system becomes proactive and attempts to satisfy potential needs of the user. Global knowledge is required for the system to identify a more suitable interface, e.g. a bigger screen, close to Nefeli in order to project more information. This brings up the issue of coordinating shared resources, which demands also global knowledge.
Scenario 2: Strolling Around a Cultural Site Nikos, a 27-years old architect, visits for the first time the old town of Corfu, an Unesco Cultural Heritage Site. Nikos has a PhD and great interest in Venetian architecture; the old town of Corfu has strongly been influenced by the Venetian architecture. As Nikos strolls around the old city, information on buildings influenced by the Venetian, French and English architecture as well as about the history of the town is presented on his smartphone. As he selects mostly information on buildings influenced by the Venetians, the system attempts to create a preferences profile for him.
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For this scenario to work the city has to provide context to the visitors; context can be information on architecture, history, local traditions etc. Nikos has pre-installed on his smartphone an application for the old town of Corfu. The system does not know in advance anything about Nikos and his preferences, as he had no time to edit his profile. An issue that emerges in this scenario is that the system has to extract Nikos preferences by monitoring his path and selections. Examples of rules that can be used to implement this scenario follow. At the lowest level as Nikos strolls around the city the GPS on his smartphone tracks his location. The smartphone sends its coordinates to the system provided by the city and informs him for points of interest and particularly landmarks that appear close to him. As Nikos selects a specific landmark detailed information is delivered and projected on his smartphone. As Nikos has not filled in his profile beforehand, the system tries to extract his preferences by monitoring his selections; each landmark selection affects his profile by incorporating landmark’s attributes to his preferences. As his preferences are build up the rules that exploit them are also taken into account in order to propose points of interest.
FUTURE TRENDS Cultural heritage sites, either indoor or outdoor, have evolved the last two decades. From the traditional approach of labels next to the exhibits we moved on to the use of audio-guides; in the digital era we started from the web portals of cultural sites and we moved on to the use of mobile devices for on the spot access of relevant information. The majority of systems that attempt to provide such services focus on the exploitation of context; the aim is to present the right information at the right time to the right person taking into account visitor preferences. However all these systems have not tried to change the way that people view, visit and interact with cultural sites; the visitor either
selects from a printed museum guide his path and the exhibits that he wants to see or sets up his preferences so that the system “guides” him, in either case the way that he interacts with the cultural site is not different, simply the means involved are different. Visitors of cultural sites seek to have engaging and learning activities in order to interact with the site and learn from their visit. In indoor sites applications and activities that demand a more interactive and active visit have to be developed. Information presented to visitors has to be not only relevant to their profile and preferences but also to their knowledge; presenting more information on a specific painting of Picasso is not sufficient to a visitor that has no knowledge on Picasso. Emphasis needs also to be put on group and family visits as context-aware applications tend to focus on individuals. In outdoor sites applications a radically emerging trend is the incorporation of augmented reality, like the one by Takacs et al. (2008), the Layar and the WikiTude augmented reality browsers, which is strengthened by the adoption of high capability devices.
CONCLUSION The objective of this chapter was to present how important is context to cultural heritage applications. From the high volume of information relevant to a cultural heritage environment, the right content has to be presented to the visitor; context exploitation can be the determining factor that supports this. How such applications can be reactive to visitor actions, personalized and proactive can be determined from various context parameters. In this chapter we presented aspects of contextaware cultural heritage environments and a system for managing context in such environment applications. The context model described is represented by an ontology divided into two layers; the lower level represents the classes of the basic concepts of context and the upper level specific instances
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of them. The management process of context consists of a number of steps attempting to decouple the acquisition of lower level context from its interpretation to higher level and from its use to define system reactions. Context management is based on a rule-based reasoning process that takes into account both local and global knowledge. The main components of our system architecture were described in order to show how context is collected from context providers and stored in the ontology, how rules are defined using concepts represented in the ontology and finally how the inference engine triggers these rules and affects the application’s state.
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Context: Any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves, and by extension, the environment the user and applications are embedded in.
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Context-Awareness: A system is contextaware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task. Cultural Heritage: The entire corpus of material signs – either artistic or symbolic – handed on by the past to each culture and therefore to the whole humankind. Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts, like buildings, historic places, monuments, etc., as well as the intangible attributes of a group or society, like social values, traditions, customs, beliefs, etc. Mobile Computing: The ability to use technology in remote or mobile (non static) environments. This technology is based on the use of battery powered, portable, and wireless computing and communication devices, like smart mobile phones, wearable computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Mobile Device: A device which is typically characterized by mobility, small form factor and communication functionality and focuses on handling a particular type of information and related tasks. Typical devices could be a Smartphone or a PDA. Mobile devices may overlap in definition or are sometimes referred to as information appliances, wireless devices, handhelds or handheld devices. Ontology: A formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. A tool that can conceptualise a world view by capturing general knowledge and providing basic notions and concepts for basic terms and their interrelations. Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp): Technology that is seamlessly integrated into the environment and aids human in their everyday activities. The embedding computation into the environment and everyday objects will enable people to interact with information-processing devices more naturally and casually than they currently do, and in whatever locations or circumstances they find themselves.
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Chapter 13
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage Luca Roffia University of Bologna, Italy Sara Bartolini University of Bologna, Italy Daniele Manzaroli University of Bologna, Italy Alfredo D’Elia University of Bologna, Italy Tullio Salmon Cinotti University of Bologna, Italy Giuseppe Raffa Intel Corporation, USA Marina Pettinari SPES s.c.p.a., Italy
ABSTRACT How can technology be used to increase visibility and understanding of numerous sites that are not yet able to attract the amount of people they deserve? Focusing on this question, the authors report on their activities started with MUSE, a project started within the Italian National Research Program on Cultural Heritage PARNASO and continued within the “Mobile and Ambient Systems” Work Group of the European Network of Excellence in Open Cultural Heritage as part of the CIMAD project. The authors use their experience on a 7th Framework Programme project called SOFIA within the ARTEMIS Joint Technology Initiative to consider future and prospective research directions and present a vision of how Cultural Heritage would benefit from making “information” in the physical world available for smart services. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch013 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
INTRODUCTION Cultural Heritage (CH) is a great attraction factor for tourism worldwide and many countries aim to offer low cost, high-value content and services that can provide better visibility to their museums, sites and landscapes. Culture is a sign of human civilization and - luckily – the culture sector is well developed on our planet. In Italy, for example, there are over 3200 Cultural Heritage sites, 402 of which are National Institutions visited by over 30 million people per year (34 millions in 2007, 33 millions in 2008) (MiBAC, 2008; Touring Club Italiano, 2008). But visibility of the large majority of sites is very low, and so is the level of “understanding” of CH (Antinucci, 2007). Solutions to these issues require services that involve many co-operating actors and are well integrated in the territory (Raffa et al., 2007). In this scenario, Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) may play a significant role, by providing the tools to reach people with relevant and appropriate information. Therefore, the market of digital services and multimedia content for cultural tourism might have a significant impact on the ICT industry in the future and may become an increasing source of new jobs for the Information Society. As stated by the Europe’s Information Society (2007), to “fully profit from the European internal market, digital content and services should rely on interoperable technologies, allowing them to reach all the users. The Information Society brings benefits to European business, society and culture only because it delivers useful services, where and when they are needed. Digital content and services are therefore crucial to delivering the Information Society’s benefits to Europe’s society and economy, … and also represent a potentially major source of new jobs and growth”. Content and services should be discovered and delivered in the most suitable format, optimized to the user situation, profile and environment. “Docere, delectare, movere” are the motivations for this multimedia content as it was for the orators of
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the ancient Rome (Bolzoni, 2002): content and services should be compelling enough to increase the knowledge level and excite the users at the same time and they should be delivered nearly spontaneously on the most appropriate available medium. Many requirements should be met to turn this potential market into reality. A lot of research has been dedicated in the last decade to meet some of these requirements separately, but research to meet all of them in a harmonized way is still a new horizon in the CH domain. In this chapter, the authors report on their research carried out over nearly a decade (20002008) within two projects: MUSE (MUseums and Sites Explorer) and CIMAD (Common Infrastructure / Context Influenced Mobile Acquisition and Delivery of Cultural Heritage Data). The former was about making the visit to a museum or archeological site more enjoyable and fruitful by means of a novel mobile sensory-augmented context-aware multimedia guide called Whyre®. The latter investigated on a common software framework to simplify the development process of CH applications. MUSE project revealed a relevant aspect, such as the need of big investment, both for the device design and for the content production. In order to improve CH perception in a cost-effective way, many actors should be involved, i.e. tour operators, service providers, CH sites owners, telecom operators and technology providers, and many integrated services should be provided, i.e. site management, data collection, content delivery, and they should be smoothly accessible from everywhere and integrated on the territory. To reach this goal, a structured approach on using technology in CH is required. The European Network of Excellence EPOCH – Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage (2004 -2008) has taken on this challenge of “overcoming fragmentation in open cultural heritage” (EPOCH, 2004) and it has devised a reference architecture for all CH related tasks from data collection to data presentation. Within
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
EPOCH, the challenge of the CIMAD project was the seamless support of heterogeneous devices with different form factors and usage models, i.e. kiosks, custom devices hired on site, personal PDAs or smart phones. Furthermore, the design of new CH services combines expertise and resource of technologists, CH professionals and communication experts that need to interact with the framework at different levels. Some services have been implemented in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. Such services spread from multimedia guides for tourists to management services for site curators. The chapter ends by presenting the authors vision on how the design of CH ICT services will benefit from current research trends on embedded systems and smart spaces. The authors report their first year experience on a 7th Framework Programme Project called SOFIA, within the ARTEMIS Joint Technology Initiative. New software architectures and platforms derived from this research will enable multi-vendor, multi-device and multi-part device interoperability at different level: connectivity, service and information. Starting from a semantic data representation, i.e. using ontology such as CIDOC-CRM1, the adoption of such new platforms will allow cultural institutions to increase their visibility and the understanding of their cultural patrimony by offering ICT smart services to plenty of visitors.
BACKGROUND ICT may find more than one application in the CH domain, i.e. conservation and preservation, collection management, enhancement of accessibility and promotion. Our research carried on during the last ten years has been mainly focused on the application of ICT for the promotion of CH. The EU recognized the central role played by ICT to enhance the visitor experience at various heritage and cultural sites by funding research with this subject. Since 2000, a number of European projects
have been focused on research in the Intelligent CH domain. ARCHEOGUIDE (Archeoguide, 2001) built a system providing new ways of information access at CH sites in a compelling, user-friendly way through the use of advanced IT including augmented reality, 3D-visualization, mobile computing, and multi-modal interaction. TELLMARIS (Katri & Christian, 2003) instead focused on tourists and citizens on the move, and their need for tailor made tourism information using mobile terminals and an existing Destination Management System, i.e. a database, as ambient intelligence environments. More recent projects funded within the EU 6th Framework Programme have been ISAAC2, aiming to valorise cultural assets as tourism resources through user-friendly and stakeholder-relevant eservices, CINeSPACE where Santos et al. (2007) envisioned a system where “Citizens, film lovers and cinema professionals will use an interactive viewing device to access location-specific content. The system will additionally allow users to ‘upload’ content in the form of video and audio clips. Breaking ground in 3D visualization and immersive reality technologies, a key objective of the three year project is to develop and nurture a collaborative virtual environment for the creation and collaboration of user generated content.” and AGAMEMNON that leaded the development of an advanced 3G mobile application, acting as an “on-line” guide to archaeological sites and museums, providing visitor of enriched and personalized information on monuments and places of interest (Pittore et al., 2005). Within the EU 7th Framework Programme, funded CH projects are most focused on the exploitation of ICT to preserve and enrich CH, helping develop digital libraries, enabling to easily create, interpret, use and preserve cultural and scientific resources. “EU-funded research on cultural heritage3, digital libraries and digital preservation deals with leading-edge information and communication technologies for expanding access to and use of Europe’s rich cultural and scientific
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resources. It also investigates how digital content created today will survive as the cultural and scientific knowledge of the future…The research is closely aligned with the work of cultural and memory organizations (such as archives, libraries and museums) and contributes to the i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative, a flagship project within the European Commission’s strategy to boost the digital economy…The EU digital libraries initiative4 sets out to make all Europe’s cultural resources and scientific records – books, journals, films, maps, photographs, music, etc. – accessible to all, and preserve it for future generations.”. For a complete list of ongoing projects within the cultural heritage, digital libraries and preservation research area please refer to (European Commission, 2009). Within the Intelligent content and semantics research area, two interesting ongoing projects are focused on the development of an IT infrastructure to improve the visitors experience: SMARTMUSEUM (Cultural heritage knowledge exchange platform) and SMARTPRODUCTS5 (Proactive knowledge for smart products). The former aims developing an universal IT solution for museums, which enables personalized approach to digital content of artworks (Kuusik, Roche, & Weis, 2009). Technologies of the solution include RFID, web based user interest monitoring, adaptive user profiling and mobile device multimedia content presentation. The latter introduces a new paradigm for the interaction of people and products by developing the scientific and technological basis for building smart products with embedded proactive knowledge. Smart products help customers, designers and workers to deal with the ever increasing complexity and variety of modern products. Smart products leverage proactive knowledge to communicate and co-operate with humans, other products and the environment. The project aims at researching all aspects relevant to the acquisition, modelling, reasoning, management, and use of proactive knowledge. A service-oriented platform for context
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integration and multimodal user interfaces will be developed and released.
TECHNOLOGY MEETS CULTURE As state by the chapter’s title, increasing understanding and visibility imposes conflicting requirements on system design. This section shows how these requirements were handled in both research initiatives cited in the introduction and it envisages a roadmap to turn CH sites into ecosystems of interacting objects that support discovery and delivery of high quality, situation dependent CH services. Such services will adapt to profile, activity and location of cultural tourists, fostering serendipity and understanding of the territory heritage.
MUSE: A Research-toBusiness Project MUSE (MUseums and Sites Explorer) was an industrial research project, lead by Ducati Sistemi S.p.a. and funded by the Italian Government within the National Research Program Parnaso (20012003). Many institutions supported Ducati Sistemi in MUSE, including the University of Bologna, with its Departments of Archaeology and Electronics Computer Sciences and Systems (DEIS) and with its Research Center ARCES, Politecnico di Milano and Cineca. MUSE proposed a framework for interactive learning and entertainment on-site, and its major outcome was Whyre, a wearable, hands-free, sensory augmented, context-aware multimedia guide designed to turn museums and archaeological sites into communicating machines. MUSE envisages an infrastructure to provide museums and archaeological sites with innovative services conveyed to the visitors by Whyre connected to the infrastructure through a WIFI network (Salmon et al., 2004a). Whyre features a 6.4”, sharp and bright display and its
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
custom user interface recommends the most appropriate content thanks to its ability to automatically detect the user context changes along her visit. Which context elements should be considered in an optimal visit is a research question. Some of the most popular context elements suggested by the literature are the visitors cultural profile, their preferences and current situation, which in turn usually encompasses their visit history, the environmental conditions and, of course, their location and orientation. MUSE’s approach to enhance usability and to smooth user interaction is very simple: it only requires a small subset of the context elements just mentioned and it is based on a hierarchical, multi-resolution space representation, where the space is considered in all of its physical aspects: the landscape, the architecture and its content (Roffia, 2004). Two principles were adopted in designing the interface: trying to identify the user focus of attention based on context and providing incremental levels of detail on-demand (Roffia, 2004). Additional services could be provided by the MUSE infrastructure, enhancing experience of the users inside the cultural site and supporting site management personnel (Garzotto, Salmon Cinotti, & Pigozzi, 2003). The MUSE infrastructure is distributed and composed of the following main components: • • • •
A network infrastructure (mixed, wired and wireless). An application server and the digital content repository. A Content Management System (CMS). Whyre devices worn by visitors.
The system is based on a client-server model, in which the server responds to a client query with an XML page containing all the resources needed by the client to instance an HTML page, e.g. images, text (Roffia, 2004). The database and the content reside on the server side. The database elements are represented as Dublin Core instances (DCMI, 1995). Videos are accessed through a
streaming server. The client runs a software with the following main features: • •
•
Localization of the device based on a local Geographic Information System (GIS)6. Control and display of multimedia content including interactive maps, videos, texts, images, audio clips and QTVR panoramas synchronized with the tourist’s physical orientation. XML based programmable user interface.
Location information is provided using data coming from Whyre embedded sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass and gyroscope) and a 802.11 WIFI card. The WIFI card is used both to transfer content and to locate the device within the surrounding environment. The embedded sensors are used to estimate the orientation of the device. Location and orientation, along with visitor’s interaction, are used to automatically retrieve multimedia content and to show the user position on a map (Roffia, 2004). MUSE infrastructure allows the development of multi-channel applications (Garzotto, Salmon Cinotti, & Pigozzi, 2003). A multi-channel application delivers its content and services on heterogeneous devices, i.e. desktop PCs, notebooks, mobile phones, PDAs, Web TVs and dedicated appliances. This approach envisages the development of generic applications that dynamically adapt to the device characteristics and communication channel. For example, multi-channel applications can be used in a scenario where the same content needs to be offered to kiosks located in each exhibition room and also to sensor-enabled PDAs, adapting in real time the content to the device characteristics and to the user’s context. To deliver a multi-channel application, content production was a major concern. Emotion, feeling and knowledge need to be communicated to the visitors. Content should be intriguing and faithful, and should address, from many points of view and at several levels of depth, many types of exhibits,
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such as paintings, historical maps, sculptures, ceramics and furniture. Consequently, content creation need to rely on the cooperation among many actors, including experts in humanities, communication and technology. Content organization is based on the notion of cultural object. Every item known to Whyre is a cultural object, and it can be associated to many digital representations, i.e. visitors can get specific views of every item, according to their wishes and attitudes. Content creation started from an extensive search for iconographic and documentary sources. The selected sources usually required some specific
pre-processing, e.g. many paintings, pictures and manuscripts were digitized and sources already in digital format were converted and/or resized. Paintings in archaeological sites were restored under the control of expert archaeologists, before being incorporated in the virtual reconstruction of the containing buildings. Figure 1 shows, the picture of the southern wall of the Viridarium of the Domus del Centenario in Pompeii, together with its restored version (Scagliarini & Coralini, 2002). Texts were written by experts and checked by the curator. Afterwards, the digitized sources were
Figure 1. Domus del Centenario, Pompeii, top of the Viridarium southern wall: as it was in 2005(top) and as digitally restored (center). The digitally restored image was then incorporated as a texture in the 3D Viridarium model (bottom)
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assembled according to the text and edited into atomic video clips. Texts were read by professional speakers and then synchronized with the video. A common need for all content was its contextualization, as every digital content element is supposed to be delivered in the proper place, i.e. in front of the relevant exhibit. To this end, a post-processing stage was required. Post-processing included file encoding into a streaming format, file binding to its reference spatial location, and file uploading to the information base. Research was then carried out to understand the MUSE impact on user experience and to evaluate content quality as well as Whyre usability and interaction model (Salmon et al., 2004b). To this end three pilots were carried out in three major Italian cultural sites (see Figure 2): the National Museum located at the Certosa e Museo di San Martino in Naples (Muzii et al., 2003), the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence (Barattini et al., 2003) and the Domus del Centenario in the Archaeological Area of Pompeii (Scagliarini & Coralini, 2002; Scagliarini et al., 2003; Coralini, 2001). The evaluation of the user experience reported interesting and encouraging results: “anybody had never seen a similar device” and “everybody would like such a device in other museums” (Muzii et al., 2003). The study shown that high quality multimedia content combined with context-aware interaction can create new expectations in the public, leading to new demands
and, possibly, new business opportunities (Salmon et al., 2004b). During the evaluation test, the public underlined one major drawback related with the weight of the device, mostly originated by the display, the batteries and the prototype case. Hence, in 2006, during the design of a new mobile guide, called TimeMachine®, it has been necessary to find a trade-off among weight, display size and batteries life. The TimeMachine features a 5” and bright display and it is resulted to be smaller and lighter than Whyre and with a longer battery life (over 4 hours). See Figure 3 for a comparison between the two devices. The TimeMachine has been in service at the Coliseum in Rome and it has been experimented at the close Roman Forum. It provides location and orientation dependent multimedia content in several languages. The infrastructure is quite unobtrusive and simple, as only a few WIFI hot spots in the indoor spaces are required in order to locate visitors’ devices. The location information is gathered from an ensemble of sensors, i.e. accelerometers, compass, WIFI card and GPS receiver, to guarantee a seamless coverage of a mixed-mode indoor/outdoor space. No public or private network connections, i.e. UMTS or WIFI, are required, as the content is stored locally, and no co-operative or centralized real time services have been provided so far. Which conclusions can be drawn from the above reported scenario in terms of requirements on system design of a custom on-site multimedia
Figure 2. Whyre® in three sites: Museo di Storia della Scienza (Florence), Archaeological Site of Pompeii and Certosa e Museo di San Martino (Naples)
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Figure 3. Whyre® (left) and TimeMachine®(right)
guide? To give an answer to this question, we can start on summarizing which are the most relevant aspects to be evaluated: • •
•
•
visitor should not be aware of technology, i.e. this must be “invisible”. devices should be aware of the “visitor context” and they should be able to pro-active deliver content only when and where they are really needed, i.e. devices must be equipped with sensing technologies. content should not interfere on what the visitor is interested in, instead they must enhance its understanding. content should enhance the understanding of what the visitor is interested in, without interfering, i.e. do not mistake the finger pointing at the Moon for the Moon.
So, in the design of a new on-site multimedia guide the following requirements arise: • •
•
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big investments both in terms of system design and content production. to find the right trade-off in terms of device capabilities, i.e. screen size, supported multimedia content type, offered services, and device usability, i.e. weight, free-hand use, battery life. to decide if content are stored locally on the device, i.e. difficult to be maintained,
or centrally on a server, i.e. need of a communication infrastructure and so this solution is more obtrusive on the surrounding environment. In the next sections, different approaches to the design of on-site guides are presented where the common idea is to move from ad-hoc solutions to more general solutions, mainly based on the use of personal mobile devices. Moreover, in the next section is presented a bigger picture of how ICT could fruitfully have an impact on CH visibility and understanding, starting from data collection and management and ending to content delivery.
EPOCH: Overcoming Fragmentation in Open Cultural Heritage While the industry tries to promote new devices to support on-site visits, research is investigating new solutions to enhance CH visibility on the territory and cooperation among institutions. To this aim, as a result of the EU 6th Framework Programme7, a Network of Excellence named EPOCH (20042008) has been created (EPOCH, 2004), dealing with ICT application to CH. More than 80 partners, from most of the European countries, but also from USA, South Africa, Australia, and the Far East, have been involved within EPOCH with the following mission and main goals:
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
•
•
• • •
Foster integration at European level, stimulating cross-fertilization between humanists and technologists, integrating research teams at a European level, creating a shared toolkit of common practices and technologies. Create a joint research infrastructure, defining research and standards, and creating a holistic approach to CH dissemination. Spread excellence and standardization, disseminate results and recommendations. Provide a training framework and mobility opportunities for CH researchers. Raise citizen’s awareness towards CH.
EPOCH delivered a set of recommendations for future European Research Agenda (Arnold & Geser, 2008) in ICT applied to CH. Main topics include: •
•
• •
•
Embed inter-disciplinarily in CH research, for being of most relevance and have most impact. Pursue technical research, including activity for standardizing 3D content representation and site-based systems. Knowledge transfer and market development across Europe. Understand socio-economic impacts of tangible CH and ICTs, including socioeconomic aspects and sustainability in cultural tourism. Encourage integrated approaches for heritage sites and ICTs.
Within EPOCH Mobile and Ambient Systems Work Group, a matrix of technologies (multilingual and semantic data processing, database and technology management, mobile wearable ambient systems, recording and data representation, visualization and rendering, multimodal interfaces and virtual humans and avatars) and CH-related activities (project design and background research, in-field research, data interpretation, publication
and archiving and public presentation) have been envisioned. To reach this holistic view, a structured approach to the use of technology in CH is required. For performing all the above mentioned CH activities in a seamless way, many actors are involved, including tour operators, service providers, sites owners, telecom operators and technology providers, and many integrated multi-vendor services should be provided. Services addressing these professional figures and the general public should address site management, data collection and content delivery and they should be well integrated on the territory, in order to be smoothly accessible everywhere. Users should be able to have access to such services on devices that are available for rent, e.g. the TimeMachine, or on their own hand-held device, e.g. a Smartphone or a PDA. Services should be automatically recommended wherever and whenever they are needed and they should adapt to the user profile, e.g. adults and children, disabled and able-bodied, novice and experienced. Furthermore, user interaction should be optimized with respect to device characteristics and user context. With reference to this view, two main issues have to be considered: platform interoperability, i.e. the same services should run on different platforms, and data interoperability, i.e. services should work on a common representation of data and should be independent from their data sources. In order to separate services from their heterogeneous data sources, standardization has been heavily pursued at different levels, i.e. definition of common management procedures, common technological infrastructures and common formats for artifacts representation. A CIDOC-CRM (Doerr, 2007) based ontology has been adopted to give a semantic description of CH objects and their associated context and content. Context data, no matter where they are originated from, e.g. coming from sensors in the environment or from direct user input, are wrapped into context elements to achieve a common format. CH data objects, coming from a wide range of sources, e.g. from archaeological sites or from
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intermediate interpretation and processing steps such as 3-D modeling, are stored in a Content Management System (CMS). EPOCH four years long effort included a joint research for defining a common technological infrastructure dealing with different CH stages from documentation to public presentation. With respect to the mobile devices scenario, the CIMAD project has taken charge of this challenge.
The CIMAD Framework The goal of CIMAD (Common Infrastructure / Context Influenced Mobile Acquisition and Delivery of Cultural Heritage Data) (Raffa et al., 2007) was to provide a common framework to simplify the development process of CH mobile applications and to support heterogeneous devices with different form factors and usage models, i.e. kiosks, custom devices hired on site, personal PDAs or smart phones. CIMAD was intended for context-aware applications in all aspects of CH, including content acquisition, i.e. tools for field survey, collection management, i.e. managing exhibits’ location, visitor management, i.e. registration services, monitoring and tracking of visitor flow, and visitor guidance, i.e. multimedia mobile guides. Nearly all CH applications and services today have mainly been developed from scratch as stand alone applications, not intended to be re-used in a modular fashion. However, in the field of context-awareness an increasing number of applications have been developed out of modular re-usable building blocks which are combined through a context infrastructure (Dey, Salber, & Abowd, 2001; Winograd, 2001; Coutaz & Rey, 2001). Based on such a context infrastructure, CIMAD aimed to introduce the same modularity to the area of CH applications where the most widely used functionalities are: •
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Dynamic adaptation of content, e.g. according to device characteristics, user preferences and profiles.
•
• •
Seamless data acquisition in fieldworks, e.g. contextualization of notes and pictures of artefacts. User context detection, with a focus on position detection. Context abstraction for detecting meaningful user states, e.g. walking or looking at a particular exhibit.
In order to provide such modularization, the CIMAD framework builds on top of two components supported by EPOCH (see Figure 4): a Context Management System called MobiComp (Ryan, Salmon Cinotti, & Raffa, 2005) and a Content Management System built on top of the Fedora digital repository (Payette, Lagoze, & Dushay, 1998). MobiComp has been used to store and access context data (Ryan, 2005). Its core element is the ContextService (see Figure 5), acting as a store for context information, i.e. Context Elements, and enabling coordination between the components of context-aware applications. Context elements8 are represented in XML (ConteXtML) and take the form of a subject-predicate-object triple, relating an entity identifier to a named context value. The elements carry also a production timestamp, a default validity period and a privacy Figure 4. Content and context repositories support interoperable services
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
level indicating how they may be disseminated through the ContextService. Three components exist for interacting with MobiComp: trackers, listeners and aggregators (see Figure 5). A tracker acts as a context producer. Their purpose is to collect raw context data from sensors and other dynamic/static sources, including configuration files for device capabilities and userpreferences. Trackers transform their input into context elements which are then put into the ContextService. Listeners receive event notifications whenever a context element is put into or removed from the ContextService. On receiving a notification, the listener may get the element from the ContextService and use it as required. An aggregator combines the behavior of both a tracker and a listener. Aggregators monitor events from the ContextService, rather than a sensor device, and apply a transformation before returning a new element to the ContextService. Aggregators can combine several low-level sensor elements to produce an element at a higher level of abstraction. For example, temperature, door, window and light sensor information might be used to determine room occupancy. Other aggregators may perform simple transformation services, e.g. converting latitude and longitude coordinates from a GPS sensor to coordinates on an appropriate local or national grid. Many nontrivial context-aware applications utilize a number of complex context aggregators, e.g. the FieldMap application described in (Leusen & Ryan, 2001).
Based on the CIMAD framework, several prototypes of context-aware multimedia guides have been proposed and showed during temporary expositions across Europe (Ryan et al., 2007; Ryan & Salmon Cinotti, 2007). They highlighted the modularity of this approach, i.e. components can be re-used and bundled together, and the interoperability across platforms. The implementation of a CIMAD context-aware multimedia guide is based on the following steps: •
•
•
•
•
CH specialists, i.e. museum curators or site experts, prepare the multimedia content and select the appropriate user interface. Curators prepare a map component, specifying the context related to each exhibit, i.e. its physical location. Curators identify the criteria for organizing multimedia content into thematic or geographic tours. The site management team together with the developers select the desired devices and technologies, i.e. PDAs and location technologies. Based on the selected devices and technologies the developers build the visitor guide. The proposed guides include:
• •
PDAs with IR beacons. Tablet PCs equipped with an USB webcam running computer vision components.
Figure 5. The Kent MobiComp infrastructure
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•
• •
2D semacode based guides running on standard mobile phones with a built in camera and a GPRS connection. GPS based guides. Guides that locate themselves thanks to the combined use of Stereo Vision and a Wearable Inertial Tracking System (Salmon Cinotti et al., 2006; Pettinari et al., 2007).
All of the above mentioned guides may benefit from the PathFinder, a service providing the shortest path between a source and a destination point (Manzaroli et al., 2008). In order to demonstrate that the CIMAD architecture can be used to support services for all museum actors, i.e. not only visitors but also staff and curators, two prototype management services were demonstrated. One is a museum presence monitor which keeps track, using a stereo-vision based system, of the number of visitors currently in the exhibition and of the overall total number of visitors (Salmon Cinotti et al., 2006). The other one is a museum registration desk service used to register visitors who wish to use a CIMAD context aware guide. The visitor’s details, i.e. profile and preferences, are entered and the desired mobile guide is selected. These information are made available to all applications through MobiComp and are also used to set the configuration of the chosen guide. Visitors can remain anonymous or can sign up for post-visit services. For further information regarding implementation and details about the individual CIMAD building blocks used in the above described services please refer to (Raffa et al., 2007; Ryan, Salmon Cinotti, & Raffa, 2005). As shown in this section, one of the main open issue concerns interoperability: moving from an ad-hoc approach, i.e. Whyre, to a more general one, i.e. personal devices, deal with common data representation, i.e. ontology, and heterogeneous set of devices, i.e. different hardware platforms, different operating systems, different network
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interfaces. Moreover, other aspects should be considered, like privacy, security and ensuring information integrity and trust. In our vision, current research on Embedded Systems could provide in the next future solutions to the above mentioned points. Regarding that, our first year experience on a European Union 7th Framework Programme project called SOFIA (Smart Object for Intelligent Applications), within the ARTEMIS Technological Platform on Embedded Systems, is presented in the next section.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS “It is therefore expected that the Internet of Things will become a reality over the next 20 years; with omnipresent smart devices wirelessly communicating over hybrid and ad-hoc networks of devices, sensors and actuators working in synergy to improve the quality of our lives and consistently reducing the ecological impact of mankind on the planet.” (Internet of Things in 2020, 2008). In order to increase CH visibility and understanding by opening CH ICT services to the largest number of users, cost effective solutions need to be investigated. Such solutions should be based on the use of personal mobile devices (Becker & Bizer, 2008), i.e. smart phones (see Devices in Figure 6). Furthermore, such devices are nowadays equipped with an increasing number of sensors (see Sensors in Figure 6), e.g. GPS, compass, accelerometer, RFID reader9, allowing the device to interact with the physical world (see Physical space in Figure 6). Such devices are also equipped with different wireless communication interfaces, e.g. WIFI, UMTS, HSDPA, allowing them to be always connected to the World Wide Web. From the other side, research on embedded computing are investigating on software design for low-cost, low-power and wireless interconnected microcomputers with a small amount of memory10. Such research will enable in the future to embed sensing, computation and communica-
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
tion on everyday objects (see Objects in Figure 6), i.e. Smart Objects. In order to allow the development of Smart Applications (as shown in Figure 6), i.e. in the CH domain, data retrieved from the physical world should be represented in a machine-readable format, its meaning has to be explicitly defined (see the “What?” circle in Figure 6) and all the data should be linked together (Bizer, Heath, & Berners-Lee, 2009) (see Semantic connection arrows in Figure 6). Each single element of a physical space, i.e. users, devices, objects, environments, should also be identified (see “Who?” circle in Figure 6). Elements within the physical space should also be located (see “Where?” circle in Figure 6). Moreover, all the data extracted from the physical space (or that just residing in the smart space) should be marked with a timestamp, i.e. When?. This raises the problem of synchronizing all the different clock sources. Also, depending on the application, the timing information should be more or less accurate. In general, taking into account timing information will impose constrains on system design, e.g. scalability, adaptability, real-time requirements.
What? Functional to reach this goal is the use of ontologies. Gruber (1995) defines an ontology as “the specification of a conceptualization”. RDF (Klyne & Carroll, 2004) represents one of the most used model to describe ontologies in terms of triple “subject-predicate-object”. Each element of a RDF triple is an Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) (Berners-Lee, 2005). Most used languages to create ontologies are: RDF Vocabulary Definition Language (RDFS) (Brickley & Guha, 2004) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (McGuinness & van Harmelen, 2004). Different research projects have been focused on using semantic web technologies (Berners-Lee, Handler, & Lassila, 2001) to harmonize heterogeneous data sources (Doulaverakis, Kompatsiaris, & Strintzis, 2005; Hyv¨onen et al., 2004; Lagoze & Hunter, 2001). Two of the most important results in the CH domain are the Dublin CORE (DCMI, 1995) and the CIDOC-CRM (Doerr, Hunter, & Lagoze, 2003). The former provides a vocabulary of fifteen properties (DC Metadata Element Set) for CH resource description11, e.g. title, description, creator, date. The latter is the result of many years
Figure 6. Connecting physical world to information world
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of work on generic data models for museums to allow information exchange and since 9/12/2006 it has been approved as ISO standard (ISO 21127, 2006). CIDOC-CRM aimed to realize an integrated scenario (Calvanese et al., 2002), where numerous and heterogeneous open information data sources have been mapped into a single ontology: with its 80 classes and 130 properties, it covers most part of the existing data representation schemas, being at the same time extensible and formally defined. The problem of mapping existing datasets, as archaeological excavation data, museum collections (based on different data structures as well as non-structured data, i.e. text descriptions) to a CIDOC-CRM compatible form is still an open issue. Providing the tools to implement such mapping will stimulate the adoption of CIDOC-CRM as reference model by heritage professionals and heritage policy makers (AMA, 2006).
Who? It is accepted from the research community that the RFID technology will play a primary role with respect to this. “It is foreseeable that any object will have a unique way of identification in the coming future, what is commonly known in the networking field of computer sciences as Unique Address, i.e. already today many RFID tags operate with a 128 bits address field that allows more than a trillion unique addresses for every square centimeter on the earth, creating an addressable continuum of computers, sensors, actuators, mobile phones, i.e. any thing or object around us.” (Internet of Things in 2020, 2008). RFID research community open questions are mainly related to security, privacy, standardization and power consumption. “Another central issue of the Internet of Things will be related to trust, privacy and security, not only for what concerns the technological aspects, but also for the education of the people at large…Obviously, all such devices will need to harvest their own energy. Overcoming the power problem will allow the things not only
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to communicate for indefinitely long, but also to relay information from other objects.” (Internet of Things in 2020, 2008). One of the main limit of RFID concerns the limited range of detection, mainly for passive RFID tags. Moving to high frequency and powered tags, i.e. 2.45 GHz active tags, will open to new research challenges aiming to find the best trade-off on power consumption, distance range and accuracy. Research are also investigating on how identify, search for and locate RFID tags spread across the environment by combining, for example, vision techniques and augmented reality (Kunkel et al., 2009).
Where? A lot of research have been carried out in the past years aiming to find solutions for tracking the position of people, vehicles and objects. For outdoor open sky environments, the GPS represents for sure the well know and adopted solution to track people and vehicles. In unconstrained environments, i.e. indoor-outdoor, the lack (or the weakness) of the GPS signal imposes to adopt other solutions, mainly based on the integration of different technologies, like for example Inertial Systems, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, WiMax and RFID. For a wide survey of location research in smart environments please refer to Pettinari (2007). In general, location granularity is closely related to the adopted space representation and to the application, e.g. an artwork is in a museum, an artwork is in a hall of a museum, an artwork is on a wall of a hall in a museum, an artwork is geo-located with respect to a coordinate reference system. Representing spatial data raises the same problem of giving a common meaning to such data. The Open Geospatial Consortium12 (OGS), for example, promotes standards for geospatial and location based services, i.e. OpenGIS®. Last research results on spatial data representation have been discussed at 2nd Annual Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop (SOCoP, 2009).
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
Geo-referenced data are usually accessed by means of maps. “A map is a portrayal of geographic information…A map may be a digital image file suitable for display on a computer screen; a map is not the data itself. Examples of map encodings include jpg, gif and other file types. OGC KML is an XML grammar used to encode and transport representations of geographic data for display in an earth browser. Put simply: KML encodes what to show in an earth browser, and how to show it. Geographic visualization includes not only the presentation of graphical data on the globe, but also the control of the user’s navigation in the sense of where to go and where to look.” (Open Geospatial Consortium Inc., 2008).
The SOFIA Project The depicted scenario raises a fundamental question: how can all these heterogeneous personal devices and Smart Objects interact with each other in order to provide meaningful and useful services when and where they are needed? About this question, the EU 7th Framework Programme SOFIA13 (Smart Object for Intelligent Applications) project, within the ARTEMIS Joint Technology Initiative, has taken on the challenge of “making information in the physical world available for smart services, connecting physical world with information world”. Functional to this challenge is interoperability at different levels: communication, service and information. Interoperability should also reflect the multi-vendor, i.e. the user shall be free in choosing the manufacturer, multidevice, i.e. many kinds of devices shall interact with each other, and multi-part, i.e. a device may be composed of parts that are considered as individual partners for interaction with another device, nature of the above envisioned scenario. New architectures and platforms will result from these research. In SOFIA vision, the two former levels of interoperability (communication and service) can be achieved by means of an open source service-based architecture framework,
namely NoTA14 (Network On Terminal Architecture). The latter level of interoperability (information) can be achieved by means of an open source functional platform that provides a cross domain search extent for triple based information, namely Smart-M315 (multi-vendor, multi-device and multi-part). A complete description of NoTA is given by Lappeteläinen et al. (2008). The Smart-M3 “computing platform allows to store and retrieve information based on tuple space mechanisms”. The heart of the system can be decomposes into a Semantic Information Broker (SIB) and the real physical storage of data. The SIB is the access point for receiving information to be stored or retrieving such stored information. In the data storage, information are stored as a RDF16 graph. M3-agents (also known as Knowledge Processors (KP)) are software entities that interact with a SIB by means of a set of primitives: insert, remove, update, query and subscribe/unsubscribe. Within the SOFIA project, we experimented Smart-M3 by developing an application, i.e. a set of KPs and a reference ontology, in order to monitor health parameters, i.e. heart rate, and to relate such parameters with the surrounding environment conditions, i.e. temperature and humidity (Spadini et al., 2009). As shown in Figure 7, three major classes of KP can be underlined: producers, aggregators and consumers (see Figure 5 to find an analogy with the MobiComp infrastructure). Producers provide RDF triples related to data gathered from the environment, i.e. location and physiological data of the patient, temperature and humidity of the monitored environments. Aggregators are used to merge raw data, i.e. temperature and humidity, and to provide high level data, i.e. Thom index (Thom & Bosen, 1959). Consumers are subscribed to one or more RDF triples changes, i.e. just the heart rate or the heart rate and other relevant information. The implemented smart application has shown the feasibility of the proposed approach opening new pro-
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Figure 7. Relating health parameters and environment parameters to prevent heat-waves health effect
spective for the design of smart applications in different domains, i.e. the CH domain.
Dealing with Security and Privacy A service centric scenario, like the one proposed within SOFIA, raises security and privacy issues. How context information is protected? Which authentication and authorization mechanisms are used to access context information? Which techniques are used to ensure the privacy in connection to context sharing? It is out of the scope of this chapter to give an answer to these question. Instead, following are reported some approaches, mainly based on the use of ontologies. In fact, as for knowledge representation, ontologies can also be used to deal with security and privacy. In (Savolainen, Niemela, & Savola, 2007) is presented a taxonomy of information security for service centric systems. Software agents, like SOFIA KPs, can make use of the DAML17 based ontology (Denker et al., 2003). In (Kim, Luo, & Kang, 2005) is presented a security ontology that
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can be used during service discovery and matchmaking. A framework for information system security management is presented in (Tsoumas & Gritzalis, 2006).
One More Need: Content Management If the above depicted scenario will become real in the next few years, with respect to the CH domain, one more question remain unanswered: how can heterogeneous multimedia content be stored, retrieved and adapted in order to be delivered on several different stationary devices, i.e. desktop PCs, set-top boxes, mobile devices, i.e. smart phones, Mobile Internet Devices (MID)18, or in general channels, i.e. high definition displays, digital frames, multimedia kiosks? Content Management Systems (CMSs) aim to give an answer to this question. Mainly, two type of CMS can be identified: Web CMS (WCMS) and Enterprise CMS (ECMS). The former is a content management system implemented as a
Requirements on System Design to Increase Understanding and Visibility of Cultural Heritage
web application usually used to handle large and dynamic collection of web site content material. Generally, a WCMS supports the content creation, control, editing and maintenance. Content can be rendered online, offline or in a hybrid processing mode. The latter is defined by AIIM19 as “The technologies used to capture, manage, store, deliver, and preserve information to support business processes.”. For a survey on ECMS, please refer to Kampffmeyer (2006). The Fedora CMS, adopted by EPOCH, represents a good example of an open source CMS. “Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) was originally developed by researchers at Cornell University as an architecture for storing, managing, and accessing digital content in the form of digital objects inspired by the Kahn and Wilensky Framework” (Kahn & Wilensky, 2006). “Fedora defines a set of abstractions for expressing digital objects, asserting relationships among digital objects, and linking behaviors, i.e. services, to digital objects.” (Payette & Lagoze & Dushay, 1998). Content adaptation is promote by a content digital object representation that aggregates one or more content item together (Lagoze et al., 2006), using RDF and the Mulgara Semantic Store20 triple based repository. Any type of content is supported, e.g. text, video, audio, image. Real time content adaptation and delivery is obtained through the use of content modeller and presenter services, e.g. a service for producing zoom-able images or for producing greyscale images. Fedora content representation is compliant with the Open Archives Initiative standards21. Last but not least, since May 2009, “Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation22 are joining their organizations to pursue a common mission. Jointly, they will provide leadership and innovation in open source technologies for global communities who manage, preserve, and provide access to digital content. The joined organization, named DuraSpace23 will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms, Fedora and DSpace.”.
Closing the Loop? How can technology be used to increase visibility and understanding of the numerous sites that are not yet able to attract the amount of people they deserve? This has been the “leitmotif” of all the chapter. In Figure 8 our answer to this question is presented. In fact, in our vision, a solution can be found by creating a synergy between two research domains: the ICT application in CH domain and the embedded system domain. The former should provide mechanisms to represent CH specific knowledge and to manage CH multimedia content. The latter should provide software infrastructures on which developing interoperable multi-vendor and multi-device applications.
CONCLUSION Starting from the consideration that increasing visibility and understanding of CH sites is an unsatisfied social need, this chapter focused on how ICT could contribute. In order to improve CH visibility and perception, many actors should be involved: tour operators, service providers, CH sites owners, telecom operators and technology providers. Services addressing site management and content delivery should be available everywhere and integrated on the territory. This macro level issue should not be handled by individual institutions, but at government level, with laws and regulations. No isolated, individual solution with a large number of functions is desirable, mainly because of the big investment required, while an infrastructure supporting interoperability is needed. Also a new interaction model is envisaged, where the users define their goals, i.e. guide me to that particular exhibit and tell me if there is something interesting for me along the way, rather than select a function, i.e. show me the map or show me the list of exhibits. This approach requires that the objects in the environment interact with
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Figure 8. Closing the loop
each other, providing services and multimedia content to everybody. Objects equipped with identification devices and with embedded multimedia content will make the environment user friendly and interactive. Research needs to solve performance and system issues in order to meet interoperability, scalability and privacy requirements. These are considered primary issues both in the long-term and mid-term European Research Agenda, respectively within the 7th Framework Programme and it is related initiatives. CH will keep its primary role by offering test beds to new technologies, new systems and new services. MUSEwas funded by the Italian government (MIUR, the Italian Ministry for University and Research), within the framework of the National Research Program on Cultural Heritage Parnaso, MURST contract no. 4946, October 2000.EPOCH, the European Research Network of Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage, was funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme, contract no. IST-2002507382.SOFIA, Smart Objects for Intelligent Applications, is funded through the European
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Artemis Programme under the Subprogramme SP3 Smart environments and scalable digital service, within the 7th European Framework Programme, contract no. 100017. However, the content here reflect only the authors’ view and the European Commission and the other Institutions are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein. Intel, Intel logo, Intel XScale and Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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ADDITIONAL READING
Scagliarini, D., & Coralini, A. (2002). L’Alma Mater a Pompei. L’Insula del Centenario. Imola, Italy: Bologna University Press.
Alesso, P. H. (2000). e-Video: Producing internet video as broadband technologies converge. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Scagliarini, D., Coralini, A., Guidazzoli, A., Salmon Cinotti, T., Raffa, G., Roffia, L., & Vecchietti, E. (2003). Archeologia virtuale e supporti informatici nella ricostruzione di una domus di Pompei. In P. Moscati (Ed.), Archeologia e Calcolatori 14 (pp. 237-274). Monterotondo, Italy: c/o Istituto di Studi sulle Civiltà Italiche e del Mediterraneo Antico del C.N.R.
Antoniou, G., & Harmelen, F. V. (2004). A Semantic Web Primer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
SOCoP. (2009). Spatial ontology community of practice. GeoSpatial Ontology Framework and Reference Model. Retrieved December 21, 2009, from http://www.socop.org Spadini, F., Bartolini, S., Trevisan, R., Zamagni, G., D’Elia, A., Vergari, F., et al. (2009, September). Approaching the design of interoperable smart environment applications. Paper presented at the 2nd NoTA Conference, San Jose, CA, USA.
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Interoperability: The capability of transferring knowledge between heterogeneous elements of a physical space like users, devices, objects and environments. Mobile Device: A battery powered inputoutput user device, wireless connected to Internet. Multimedia Content: A mean to distribute and represent digital information by combining text, pictures, sound and video. Ontology: A domain specific formal machinereadable description of knowledge, based on the use of classes and proprieties extracted from vocabularies. Each ontology element must have an unique identifier. Sensor: An electronic device able to convert a physical characteristic into an electrical signal. Smart Environment: An ecosystem of interacting objects, e.g. sensors, devices, appliances and embedded systems in general, that have the capability to self-organize, to provide services and manipulate/publish complex data. Smart Object: A Smart Environment component, with a specific function, able to sense from and interact with the environment.
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Context: A set of application-dependent information that can be used to characterise the situation of a person, an environment, a device or an object. It can be extracted by the physical space by means of sensors.
7 8
9
12 10 11
http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/. http://www.isaac-project.eu. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/telearndigicult/digicult_en.html. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/ activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm. http://www.smartproducts-project.eu/. http://www.esri.com/software/mapobjectslt/ index.html. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp6. http://www.mobicomp.org/mediawiki/index.php/ContextElement. http://www.icarte.ca/. http://www.sics.se/contiki/. http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
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14 15 16 17 18 13
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http://www.sofia-project.eu/. http://www.notaworld.org/. http://open-m3.sourceforge.net/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-M3. http://www.daml.org/services/. http://www.intel.com/products/mid/.
21 22 23 19 20
http://www.aiim.org/. http://www.mulgara.org/. http://www.openarchives.org. http://dspace.org/. http://duraspace.org/index.php.
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Chapter 14
Personal Digital Collections: Involving Users in the Co-Creation of Digital Cultural Heritage Paul F. Marty Florida State University, USA Scott Sayre Sandbox Studios / Museum411, USA Silvia Filippini Fantoni University Paris I - Sorbonne, France
ABSTRACT Personal digital collections systems, which encourage visitors to museum websites to create their own personal collections out of a museum’s online collections, are the latest trend in personalization technologies for museums and other cultural heritage organizations. This chapter explores the development, implementation, and evaluation of different types of personal digital collection interfaces on museum websites, from simple bookmarking applications to sophisticated tools that support high levels of interactivity and the sharing of collections. It examines the potential impact of these interfaces on the relationship between museums and their online visitors, explores the possible benefits of involving users as co-creators of digital cultural heritage, and offers an analysis of future research directions and best practices for system design, presenting lessons learned from more than a decade of design and development of personal digital collections systems on museum websites.
INTRODUCTION Digital representations of cultural heritage have transformed the way museums and other cultural heritage organizations interact with their visitors. The widespread availability of digital collections has resulted in unprecedented levels of access, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch014
offering museum visitors new opportunities for interactivity, many of which are unique to the online environment. One of the more innovative of these opportunities revolves around the ability of libraries, archives, and museums to involve users in the personalization and co-creation of digital collections of cultural heritage. This ability is best exemplified by personal digital collections (also known as “my collection”
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or “my museum”) interfaces on museum websites, where online visitors are encouraged to build their own personal collections of the museum’s online artifacts, returning to view, modify, and interact with them at their leisure. The primary purpose and implementation of these tools range from simple bookmarking applications to extremely sophisticated interfaces that empower educators and researchers to construct new knowledge out of existing digital cultural content by customizing museum information resources to create new presentations, activities, reports, etc. In theory, the ability to create and manipulate personal collections encourages visitors to develop a personal relationship with collections, and helps them develop lifelong relationships with museums and other cultural heritage organizations. In reality, the success of these systems has been mixed, especially when viewed from the perspective of multiple audiences with diverse needs and expectations. This chapter examines the development, implementation, and evaluation of personal digital collections systems over the past decade. It addresses such questions as: When do they succeed? When do they fail? What lessons have we learned that can inform the successful design of similar interfaces? How will emerging web 2.0 trends focusing on social media, mash-ups, and integration affect the future of these tools? It answers these questions by providing an overview of existing research about personal digital collections systems, a survey of select systems developed over the past decade, and a discussion of the best practices for the design and development of systems that encourage users to create their own personal collections of digital cultural heritage, thereby becoming co-creators of their own digital culture.
BACKGROUND Revolutionary trends in personalization have occurred in the online museum environment over
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the past two decades (Beardon & Worden, 1995; Bowen & Filippini Fantoni, 2004). As museums and other cultural heritage organizations explore new methods of making their collections available online, the focus has shifted from providing information about objects to providing visitors with new opportunities for interactivity. Many museums now encourage their visitors to draw connections between cultural artifacts, and share those connections with other museum visitors (Bearman & Trant, 2005; Dietz et al., 2004; cf. Borgman, 2003). Online visitors are encouraged to add value to digital collections of cultural heritage, contributing their knowledge to the museum’s collections by adding new connections and interpretations across user communities (cf. Lynch, 2002). The popularity of such activities has raised a variety of questions about the consequences of allowing users to create and manipulate personal digital collections of cultural heritage. Some researchers have focused on the educational potential of allowing museum visitors to act as curators and design their own online collections and exhibits (Adams et al., 2001). Others have attempted to assess the effectiveness of these tools by examining the ability of personal digital collections to encourage museum visitors to feel more involved with or connected to digital cultural heritage (Filippini Fantoni & Bowen, 2007). This section addresses these and related research questions, providing an overview of the key findings from the literature on this topic.
Personalization and the Museum Visitor Personal digital collections systems are just one of many tools available for museum professionals who are interested in personalizing the museum experience for their visitors. Many different technologies to support personalization, in the museum and online, have been developed over the past couple of decades (Marty & Jones, 2008;
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Thomas & Mintz, 1998), ranging from interactive portals of museum information resources (e.g. “My Met Museum”) to interfaces capable of adapting information resources dynamically to meet the different needs of different users (Paterno & Mancini, 2000). Perhaps the most common of the technologies museum visitors can use for personalization in the gallery are the handheld audio guides available in many museums to supplement gallery tours. Audio guides, whether they are developed for portable CD-players, iPods, or handheld computers, can provide visitors with the ability to access detailed descriptions of individual works of art and even create their own personal tours complete with online access to their favorite artifacts (Din & Hecht, 2007). In their latest incarnation, audio guides even support the co-construction of new digital knowledge, allowing museum visitors to work collaboratively to annotation collections with audio comments (Puig et al., 2009). Like all new technologies, the development and use of these devices can be problematic, and the history of interactive tools for personalizing the museum visit has led many to question their success and relative value (Schwarzer, 2001). Some researchers question whether personalized, interactive technologies actually improve the process of visiting the museum. Studies demonstrating that visitors spend more time in galleries while using interactive technologies, for example, raise important questions about whether the additional time spent in the galleries by visitors using handheld computers is time constructively spent (Evans & Sterry, 1999). While visiting a museum with interactive technologies is clearly attractive to many museum visitors (witness the growing popularity of pod-casting museum audio tours (Samis & Pau, 2006)), it is possible that visitors using interactive devices may spend more time in galleries learning how to use these devices than actually learning from them. Others raise concerns about the social implications of using interactive, personalized technolo-
gies while visiting museums. Does the widespread use of audio guides in galleries, for instance, enhance or detract from the social experience of visiting a museum with friends or family? Researchers have explored methods of making audio guides less socially isolating, allowing visitors to eavesdrop, for example, on their fellow visitors (Woodruff et al., 2002). Researchers have also explored ways of extending the social experience outside of the museum itself, allowing visitors within physical galleries to interact and converse with online visitors to those same galleries using the museum’s website (Galani & Chalmers, 2002). Other have studied the social interactions among museum visitors who co-visit museum websites in groups while online, taking virtual tours led by virtual docents over the internet (Paolini et al., 2000). Recent research into personalization technologies has focused on ways of using pervasive or ubiquitous computing techniques to create personalized experiences in museums and on museum websites (Arts & Schoonhoven, 2005; Hsi & Fait, 2005; Silveira, et al., 2005). Nowhere have these technologies had a greater impact on the museum visitor than in the online world of museum websites. Recent technical advances have led to dynamic, adaptive virtual museum environments where the entire museum experience can be shaped by personalization technologies. Online visitors can take virtual tours that vary in content according to user-definable profiles selected by the virtual visitor (Paterno & Mancini, 2000), learn more about the role of the curator by curating and exhibiting their own personal galleries (Adams et al., 2001), and create their own personal digital collections (Bowen & Filippini Fantoni, 2004). Personalization technologies on museum websites have become increasingly popular over the past decade. A recent study showed that online museum visitors strongly agreed that museum websites should take advantage of the online environment to present unique experiences that cannot be duplicated in museums (Marty, 2008).
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In particular, this study showed that the majority of online museum visitors agreed or strongly agreed that museum websites should offer interfaces that can be customized to meet the needs of different online visitors (e.g. virtual tours that adapt to individual interests), as well as interfaces that can record and store personalized information for different online visitors (e.g. personal digital collections of selected museum artifacts).
Personal Digital Collections on Museum Websites The latest trend in museum personalization is the development of “personal digital collections,” which allow virtual visitors to save selected objects from online collections on a personalized page available on a museum’s website (Filippini Fantoni & Bowen, 2007). These interfaces are becoming increasingly common; museums as diverse as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Australia, and the Tate Online offer visitors the ability to create their own personal collections of digital cultural heritage. Visitors can return to view their collections whenever they like, add and remove artifacts at will, and (with some of the more advanced systems) annotate their collections with personal observations (and even media in some cases) and share their collections with others online. While implementations of these systems range from the simple to the complex, they all share the goal of allowing online museum visitors to arrange information of significance to them in some personal way. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, allows visitors to bookmark their favorites from a selection of available artifacts online. ArtsConnectEd, a joint project of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, offers visitors the ability to create multiple collections of cultural heritage and related digital resources (e.g. audio, video, texts, and multimedia), annotate them with textual descriptions, and then distribute them to others. The Fine Arts Mu-
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seums of San Francisco allows online visitors to choose from over 80,000 works of art and arrange their selections into virtual galleries. The Getty encourages online visitors to create a collection of their favorite museum artifacts online, and then print out a customized map showing the location of these favorites in the museum itself. Museum visitors have reacted generally positively to the development of these tools, and frequently use personal digital collections systems for reasons that go beyond making a simple list of favorite artifacts. Visitors planning a first-time visit to an unfamiliar museum may use such interfaces to create their own personal list of must-see artifacts. Educators preparing lectures may use such systems to replace more traditional slides and print media within a range of academic applications. Curators applying for jobs in a new museum may use personal digital collections systems to increase their understanding of the museum’s collections, generating their own lists of favorites to highlight in a presentation. In the age of web 2.0, online visitors of all types are primed to take advantage of the features offered by personal digital collections systems, especially those who use social computing and networking tools regularly to accomplish their tasks. For museum professionals, personal digital collections systems provide a valuable tool that allows them to adapt their online products, services, and information in ways that better meet their visitors’ individual needs and characteristics. By integrating such systems into their websites, museum professionals can help support visitor choice and self-directed exploration, facilitate personal connections between visitors and content, sustain visitor participation, and offer even more opportunities for integration and engagement with collections. For some, the hope is that visitors who are encouraged to “save” their favorite artifacts online will develop a stronger interest in the collection. It is possible that the ability to create personal digital collections serves as a lure, encouraging visitor not only to explore these objects online,
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but also to visit these objects in person. Excited by seeing their current favorites online and finding new ones at the museum, visitors will hopefully return to the website before and after each visit, looking up more information about their current favorites, and eventually adding new objects. Unfortunately, current research shows that, with the exception of systems designed to meet specific educational needs, the success of these systems has so far been relatively limited (Filippini Fantoni & Bowen, 2007). Recent studies at the Tate Modern and the Getty Museum reveal that the use of personal digital collections tends to be quite superficial, and confined mainly to young people, experts, teachers, students, and frequent visitors (Filippini Fantoni, 2006a, 2006b). Visitors surveyed as part of these studies indicated a lack of time or interest as the primary reasons for not using these systems; in addition, many visitors did not feel the need to prepare for or follow up on their visit using systems that allow them to bookmark selected artifacts. Other factors that influence the limited success of personal digital collections tools included a fear of sharing personal information, and technical issues that can make it difficult for visitors to use new, and frequently unfamiliar systems. Many of these issues, however, are not limited to personalization tools; they also affect other technology-based applications in museums, which suffer from similarly disappointing results. It is likely, therefore, that the problem lies not so much with the notion of personalization, which remains relevant for museums and other cultural heritage organizations, but rather with the massive investment in new technologies that the implementation of personalization requires. This poses problems not only for museum professionals, who frequently face limited technical competencies and small technology budgets, but also for museum visitors, the majority of whom are unfamiliar with the more sophisticated technologies that drive personal digital collection tools. Museum professionals and visitors are struggling with the need to develop
new models of visiting and interacting, of awareness and marketing. Consequently, until museums find more effective ways of implementing new technologies, and until the use of technology becomes more widespread in their visitors’ everyday lives, it will be necessary for museums to lower their expectations regarding the effective use of most technology-based applications, including personalization tools. There is a strong need for more research examining how personal digital collections have been implemented by museum professionals, how they have been used by online museum visitors, and how effective they are at meeting the needs and expectations of visitors and professionals alike. Given the continuing interest that many museums have with personalization technologies, along with the increasing familiarity of museum visitors with new technologies, it is important that research on this subject continues, especially considering the significant financial and intellectual resources needed to develop and implement these applications. The next section of this chapter provides an overview of the design, development, and use of personal digital collections systems, and offers critical lessons learned for future systems design.
PERSONAL DIGITAL COLLECTIONS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE The implementation of personal digital collections systems on museum websites has become increasingly popular over the past decade. While the majority of these systems are custom-designed for specific museums or for specific audiences, and thus essentially unique, they do share certain design elements in common, including the ability to identify, group, annotate, and share collections of digital culture. This section of the chapter provides an overview of the past, present, and future of these systems, beginning with a discussion of the history and different types of personal digital collec-
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tions tools on museum websites. It explores their most common interface features, and provides examples of the most popular systems, from simple bookmarking applications, to more complex “my museum” interfaces, to sophisticated personal digital collection systems that allow for and encourage high levels of interactivity and the sharing of collections among online museum visitors. It examines the potential impact of such systems on the relationship between museums and their online visitors, exploring the ability of personal digital collections to extend the museum visit beyond the gallery walls, and to encourage stronger relationships between museums and their visitors, in the galleries and online. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of best practices for system design, based on a recent case study of the ArtsConnectEd project, presenting lessons learned from more than a decade of design and development of personal digital collections systems on museum websites.
My Museum: Personal Collections and Personalized Environments The concept of a personal digital collection was first introduced in the mid-1990s by Beardon & Worden (1995), who developed a prototype system called the virtual curator. Their prototype allowed users to construct an exhibition or display on their own, choosing the objects in which they were most interested and eventually writing comments about them, with the aim of drastically changing the underlying metaphor of pre-classified exhibitions. This project, which initially started as a tool that would enable design students to gain the intellectual benefits of curating a small exhibition without all of the resources required to stage a real one, paved the way for a series of initiatives that are now available on a growing number of museum websites (Bowen & Filippini Fantoni, 2004). One of the first examples to be developed by a museum was “My Met Gallery,” which has been
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available since 1999 on the Metropolitan’s website (http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/gallery.asp). With this system, visitors can select their favorite works of art from the museum’s online collections and save them to a personal page that may be visited and updated later. This personal digital collection tool offers an excellent example of one of the simplest possible implementations; visitors may not have more than one personal collection, nor can they annotate or share their collection with others. They cannot even re-organize the artifacts in their collection; all they can do is add and remove artifacts (see Figure 1). Since then, dozens of museums have introduced their own personal digital collections interfaces, many of them with increasingly sophisticated tools and technologies. Examples include the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Personal Collection (http://www.clemusart.com/explore/collectionLogin.asp), the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Your Collection (http://www.whitney.org/ Login) and the recently redesigned Art Collector (http://www.artsconnected.org/collector), which provides access to the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center as part of the ArtsConnectEd project. Many of these newer systems allow visitors to create multiple collections, annotate the artifacts in their collections with comments, and share their collections with friends and families via email or on Facebook, Twitter, and other social network websites. Some even allow visitors to turn their collections into their own personal virtual exhibits, with the ability to zoom into digital images, compare multiple artifacts, and so on. ArtsConnectEd’s Art Collector provides an excellent example of these more complex functions; see Figure 2 for an example of a set created with Art Collector illustrating, among others, the ability to compare two separate works of art on one slide (see Mouse and Cat, lower left). The availability of these tools is particularly helpful for individuals accessing online digital collections for research and educational purposes.
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Figure 1. A sample “My Met Gallery” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art website (http://www.metmuseum.org). ©2010. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used with permission
Figure 2. A sample set created using “Art Collector” at the ArtsConnectEd website (http://www.artsconnected.org). ©2010. ArtsConnectEd. Used with permission
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Educators, for example, can select a list of artifacts prior to a visit, set up study sets, provide personalized recommendations, and test knowledge acquired during a visit by asking their students to create personal collections. A teacher planning a field trip to a museum could create an online exhibit, including all the objects the students will see on their trip, complete with annotations that explain why each object is important and how it relates to the class’s lesson plans. In some cases, teachers may assign students to use these tools as a means for generating their own class projects and presentations. By supporting visitors’ individual interests, these solutions can be very useful in supporting the learning process regarding objects in the collection.
Personal online collections can also be helpful for museum visitors wishing to more carefully plan their trip to the museum. The J.P. Getty Museum’s Getty Bookmarks (https://www.getty.edu/ mygetty/), the Tate Britain’s My Tour (http://www. tate.org.uk/britain/explore/etb.jsp), and the Musée d’Orsay’s Plan Your Visit ((http://www.museeorsay.fr/en/tools/my-selection/) offer features that allow online visitors to identify the artifacts they want to see on their visit, and create a printable map of those selected artworks which they can bring with them to the museum. Figure 3 shows an example gallery map automatically generated by the Getty Museum’s website, indicating the location of selected Greco-Roman artifacts currently on exhibit in the Getty Villa.
Figure 3. A sample map created using the “Getty Guide” at the Getty Museum website (http://www. getty.edu). ©2010. The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved
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Existing systems can be even made more complex by adding tools that contribute to the creation of a “personal environment” within the museum’s website, which can be customized according to one’s needs. Visitors can select links to their favorite sections of the website, access their personalized agendas, and store links to images, information or articles for future research. These applications are primarily designed for frequent visitors or for special categories of visitors who use the website as a working tool, such as teachers, journalists, experts, students, or researchers. Once a page has been created and customized, visitors can log in every time they access the website to find all the information they need. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, provides a complete “My Met Museum” system, which includes the already mentioned “My Met Gallery” along with a “My Met Calendar,” a subscription to a free newsletter, and a “Rapid Check Out” option to facilitate purchases in “The Met Store” (https://www.metmuseum. org/mymetmuseum/). Similar “My Museum” applications—integrating personal digital collections systems with visit planning tools, online calendars, and the like—are available on the websites of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (https:// www.philamuseum.org/myMuseum/), the Virtual Museum of Canada (http://www.museevirtuelvirtualmuseum.ca/MyExhibits.do?lang=en), the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/), and the Musée du Louvre (http://www.louvre.fr/ llv/perso/). The Louvre application, called “My Personal Space,” not only allows visitors to save artwork from the museum’s online collection but also allows them to subscribe to the louvre. fr newsletter, create personalized tour plans, and access many other educational resources. In these ways, museum professionals have used a variety of new technologies to support the changing needs and expectations of their online visitors. While the features of these websites are constantly evolving, a summary of technologies
and capabilities at this point in time can be very helpful as we seek to improve our understanding of the role of personal digital collections on museum websites. Table 1 provides a list of some of the most popular systems currently available on museums websites, highlighting the different functionalities that they offer, including whether the application allows the visitor to create multiple collections, to publish, email, and annotate their collections, and create a printable map showing the location of their collections in the museum’s galleries. The most frequently occurring features include the ability to manage multiple collections and email them to others, while the least frequently occurring include the ability to publish collections and produce printable maps.
Personalization’s Potential: Extending the Visit Beyond the Museum Walls Personal digital collections systems, originally designed for online use only, have recently been expanded to cross the boundaries between online and on site museum visits, thanks to the development of new technologies that allow visitors to save information from interactive kiosks and mobile devices while visiting the museum for use after their visit. Information bookmarked in this way can be retrieved either via links in an email sent to the visitor, or via a personal page on the museum’s website, accessible through a username and password (Filippini Fantoni & Bowen, 2007). When well-integrated into the visitor experience, these applications can be a powerful tool to facilitate learning and to extend the visitors’ experience beyond the museum’s walls. Visitors can be overwhelmed by the vast amount of information presented in kiosks or on mobile guides, and the ability to save content and access it somewhere else offers visitors the flexibility to focus more on discovery and the aesthetic experience in the museum and to leave the more traditional didactic aspects for later. Research also indicates
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Table 1. A comparative analysis of some of the most popular personal digital collection systems Museum
PDC System
Multiple Collections
Publish Collections
X
X
Email Collections
Annotate Collections X
Art Institute of Chicago
Art Explorer
Metropolitan Museum of Art
My Met Gallery
MFA Boston
My MFA Gallery
X
MFA Boston
MFA Educators
X
X
X
X
Minneapolis Institute of Art / Walker Art Center
Art Collector (ArtsConnectEd)
X
X
X
X
MOMA
My Sets
X
X
X
Musée d’Orsay
Personal Album / Plan your visit
Musée du Louvre
My Album
X
X
Peabody Essex Museum
ArtScape
X
X
Philadelphia Museum of Art
My Gallery
X
X
X
Seattle Art Museum
My SAM Collection
X
Tate Modern
My Selection
X
Tate Britain
My Tour
X
Virtual Museum of Canada
My Images
X
Whitney Museum of American Art
Your Collection
that repetition is a major mechanism for retaining memories over time (Brown & Kulick, 1997), so these applications can play an important role in increasing visitors’ knowledge about a collection or exhibition as well as stimulating a positive response and the intrinsic desire to learn more. To take advantage of these potentials, museums have been incorporating bookmarking features in their kiosks and mobile guides over the past several years. The J. Paul Getty Museum, for instance, developed a series of multimedia kiosks (Filippini Fantoni, 2006b) in 2005; available at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, these kiosks allow visitors to access and save content of interest (including videos, descriptions of artworks, and artist biographies) concerning the museum’s collection, history, architecture, etc. Bookmarked
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Map Collections
X
X
X X X
X
X
X
information can be accessed at the kiosk during subsequent visits or as a personal collection available on the museum’s website. Similarly, the UK National Gallery’s Art Start kiosks include an “Add it to My Tour” feature that allows visitors to bookmark objects from the collection, which can then be sent via email and/or printed out on a map highlighting their location in the museum so that visitors can find them more easily during the visit (Filippini Fantoni, 2006a). These applications have been extended to mobile technology that accompanies visitors through the galleries, capturing spontaneous interests and bursts of curiosity so that visitors can follow up later on what catches their attention during the visit. Guidebook, a project developed in 2000 by the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco
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in cooperation with the Concord Consortium and the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, provides an excellent example; while providing visitors with audiovisual information about the exhibits in the museum, this handheld device also “remembers” a visit to the museum, allowing visitors to bookmark exhibits of interest and to send user-captured souvenir photographs to a personalized webpage for viewing after the visit (Hsi, 2008). Similar projects have been developed at the Tate Modern (SMART guide), the Natural History Museum in London (Barry, 2006), the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris (Topalian, 2005), the Boston Science Museum (Reich & Chin, 2006), and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (Filippini Fantoni & Bowen, 2008). Projects such as these have helped dramatically improve our overall understanding of the role of interactive technologies before and after museum visits, in the galleries and online (Marty, 2007). By orienting visitors prior to a visit, and offering opportunities to explore related ideas after a visit, personal digital collections systems can offer a level of continuity, not only between the different phases of the museum experience (i.e. before, during, and after visits), but also between online and onsite experiences. To describe this phenomenon, Ailsa Berry, Head of Interactive Media at the London Natural History Museum, has coined the term, the “virtuous circle” (Berry, 2006). Museums are only now recognizing the full potential of integrating these two key areas as well as the value this integration brings to the visitor experience. It is extremely important that museum professionals offer museum visitors a user experience that combines physical and virtual offerings, through a journey that extends from the web to the museum and vice versa. Personalization technologies in general, and personal digital collections systems in particular, can be very helpful in supporting the cycle of online and onsite experiences by providing an added value that encourages visitors to become more engaged in the museum experience.
Lessons Learned: Best Practices for System Design The wide range of personal digital collection functions and applications offered by museums today provides an excellent snapshot of best practices in designing and implementing these systems. To document these best practices, as well as critical lessons learned from the design and development of personal digital collection tools over the past decade, this section presents a case study from the redesign of ArtsConnectEd (http://artsconnected. org) completed in 2008 (Dowden & Sayre, 2009). This redesign project recruited museum professionals and public and professional end-users to review eighteen of the most current implementations as well as a number of commercial web 2.0 applications in order to identify their most important features and functionalities (see http://ace2. artsconnected.org/ for a summary of their findings). The review, which focused on developing requirements for the redesign of ArtsConnectEd, generated well over fifty items. While not all of these features were implemented in the redesign of ArtsConnectEd, the range of identified items revealed some larger themes that can be used as an informal set of best practices for those seeking to develop similar systems. These themes range from user-specific functionality to larger issues of technical interoperability. The following provides an overview of the key discoveries, lessons learned, and best practices derived from this research. Multiple Audiences and Applications. Personal digital collection tools should be designed for a wide variety of audiences and applications. While typically envisioned as a way to allow museum patrons to bookmark their favorite works, more specialized audiences will need more specific applications. Teachers may utilize personal digital collections for everything from building digital “slide sets” for class preparation to assigning students to create sophisticated multimedia projects. While museums tend to look at the end-user as
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their primary audience for these tools, ArtsConnectEd’s research found that there are many internal users as well. Museum educators, particularly tour guides and docents, utilize personal digital collections for tour design, research, and training. Educators focusing on school audiences use personal collections for creating thematic sets of media as well as for delivering structured instructional units. The needs of these audiences should be considered when developing personal digital collections systems. Inter-Institutional/Resource Interoperability. Museum professionals clearly see the intellectual, physical, and legal boundaries of their physical collections, but the general public often does not understand or even care about these constraints. While the public often knows what they are looking for, or what they need when it comes to collection objects, their needs, particularly in today’s networked information environment, often transcend the boundaries of one museum’s collections, and many users express a desire to create collections from multiple museums regardless of institutional boundaries. ArtsConnectEd’s integration of the collections of the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a start, but the understandable desire is to extend this integration to all museum collections. Technical interfaces and protocols such as Application Programming Interfaces “API” and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting “OAIPMH” (adopted by ArtsConnectEd as a means of integrating disparate collections) can now easily facilitate this type of museum collection sharing, harvesting, ingestion, and integration. While a small number of museums have begun to make their collections broadly accessible through these interfaces, there is a long way to go before the open sharing of museum information meets the needs expressed by the general public. Achieving true inter-institutional interoperability can be very challenging, especially when dealing with different types of organizations.
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Multimedia. Online visitors have grown accustomed to accessing and utilizing a wide range of media from YouTube videos and audio podcasts to PDF documents and SlideShare presentations. Simultaneously, many museums have begun to produce and publish these forms of rich media as a part of their standard operations. Users of personal digital collections tools increasingly expect to be able to collect and organize a wide range of heterogeneous media types, and rich media assets (whether internally and externally produced) can be of equal or greater value to museum users than more traditional images and supporting text. ArtsConnectEd users, for example, expressed a need to link to or attach a wide range of documents types to their collections (in addition to presentation media) to be used as instructions, worksheets, lesson plans, etc. Personal Media Integration. Along with the users’ need to access and integrate multimedia assets from a range of online sources, users also expect to be able to utilize their own media assets within their personal digital collections. Many members of the public, particularly teachers and students, cannot make full use of museum collections if they are constrained to work only with museumprovided/sanctioned resources. When museums fail to provide a mechanism for integrating external resources, users are more inclined to download museum media for personal use, breaking all connections to its original context and connections to the museum itself. Users who regularly store their personal images on photo sharing sites like Flickr or Picasa and their videos on YouTube or Viveo see personal media integration as extending beyond the standard uploading of files. To meet the needs of these users, personal digital collections systems need to be able to interface with their personal media wherever it resides. Serendipity and Personal Relationships. While search and browse tend to be the bedrock of museum information discovery and retrieval, many users of museum collections express a desire to go beyond the targeted, linear constraints of this
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functionality. ArtsConnectEd research found that users desired additional layers of discovery based on purely on randomization of returns or on user-generated tags. Randomization allows users to elude the constraints of familiarity by showing them items they may never have otherwise discovered. Randomized collections of objects can also provide a wide range of possibilities for student activities and projects. User-generated tags provide an additional, more casual mechanism for discovering relationships, often of a less traditional/scholarly nature. Tag cloud interfaces for both items and collections can dynamically extend the user experience in previously unforeseen directions. In addition, user-generated tags can benefit the museum by providing greater insight into how users describe, find and generate useful content (see Future Research Directions below). Share, Copy, and Modify. Today’s users live in a world of clones, mash-ups, and personalization, and they expect that a museum’s personal digital collections systems will facilitate these activities. ArtsConnectEd research showed that users often wanted to acquire another user’s collection only to modify it to better meet their own needs. While they could build an identical collection from scratch, they desired tools that easily facilitated the sharing, copying, modification, and re-sharing of collections (based on the Creative Commons share and share-alike license). Museum professionals and visitors expressed interest in this functionality for everything from sharing thematic collections of images and slide sets to complex lesson plans and rich media presentations. Social Tools. Perhaps contrary to expectations, personal digital collections are not always intended to be personal. ArtsConnectEd research showed that many users desired social media tools that facilitated the sharing, rating, and commenting on personal collections. Sharing collections through publication and email was deemed critical to many applications of personal collections. While sharing in itself is useful, many felt that the ability to collect community comments and ratings was
essential as a means to filter and acknowledge useful content. Such tools—along with integration with social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave—can also benefit the museum by providing free marketing and direct connections to personally relevant content. Multiple Forms of Output. Supporting the needs of different audiences requires a range of views and outputs of collected resources. While light tables and virtual galleries may satisfy the casual user, many specialized end-users require a greater range of options. ArtsConnectEd research found that users appreciated a wide variety of outputs for the individual items in their collections as well as for the collections themselves. At the item level, users need to be able to view full screen, zoom, print a full-page image, and print an information page containing all primary information. At the collection level, user requests ranged from the need to cut and save image details, arrange items chronologically into timelines, and place two pieces of media side by side for comparison. Requests also included the need to present media with or without supporting metadata (e.g., for use in quizzes or research assignments). As with onscreen presentations, there was also a need for a range of printable options for different applications. Collections may need to be printed as a series of thumbnails with metadata as well as space for audience note taking, a set of thumbnails and presenter notes, or as a full-page, book-like presentation of each of item in an author’s collection. Finally, authors need a way to save their collections locally so they may carry them with them and access them offline—particularly important as a backup for professionals where internet access may not always be available. Physical Connections. While virtual collections of digital material can stand on their own, extending these items to the physical world can further expand their application. ArtsConnectEd research found that museum professionals and visitors desired up-to-date location information for each physical object to be associated with its
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digital media. Including these data allows users to compile collections around works within specific galleries and design printable walking tours based on the current locations of objects throughout the physical museum. Addressing this user need is particularly important for museums who wish to maintain and market their physical relevance and accessibility in the digital domain.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The development and implementation of personal digital collections on museum websites has really only just begun. Museum professionals continue to grapple with the technologies required to implement these systems, while online museum visitors struggle to determine how (and whether) these systems meet their changing needs and expectations. There is a critical need for future research into the potential use of these tools, and today’s researchers and developers have a great opportunity to shape the future directions and development of personal digital collections systems, and to help museums redefine their relationships with their visitors as well as their roles as digital entities in the information age. More research is needed to increase our understanding of the current incarnations of personal digital collections and the way they are used by museum visitors. Studies are needed that compare the experiences of visitors who use personalization technologies with those who do not. The artworks or artifacts that visitors choose add to their personal collections should be compared, along with the way they are used to augment the museum visit and the amount of information visitors retain about them. A comparative analysis of personalized and non-personalized, pre- and post-visit experiences could also be useful. In addition, future studies should examine whether the use of personal digital collections strengthens the museum’s relationship with its visitors, through
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studies that attempt to capture visitor behavior over time, online and onsite. Future research must also go beyond the use of personal digital collections by museum visitors in their own lives to examine how museum professionals can take advantage of the use of these systems by their visitors in order to add value to their own understandings of their collections. It is possible that the arrangements of artifacts created by online visitors reflects new, previously unrecorded knowledge of digital culture—information that may be known only to the visitor and unobtainable through any other means. By recording these collections as they are created, and deciphering the reasons behind these new arrangements (with or without the assistance of the creator), museum professionals can realize the benefits of involving users as co-creators of digital cultural heritage. Researchers interested in these questions can benefit from current work exploring social tagging and collaborative annotation in art museums (Bearman & Trant, 2005; Trant, Bearman, & Chun, 2007; Trant, 2009). The efforts of the Steve researchers and participants over the past few years have clearly demonstrated the potential value of capturing user data by encouraging online visitors to tag works of art (http://steve.museum/). The success of the Steve project illustrates the willingness of the general public to play an active role in distributed knowledge creation, and to help improve access to cultural heritage resources. The development of personal digital collections is a logical next step for those visitors who are already engaged in the collaborative annotation and co-creation of digital cultural heritage, and future researchers should capitalize on these initiatives and reach out to those audiences to help them build the next generation of personal digital collections systems. The ultimate goal of future research in this area should be to help designers, developers, museum professionals, and museum visitors better understand how to create online tools that involve
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users in the co-creation of digital collections of cultural heritage. By encouraging their visitors to become actively involved in the creating, shaping, and sharing of digital cultural heritage, museums and other cultural heritage institutions have the unique opportunity to help their visitors develop a personal interest in documenting and exploring their own culture. Such efforts will benefit cultural agencies around the world, and encourage an improved understanding of all cultures worldwide. Achieving this goal will require researchers and developers to take a close look at existing web 2.0 applications, with a focus on understanding how the popularity of tools such as YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious has influenced user expectations about the features and capabilities of personal collections interfaces. The design and use of existing social computing applications—especially those used by millions of people around the world—will have significant implications and opportunities for the future design and development of personal digital collections systems in museums. At the very least, museum visitors will increasingly expect features such as tagging, sharing, and commenting, and will demand that museum-developed tools function as smoothly, seamlessly and effortlessly as other tools they use online in their daily lives. Given these demands, researchers and developers will have to weigh the relative merits of museums developing their own personal digital collections systems with the possibility of the museums contributing their digital images and other cultural materials to pre-existing online tools such as Flickr; several museums worldwide are already using Flickr for this purpose (Kalfatovic et al., 2009). While such efforts do not require the technical development or expertise required of those who wish to create their own systems, they do raise additional questions of control, copyright, and intellectual property—questions that ultimately may prove more difficult to address than the technical ones. Nevertheless, these are important issues to consider, especially in light of increasing user expectations in the online
world. It is difficult for most museums to compete with the features of social computing tools such as Flickr, which comes complete with tagging, commenting, and sharing built into its interface. It is even more difficult when one considers the inherent challenge of building systems that can cut across multiple institutions and allow users to create personal collections that draw upon the resources of more than one museum—something Flickr already allows easily. Finally, researchers and developers will also need to examine the potential integration of personal digital collections systems with increasingly ubiquitous handheld devices. As personal collection tools expand their reach to span multiple collections, and standards for aggregating cultural heritage from multiple institutions overcome the barriers that currently make sharing difficult, everyone with a handheld computer will demand anytime, anywhere access to their personal digital collections. One’s personal device will become one’s butterfly net and showcase in one, as visitors to museums the world over—in person and online—use their iPhones and iPods to collect digital culture as people today collect postcards, and show pictures of their collections to their friends as people today show off their family photos.
CONCLUSION This chapter provided an overview of personal digital collection tools in museums, examining their past, present, and probable future. Despite having been implemented in various forms by different museums for more than a decade, much remains to be learned about their use by museum visitors. The study of personalization technologies in museums remains ripe for future research, and today’s researchers and developers have a tremendous opportunity to help shape tomorrow’s personal digital collections systems. Museum professionals and researchers alike have the opportunity to look closely at how the
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design, development, and use of personal digital collections interfaces encourage museum visitors to help construct new digital knowledge by taking existing digital artifacts and collections and re-shaping them into new forms and new interpretations. Future researchers will continue to illuminate the role of the museum in encouraging the co-creation of digital cultural heritage, just as future developers will continue to design personal digital collections systems with new features and new capabilities. It is our hope that this chapter has helped improve our current understanding of how social computing technologies can shape the future of digital knowledge creation in museums and all cultural heritage organizations.
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Bearman, D., & Trant, J. (2005). Social terminology enhancement through vernacular engagement: Exploring collaborative annotation to encourage interaction with museum collections. D-Lib Magazine, 9(11). Retrieved from http://www.dlib. org/ dlib/september05/bearman/ 09bearman.html. Besser, H. (1997). The transformation of the museum and the way it’s perceived. In Jones-Garmil, K. (Ed.), The wired museum: Emerging technology and changing paradigms (pp. 153–170). Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Borgman, C. (2003). Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation. NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop. Retrieved from http://www.sis.pitt.edu/ ~dlwkshop/paper_ borgman.html Bowen, J. P., & Filippini Fantoni, S. (2004). Personalization and the web from a museum perspective. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2004 (pp. 63-78). Toronto, Canada: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2004/papers/ bowen/ bowen.html Brown, R., & Kulick, J. (1997). Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5, 73–79. doi:10.1016/00100277(77)90018-X Dietz, S., Besser, H., Borda, A., & Gerber, K. (2004). Virtual Museum (of Canada): The next generation. Retrieved from http://www.chin. gc.ca/ English/Members/ Rethinking_Group/ Din, H., & Hecht, P. (2007). The digital museum: A think guide. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Dowden, R., & Sayre, S. (2009). Tear down the walls: The redesign of ArtsConnectEd. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds), Museums and the Web 2009. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2009/papers/ dowden/dowden.html
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Evans, J., & Sterry, P. (1999). Portable computers and interactive multimedia: A new paradigm for interpreting museum collections. Archives and Museum Informatics, 13, 113–126. doi:10.1023/A:1016615422170 Filippini Fantoni, S. (2006a, September). Webbased Solutions: Save it for later. Arts Professional. Retrieved from http://www.artsprofessional. co.uk/ Magazine/view.cfm?issue= 129&id=3036 Filippini Fantoni, S. (2006b). GettyGuide Bookmarks: Do they really work? London, UK: Getty Internal Report. Retrieved from http://www.getty. edu/ museum/research/metrics _evaluations/gettyguide_ bookmarks.html Filippini Fantoni, S., & Bowen, J. (2007). Bookmarking in museums: Extending the museum experience beyond the visit? In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com /mw2007/papers/ filippini-fantoni/filippini- fantoni.html Filippini Fantoni, S., & Bowen, J. P. (2008). Multimedia tours in museums: Reflections from ten years of practice. In Tallon, L., & Walker, K. (Eds.), Digital technologies and the museum experience: Handheld guides and other media. New York: Alta Mira Press. Galani, A., & Chalmers, M. (2002). Can you see me? Exploring co-visiting between physical and virtual visitors. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2002. Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2002/papers/ galani/galani.html Hsi, S. (2008). Designing personalization. In Tallon, L., & Walker, K. (Eds.), Digital technologies and the museum experience: Handheld guides and other media. New York: Alta Mira Press.
Hsi, S., & Fait, H. (2005). RFID enhances visitors’ museum experience at the Exploratorium. Communications of the ACM, 48(9), 60–65. doi:10.1145/1081992.1082021 Kalfatovic, M. R., Kapsalis, E., Spiess, K. P., Van Camp, A., & Edson, M. (2009). Smithsonian Team Flickr: A library, archives, and museums collaboration in web 2.0 space. Archival Science, 8(4), 267–277. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9089-y Lynch, C. A. (2002). Digital collections, digital libraries and the digitization of cultural heritage information. First Monday, 7(5). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ issues/issue 7_5/lynch. Marty, P. F. (2007). Museum websites and museum visitors: Before and after the museum visit. Museum Management and Curatorship, 22(4), 337–360. doi:10.1080/09647770701757708 Marty, P. F. (2008). Museum websites and museum visitors: Digital museum resources and their use. Museum Management and Curatorship, 23(1), 81–99. doi:10.1080/09647770701865410 Marty, P. F., & Jones, K. B. (Eds.). (2008). Museum informatics: People, information, and technology in museums. New York: Routledge. Paolini, P., Barbieri, T., Loiudice, P., Alonzo, F., Zanti, M., & Gaia, G. (2000). Visiting a museum together? How to share a visit to a virtual world. Journal of the American Society for Information Science American Society for Information Science, 51(1), 33–38. doi:10.1002/(SICI)10974571(2000)51:13.0.CO;2-I Paterno, F., & Mancini, C. (2000). Effective levels of adaptation to different types of users in interactive museum systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science American Society for Information Science, 51(1), 5–13. doi:10.1002/(SICI)10974571(2000)51:13.0.CO;2-S
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Puig, V., L’Hour, Y. M., Haussonne, Y. M., & Jauniau, C. (2009). Collaborative annotation system using vocal comments recorded on mobile phones and audio guides: The Centre Pompidou exhibition Traces Du Sacré. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2009/papers/ puig/puig.html Reich, C., & Chin, E. (2006). Lessons from the Museum of Science’s first multimedia handheld tour. Boston, MA: Museum of Science Internal Publication. Samis, P., & Pau, S. (2006). ‘Artcasting’ at SFMOMA: First-year lessons, future challenges for museum podcasters broad audience of use. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2006. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse. com/ mw2006/papers/ samis.html Schwarzer, M. (2001, July/August). Art and gadgetry: The future of the museum visit. Museum News, 80(4), 36-41, 68, 73. Silveira, M., Pinho, M., Gonella, A., Herrmann, M., Calvetti, P., Bertoletti, A. C., & Girardi, M. (2005). Using mobile devices to help teachers and students during a visit to a museum. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2005. Toronto, CA: Archives and Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com / mw2005/papers/silveira /silveira.html Thomas, S., & Mintz, A. (Eds.). (1998). The virtual and the real: Media in the museum. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Topalian, R. (2005). Cultural visit memory: The Visite+ system personalization and cultural visit tracking site. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2005. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2005/papers/ topalian /topalian.html
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Trant, J. (2009). Tagging, folksonomy and art museums: Early experiments and ongoing research. Journal of Digital Information, 10(1). Retrieved from http://journals.tdl.org /jodi/article/view/270. Trant, J., Bearman, D., & Chun, S. (2007). The eye of the beholder: Steve.museum and social tagging of museum collections. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www. archimuse.com/ ichim07/papers/ trant/trant.html Woodruff, A., Aoki, P. M., Grinter, R. E., Hurst, A., Szymanski, M. H., & Thornton, J. D. (2002). Eavesdropping on electronic guidebooks: Observing learning resources in shared listening environments. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2002: Selected papers from an international conference (pp. 21-30). Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2002/papers/ woodruff/ woodruff.html
ADDITIONAL READING Aroyo, L., Brussee, R., Rutledge, L., Gorgels, P., Stash, N., & Wang, Y. (2007). Personalized museum experience: The Rijksmuseum use case. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.). Museums and the Web 2007. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse. com/ mw2007/papers/aroyo/ aroyo.html Beler, A., Borda, B., Bowen, J. P., & Filippini Fantoni, S. (2004). The building of online communities: An approach for learning organizations, with a particular focus on the museum sector. In J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini & G. Stanke (Eds.), EVA 2004 London Conference Proceedings (pp. 2.1-2.15).
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Cooper, J. (2006). Beyond the on-line museum: Participatory virtual exhibitions. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.). Museums and the Web 2006. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2006/papers/ cooper/cooper.html Dowden, R., Sayre, S., & Dietz, S. (2000). ArtsConnectEd: Collaboration in the integration and access to museum resources. First Monday, 5(6). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ index.php /fm/article/ view/752/661. Filippini Fantoni, S. (2003). Museums with a personal touch. In J. Hemsley, V. Cappellini & G. Stanke (Eds.), EVA 2003 London Conference Proceedings (pp. 1–10). Filippini-Fantoni, S., & Bowen, J. P. (2005). Personalization issues for science museum websites and e-learning. In Subramaniam, R. (Ed.), E-learning and virtual science centers. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Hitzeman, J., Mellish, C., & Oberlander, J. (1997). Dynamic generation of museum web pages: The intelligent labelling explorer. Archives and Museum Informatics, 11, 107–115. doi:10.1023/A:1009099015843 Hsi, S. (2003). A study of user experiences mediated by nomadic web content in a museum. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 19(3), 308–319. doi:10.1046/j.0266-4909.2003.jca_023.x Marucci, L., & Paterno, F. (2002). Design and evaluation of an adaptive virtual guide for Web applications. Universal Access in the Information Society, 1(3), 163–175. doi:10.1007/s102090100016 Oppermann, R., & Specht, M. (1999). A nomadic information system for adaptive exhibition guidance. Archives and Museum Informatics, 13(2), 127–138. doi:10.1023/A:1016619506241
Parry, R., & Arbach, N. (2005). The localized learner: Acknowledging distance and situatedness in online museum learning. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2005. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2005/papers/ parry/parry.html Sampson, D., Karagiannidis, C., & Kinshuk, K. (2002). Personalised learning: Educational, technological and standardisation perspectives. Interactive Educational Multimedia, 4, 24–39. Wakkary, R., & Evernden, D. (2005). Museum as ecology: A case study analysis of an ambient intelligent museum guide. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2005/papers/ wakkary /wakkary.html Wakkary, R., Muise, K., Tanenbaum, K., Hatala, M., & Kornfeld, L. (2007). Situating approaches to museum guides for families and groups. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ ichim07/papers/ wakkary/wakkary.html Walker, K. (2007). Visitor-constructed personalized learning trails. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds), Museums and the Web 2007. Toronto, CA: Archives & Museum Informatics. Retrieved from http://www.archimuse.com/ mw2007/papers/ walker/walker.html
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Adaptive Interfaces: Online systems, tools, or interfaces that adapt to individual interests according to user-definable profiles selected by virtual visitors.
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Customization Technologies: Digital systems, tools, or interfaces that allow for the customization of online interfaces to meet the different needs of museum visitors, in the galleries and online. Personal Digital Collections: Online systems, tools, or interfaces allowing museum visitors to save selected objects from an online collection on a personalized page available from a museum’s website.
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Personal Environments: Online systems, tools, or interfaces allowing museum visitors to save links to their favorite sections of a museum website, access personalized calendars and agendas, and store links to artifacts, images, information, or articles for future research. Personalization Technologies: Digital systems, tools, or interfaces that record and store personalized information for different museum visitors, in the galleries and online.
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Chapter 15
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription Enric Mayol Technical University of Catalonia-BarcelonaTech, Spain & Catalonian Genealogical Society, Spain
ABSTRACT Lately, genealogy has become a hobby not only in the United States, UK or France but also in many other countries where it is now widespread. The main sources of information for genealogists are different kinds of genealogical documents (census, church vital records, wills, …). In fact, and specifically in Spain, several projects to digitalize heritage and genealogical documentation have developed recently, in order to improve its access and to preserve its conservation state. Such digital information is useful, but it would be even more useful to have its transcription in a searchable support like databases or web repositories. This chapter analyses the opportunities and characteristics of such transcription projects and describes a transcription user interface tool. This proposal allows for easy, intuitive and fast design of a user interface to transcript genealogical documentation, in agreement with the contents of each different kind of genealogical documents. Given an XML Schema (XSD) describing a genealogical document structure and contents, this tool allows the user to adapt and personalize a user interface to transcribe the document contents, while obtaining an XML file to be stored in some database management system or to be shared among genealogists. At any moment during the transcription process, user interface may be adapted to the user requirements and to the document characteristics, so, this adaption is dynamic, intuitive and user friendly. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch015 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
INTRODUCTION Genealogy research consists on trying to identify, to localize and to obtain information about our ancestors (and descendants). The first step of this research is to collect information by means of interviews to grandparent and older relatives, and also by looking through the family documentation and memorabilia at home. But, when the curiosity goes beyond living people, genealogists need to access administrative, civil, religious and ultimately, heritage documentation centres, to find genealogical information. Therefore, the genealogy research goes on by visiting such documentation centres. In fact, several centres must be visited to find different kinds of information or to find information about different ancestors. This may be an inconvenient for genealogist, since this research is time consuming and sometimes involves expensive travel. Moreover, heritage documentation kept on these centres is fragile and must be handled with care. And sometimes, it may have a restricted access even to specialists. Documentation centres and genealogical associations are sensitive to these access difficulties and preservation needs for their documents. So, they have been starting document preservation and diffusion projects to allow wider and easier access to their documentation. Such projects include strategies to digitalize documentation and to put digital images on the webpage of the centre. In this way, they fulfil preservation of original documentation and they make a broad diffusion of the archive catalogue. Digitalized documentation is useful and facilitates genealogy research, but it will be more useful to have a direct access to the document contents. The ultimate wish of genealogists, historians and, in general, any person who makes a heritage investigation is to have all information of heritage documentation extracted or transcribed in a digital support accessible online and with powerful and
flexible query functionalities. This is a long term, high cost and not easily reachable project. However, there are some initiatives to provide computer-supported tools to facilitate the transcription task (Jameson et al., 2008; Pedro, n.d.). There are initiatives on handwriting recognition and digital library research to automatically transcribe heritage information (Gamera, n.d.; OCROPUS, n.d.). Moreover, genealogical and documentation centres have started projects to manually transcribe genealogical documents with the collaboration of volunteers (genealogist, students, retired people, …). In this case, information systems, software engineering and database research may provide user-friendly support tools and a clear methodology/guidelines of how to proceed to obtain high quality transcriptions. In this chapter, we follow this software engineering approach to propose a user adaptative interface tool to improve the manual transcription task. The objective of our genealogical transcription user interface tool is to allow transcribers to build, in an easy, intuitive and fast way, a user interface to transcribe the content of different kinds of genealogical documents. The generated interface may be adapted to the transcription process characteristics, to the user preferences and to the document structure itself. The flexibility of the tool, allows changes in its configuration at any moment of the transcription process. The dataentry interface may be readapted at any moment according to changes on the structure or contents of the document or user preferences. The chapter begins with a background section, in which we explain in more detail the need of computer-based tools, to support genealogical transcription. And we also define basic concepts as well as introducing the technology we will use. Afterwards, we show the global architecture of the tool and we describe in more detail all its components. To end with the tool description, we summarize the main contributions or benefits we expect of our tool, supporting the transcription
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process. Finally, we finish the chapter with main conclusions and further work.
BACKGROUND Genealogy Traditionally, genealogy has been defined as a discipline of history that analyses relationships between someone and his/her ancestors and descendents. The most expected and visible result of a genealogy research is the elaboration of a family tree. But, genealogy is not restricted to relationships between ancestors and descendent. Genealogists try to go beyond and understand where and how people lived, and also their lifestyles, biographies, and motivations. Genealogists may specialize in their own family; in a particular group; in a specific surname; in a particular period of time or in a small community village or parish. The Encyclopaedia of Genealogy (eogen, n.d.) defines genealogy as: •
• •
A record or table of the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or ancestors; a family tree. Direct descent from an ancestor; lineage or pedigree. The study or investigation of ancestry and family histories.
Genealogy has become one of the most important and widespread hobbies for many people. And not only for older people, but also for young people who are really interested in knowing their roots, their ancestors and the details of their ancestor’s living style. This genealogy popularization has promoted individual and collective initiatives of collaboration and voluntarism to support and to conduct research among genealogists. And consequently, genealogists request more support from information and communication technologies, for their activities. There are many
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genealogical software products to aid genealogists in the elaboration of their family trees. These software products also help to manage and share genealogical information, and to communicate and define virtual communities of genealogists. The Cindy’s Lists (n.d.) portal is a very complete directory of webpage links relative to genealogy computer resources. Genealogists and family historians often join family historian societies, where novices can learn from more experienced researchers. Most of these societies promote and conduct digitalization and indexing projects to make genealogical information sources more accessible, and to engage in advocacy and other efforts to preserve public records.
Genealogical Information Sources Among the documents that have more interest for genealogists, are those containing vital information of people and families, as well as their relationships in the context of some community, city or country. To build a family tree or to study the history of a family/lineage, genealogists require access to different kinds of documentation (church records, civil and property registry documents, wills, census, etc) and have to visit several documentation centres or archives to search for the vital information of members of their families. Each of these documents may contain many records of different people. As (Mills, 1999) clearly defines, the origin of genealogical information, may be a document, book, website, person, artifact, photography, audio/video recording, or other items containing data. Sources may be either original (not derived from a prior record) or derivative (extracted, transcribed into a type-scripted or hand-scripted copy, abstracted, etc., from an original record). Exact, complete copies, unaltered when photocopied or scanned into digital images, are often considered to be equivalent to the original record.
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
Making a search on the web with the magic words of “genealogy” or “family history”, you will find a legion of websites. They refer to genealogical associations, genealogist’s personal blogs, archive’s webpage, etc. Some of them are web pages with a vast range of contents produced by volunteers (GSU, Ancestry, GenServ, GeneaNet, Hispagen, SCGHSVN). Both kinds of genealogical information sources may be found in them: portals providing digital images of original sources and, other portals, providing the result of the extraction, transcription or indexing of the original sources or elaborated family trees. As genealogy becomes more popular, more genealogists and researches are keen for documents to be available online in original or derivative formats. But this material must be provided in a way that will be useful and that really supports scholarly research. At the same time, there is a growing interest on genealogical communities to move towards the agreement and publication of standards and good practice guidelines (GSU). The key elements of these guidelines should be the need for accuracy in compiling genealogical information; developing criteria for the evaluation of evidence; and setting standards for creating and publishing web pages.
Digitalization In order to improve the access to original sources of genealogical information and to preserve them, many documentation centres (archives, library, and other organizations (genealogical or not)) have started projects to digitalise this documentation. Current advances in digitalization technology reduce costs of such process. Information is stored in more efficient digital supports (more quality in less space) making easier to access and share their contents among researchers. The main purpose of a digitalization project is to preserve documentation, but in heritage digitalization projects it is also important to facilitate the access (and share) of such information. Heritage
original sources are usually very old and in a sensitive conservation state, and very frequently researchers have restrictions to access this kind of documentation. Consequently, genealogists may have difficulties in order to conduct their research, as they would like. Digitalization is a first step to provide a satisfactory solution with the aim of making heritage information available worldwide. But, notice that, even when a genealogist accesses a digital document, s/he still has to read, understand and analyse the information it contains. These tasks are repeated and repeated by each genealogist that uses the digital document, and there is no easy way for them to share their experience, knowledge, personal interpretation or guidelines to extract and analyse more accurately all the information contained in the document. In this sense, we think a more definite solution may require the transcription of such documents and to store them in some kind of interconnected (via Internet) repositories worldwide. But a previous digitalization process of original sources is clearly necessary and an important support to facilitate its transcription. In fact, all transcription projects usually begin after a digitalization process has been made. Digital images may be automatically processed or may be more easily distributed between transcribers.
Transcription Transcription is defined as the activity to: make a written or typewritten copy of dictated material, notes, etc; make an exact copy of a text or document; write out in another language or alphabet; or to transfer data from one recording form to another. But more specifically to genealogy, it is important to distinguish between Transcription, Extraction, Abstraction and Indexing depending on the information obtained from the original source (eogen, n.d.). •
Transcription: A document transcription is a literal copy of the document. The copy
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An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
•
•
•
is as faithful to the original as possible. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are included in their original form even if there are errors or usage that does not match present-day practice. Transcripts may or may not reproduce the original letter spacing and line breaks. In the digital age, transcripts are usually created on a computer: transcripts stored in digital form are easier to search, store in databases, re-print, etc. Extraction: A document extract is a literal copy of a portion of a document. The copy is as faithful to the original as possible. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are included in their original form even if there are errors or usage that does not match present-day practice. An extract is not the same as a transcript; an extract includes only a portion of the document whereas a transcript is a copy of the entire document. Abstraction: A document abstract is a summary of the contents of a document, which does not include every word or punctuation mark, but still includes all essential details. Names, places, etc. are written exactly as they appeared in the original document. Editorial comments are included in square brackets. Researchers typically omit boilerplate language from abstracts. The abstractor must understand the boilerplate language, however, in order to retain all the pertinent facts. Indexation: The process of capturing pertinent family history information from historical documents and making it available for publication on the Internet, creating a database of vital information taken from a collection of records so it is easier to search.
These terms are used indistinctly to refer to the fact of collecting all fields of a record, without punctuations marks and non-informative words. Typically, fields that provide information about a
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person (names, surnames, occupations, vital status, roles, ages, …) or vital events (dates, places, …) are transcribed exactly as they appear in the source document into some searchable format. It is important to state that genealogists do not correctly use these concepts, since usually, when a genealogist talks about ‘transcriptions’, they refer to the ‘abstraction’ semantics. Also, when genealogists refer to partial transcriptions they use the concept of ‘indexations’. In this chapter, we will use the term transcription in the genealogist way and not as an exact copy of the source. We propose to make a complete abstraction of relevant genealogical data of the document, and to put it into a structured digital form that may be readable and processable either by people or by computers. In this sense, we would like to remark that we propose to do a complete and exact copy of all fields eliminating noninformative literals. The obtained transcription is structured into fields; meanwhile the original source is a textual document. So, we prefer to use the term transcription to emphasize the completeness and literal copy of the process.
Transcription Approaches Genealogical information sources are usually handwritten documents. Taking into account that they may be written in Latin or ancient languages and that they may be partially damaged, it is very difficult to read and to understand them. How the document information is described and written depends very much on the personal style of the register officer, priest or person who recorded it in the document. All these documents have some common kind of pattern or structure. But, even though the information contained in all records of the document is similar, we may often find that some fields are missing, undefined, or described in a different order. Because of this, the document structure and contents is not fixed, but variable and flexible. Because of this, the transcription is neither an easy nor an economic task.
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
Basically, there are two approaches to make the transcription of genealogical documents. The first one is based on the image treatment of the digital documentation. The second one is based on a manual transcription made by volunteers extracting the information from the documents (digital or not). 1. Transcription projects following the first approach try to automatically recognize and extract the contents of such heritage and genealogical documentation. Such proposals are based on OCR and OMR techniques, on computer vision techniques and digital treatment of images (Droettboom & Fujinaga & MacMillan & Chouhury & DiLauro & Patton & Anderson, 2002). These proposals have been obtaining some hopeful results, but they are usually restricted to some simplified cases of documentation. The currently existing tools only recognize handwritten characters, but cannot extract its information; or are restricted to some very structured documents (like census) in which it is easier to identify where handwritten information is in. However, there are research communities working on computer vision, handwriting recognition and digital library that have been promise results and advances, which are usually presented in the joint conferences on digital libraries, handwritten recognition conferences and in digital library journals as (JCDL, n.d.; IJDL, n.d.). 2. The second approach is based on volunteer genealogists labour. Transcriptions are elaborated by a manual process, in which one or several volunteers read and transcribe the documentation contents into a database using (or not) some data-entry software. The most relevant initiative of this second approach is the Family Search Indexing Project (FSIP, n.d.) that combines the spreading of digital versions of microfilmed parish records (and other) into a webpage and a searchable
database that contains indexes of such records from nearly all countries of the world. Research advances in this area are more related to software engineering, database and information systems research communities. However, hardly any research is performed by these disciplines to the specific domain of genealogy, and more general results must be adapted to this domain. In this chapter we address this second approach. Many genealogical associations and historic archives have initiated small projects for transcribing genealogy documentation following the second approach. Most of these associations have, in their web pages or/and libraries, some kind of database, files or repositories of genealogical information. This information usually corresponds to indexes or partial transcriptions of civil or church records of birth, marriage or death, and some kind of old census. But in this case, transcriptions are usually stored in plain-text documents; in non-editable files (pdf files); scanned handwritten documents; and, the more structured transcriptions, have a spreadsheet or database format. Therefore, it is very difficult (or impossible) to manage, to share or to integrate these documents. Transcriptions on spreadsheets and database formats should be more manageable but, in fact, when a genealogist defines his own transcription goal, s/he defines the particular set of fields s/he is interested to transcribe, for his/her particular needs referred to a specific church, town or archive. Therefore, s/he obtains a transcription that has a different structure from other transcriptions done by other people. Although transcription may contain the same fields, they may be transcribed in a different order, or they may have a different format or maybe genealogists followed a different set of rules (names, surnames, contractions, etc). So, one of the most important limitations in order to make a transcription feasible to be integrated, is the lack of a good genealogical
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An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
transcription tool with a standard approach to handle genealogical information. The few existing tools following this approach are quite rigid and non user-friendly (many genealogists are not computer literate). Besides, as far as we know, none of them can be personalized and adapted to each user and each kind of document, and there are not complete transcription systems in the genealogy area. In other areas, like bioinformatics, where DNA and protein sequences require to be transcribed, these kinds of systems are more popular. For example, the Pedro transcription system (Jameson et al.’s, 2008; Pedro, n.d.) is a very powerful tool that is also based on XML and we agree with him in our approach. As we have previously said, transcription is a time-consuming task that requires an effective tool support, but in the specific case of genealogical document transcriptions, it requires also to have a predefined reference database schema where the transcribed information will be stored.
XML Schema As we have already mentioned above, information of records in a genealogical document is similar. But, in most cases, structure and contents of the genealogical document and how the record is described may differ. Therefore, comparing records in the same or different genealogical documents, we observe different ways (structure, format, order) to provide the same information. So, for the same contents, the structure is not fixed. Such differences are more evident in parish or civil records (birth, wedding, death, …) than in documents that correspond to lists with few information (census, immigration lists, …). In this sense, to model or to define a precise description of a genealogical document content, we require a knowledge modelling language that must be very flexible describing the structure and contents of the document, but at the same time, it must also be very accurate to define the semantics of the record and its fields.
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These requirements are well supported by XML technology. And more concretely, to model the structure and contents of genealogical documents, the XML Schema Definition language (XSD, n.d.) is a good option while the XML language (XML) is a good support to represent transcribed genealogical records.
THE GENEALOGICAL TRANSCRIPTION USER INTERFACE TOOL Architecture Overview The genealogical transcription user interface tool we propose must be a assisting tool for those genealogists interested in extracting all data, as literally as possible, from genealogical documents in an easy and friendly way. The main advantage of our tool is that it is adaptative, that is, it has the capacity for adaptation. Each user may adapt or modify very easily and quickly and at any given moment, which fields he wants to use and where does he want them to be placed in the data-entry interface. For example, when the document contents changes because some information becomes missing, undefined, or described in a different order, the user can add, hide or move any field of the dataentry interface to adapt it to the actual contents of the document, and make the transcription process easier. Moreover, the user can activate or deactivate rules that induce automatic actions that the interface performs. Given a genealogical document, we require a description of its contents by means an XML Schema. We assume that an expert has previously defined this schema. The Schema basically defines the different fields or items that are described in each record of the document stating their major properties. As it is shown in Figure 1, an XML Schema parser automatically reads and analyses the XML
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
Figure 1. Architecture of the tool
Schema and it builds a tree structure with all fields described in the schema. Besides, it collects the properties of each field relevant for the transcription process. In addition to the XML Schema, our tool also requires to know which user interface (UI) components to use. This file describes the graphical or Java interface components available to be used to design and to build the Transcription Interface. For example, fields of type String will have a Jtext component; meanwhile fields of type Enumeration can use a JComboBox component. The Configuration Interface allows the user to design and to personalize the Transcription Interface that the user will use as data-entry interface during the genealogical document transcription. The user selects which document fields will be transcribed, and with just two clicks, s/he indicates
in what position of the interface they must appear. The user interface components associated to each selected field are specified into the Interface Design Specification. After finishing the design of the data-entry interface, the Transcription Interface is generated and the user may begin with the transcription process. The Interface Design specifies the data-entry interface describing all the selected items and their associated graphical components, with their position and size. Additionally, the decorative elements of the interface are also described in the Interface Design. The Transcription Interface shows the dataentry interface designed in the Configuration Interface to transcript a record of the genealogical document. During the transcription process, field properties are used to validate some restrictions of the values that can be entered in the field. For
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An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
example, checking data types, mandatory fields, minimum and maximum occurrences for multivalued fields, etc. The user interaction is designed in such a way that using the keyword is enough to enter all data. The use of mouse is reduced as much as possible since it is less efficient in a data entry activity. The Interaction Model is used to facilitate the task of entering data, since this model defines which automatic actions must be performed by the interface itself. For example, automatically numbering a record identifier, or copying the last page number in consecutive records, or executing some semantic rules of the fields. In the latter case, for example, while entering surnames of a baptism, the interface may provide automatically the parent and grandparents surnames that the user has entered for the baby. The Transcription Interface may visualize and zoom in/out the digital version of the document to be transcribed, if it is provided. While transcribing genealogical documents, it is frequent to detect that record structure changes from one record to another. Since genealogical documents, like parish records, are free text written, it is very usual that the person who wrote the document introduced some new field in the record, or s/he omitted some fields present on previous records, or s/he simple changed the order in which s/he wrote all fields in the current record. Then, in these situations, and in order to facilitate the data entry of the following records, it may be necessary to adapt the Transcription Interface to the new structure and contents, just in that moment. This may be easily performed by means of the Configuration Interface, modifying the Interface Design and continuing with the transcription process. This is possible and does not require any additional action. It is precisely in this aspect where relies the main adaptative capacity of our tool: the Transcription Interface can be modified at run time without more changes. It is not necessary to stop and start again the transcription process, since it is only paused to make changes on the interface.
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When all records of the genealogical document have been transcribed, an XML file is obtained with the complete extract of the genealogical data of the document. Obviously, partial XML files with the transcription of a subset of document records may be obtained at any moment during the transcription process.
Architecture Components Models are useful tools to guide and support the development of user interfaces, since they facilitate adaptation and personalization (Griffiths et al., 1998; Karger & Quan, 2004). The architecture of our tool is based on several of such models represented as architecture components, as shows Figure 1. All of them provide the necessary information to adapt the transcription interface design to the transcription process characteristics, to the structure and contents of the genealogical document to transcribe and to the user preferences.
XML Schema The XML Schema (XSD) describes the structure of the genealogical document to be transcribed. Even though these kinds of documents are usually handwritten, they have some definite structure or pattern. This structure is very simple but it may change from record to record. It has a lot of optional fields and no complex semantic constraints are required. Therefore, XML Schema Definition language is adequate to model the contents of such kinds of genealogical documents. The genealogical documents we are considering are those described previously (church records, civil registry, …). The structure of these documents is a sequence of vital records (birth, marriage, burial, etc…) of the same type. Each record may be described by a set of fields. These fields usually give information of participants on the genealogical event described in the document. For example, a Baptism Record Book is a church document containing a chronological sequence of
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
baptism records of the same parish. Each baptism record usually describes name and surnames of the baby; place and date of birth; name, surnames, profession and birthplace of parents and sometimes grandparents; name, surnames and profession of godparents; name and surnames of priest; and some additional information. In Figure 2 we show an excerpt of an XML Schema for a Church Baptism Record Book. This schema is derived from an UML conceptual model that describes this kind of document. In fact, our research group is analysing several types of genealogical documents that contain relevant information for genealogical research. We are working in the definition of an UML reference model for genealogical documentation. This
reference model will be used to build a more focused genealogical transcription user interface and the corresponding database schema to store all transcriptions. An XML Schema has a tree structure where complex elements are defined in terms of other elements (simple or complex). At the end, each complex element is defined by simple elements. Each simple element (field) is described in terms of its name, data type, minimum and maximum number of occurrences, valid values for enumerations, and so on. These properties will be considered during the transcription process to check XML Schema compliance of transcription data, which is stored into an XML file.
Figure 2. Excerpt of the Baptism record book schema
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In the Baptism Record schema shown in Figure 2, we can see the element Baptism that defines all the information relative to a baptism record: page, face, date of registry and the localization into the page of each Registry on the Baptism Record Book; marginal notes, date of baptism, and possible additional notes and observations. After that, we show the main information of people participating on the event: common information defined on the Role element (first name, surnames, vital status, sex, place of residence, …); specific information for Baptized baby (other names, birth date and hour, and son type); and some additional information of the rest of Participants (…, civil status, job, alias, and the relationship with the baptized). To specify the face of the page in which the Registry begins, the schema restricts to only two alternatives: versus or back. This restriction is specified by means of an enumeration. Notice for example, that in Spain, people have two surnames: the first one is the father’s surname, and the second comes from the mother. The birth plabe (birth_place) may be unknown or it may be written in the registry, but in any case there is only one item for one specific person (Role). It is possible to find additional names (other_names) for each Baptised baby, and they are limited to six.
User Interface (UI) Components The purpose of this file is to define the correspondence between graphical components of the Transcription Interface and the elements of the XML Schema. Correspondences defined in this file could allow our tool to generate the Transcription Interface. The selected graphical component for each XSD element depends on its basic data type. For example, to transcribe String elements, like surnames or names of the baptized baby, it is enough to use a Jtext component. Enumeration elements (like Face), a JComboBox is the more
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appropriated Java component to transcribe this field, since valid values are pre-defined. Table 1 shows some examples of correspondences between Java graphical components to transcribe XML Schema elements. In some cases, more than one Java component is proposed to facilitate the data entry process. For example, for Date type elements, two additional JButtons are proposed. This allows the user to introduce a new Date by simple clicking the previous/next button instead of writing the date value. Therefore, the Transcription Interface obtains the date value from the previous registry and puts it on the current element accordingly modified (day before or after).
Interaction Model The purpose of the Interaction Model is to define dependencies between elements of the XML Schema, that allow deriving values for some elements in terms of other element values. Therefore, for these elements, its value can be automatically derived, so that, the transcriber does not need to write them. Records of genealogical documents are chronologically ordered since priest or register officer usually wrote them sequentially by date. It is very usual that in the same page there are several different vital records, some of them with the same date. Table 1. XML Schema elements and Java components XML Schema Types
Java Components
String
JText
Enumeration
JComboBox
Boolean
JComboBox
Date
JText (day) + JText (month) + JText (year) + JButton (previous) + JButton (next)
Time
JText (hour) + JText (minute)
Choice
JComboBox + JButton
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
We also assume that the transcription of a document is performed sequentially in the same order as the records were written. Therefore, it is not strange that consecutive records may have some fields with the same value, for example, page number, event date, name of priest, etc. Because of these situations, and to reduce the user data entry effort during the transcription process, the Interaction Model defines some rules to be applied each time a new record is transcribed. Basically, this kind of rules state that two fields of the same registry are equal, a field of the record takes a default value that is the same of the same field on the previous record, etc. For example, the sentence of the Interaction Model of Figure 3 states that automatically, page element of Registry takes the same value of the previous Registry. Then, the transcriber may confirm or modify this value. Therefore, in this way, we reduce data entry of elements that may be automatically derived. Another interesting situation happens when there are semantic restrictions between different fields of the same record. In the past, due to the high level of baby mortality and religious beliefs, parents used to baptize their babies on the same day they were born. Therefore, it is very usual that the date of birth is the same as the date of baptism. This situation is modelled in the last sentence of the Interaction Model of Figure 3 to enforce that when a Birth date is stated, the Baptism date assumes by default the same value, or
vice versa. Other semantic restrictions may be checked defining the corresponding derivation rule in the Interaction Model. To specify such kinds of derivation rules, we do not need to use a complex XML Schema syntax, and we have defined our own extension of the XML Schema syntax. However, there are XML Schema extensions like Incox (Opocenska & Kopecky, 2008) or Schematron (International Organization for Standardization, 2006) proposals to specify more complex integrity constraints.
Interface Design Specification By using the Configuration Interface, the user can build different Transcription Interfaces. Our tool may store several transcription interface designs made by the user, to be in future transcription sessions or as base designs to configure more complicated transcription interfaces. Each Interface Design is specified by the subset of XML Schema fields that will be visible on the Transcription Interface, the corresponding graphical components, the position it occupies on the window, and its size. Additionally, some other decorative elements like boxes or labels are specified to have a more intuitive and user friendly Transcription Interface.
Transcriptions in XML As soon as the transcription process begins, an XML file is created to store each genealogical re-
Figure 3. Excerpt of the interaction model
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cord transcribed. Such file will be used afterwards to put transcription data into a relational database as a common transcription repository. Transcription is performed only using the generated Transcription Interface from the XML Schema. Since field characteristics and restrictions of the schema are checked either while configuring the transcription interface or while data is transcribed, the resulting XML transcription file is compliant with respect to the XML Schema.
Interfaces Configuration Interface The window shown in Figure 4 corresponds to the Configuration Interface. This interface is used by the transcriber to design the main window of the Transcription Interface. Configuration Interface provides all necessary items to create and design an interface to transcribe genealogical data. At the top, a first set of buttons allows the user to create, to save, to modify current Transcription Interface or to retrieve an already designed interface. There are two additional buttons to align a Figure 4. Configuration interface
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subset of components of the interface and a button to group components. The last two buttons are to add and remove decorative borders around components of the interface. The right side of the window shows all the elements of the XML Schema in a tree organization. The central part of the window is the working area where the user adds, removes and arranges the different graphical components that will compose the Transcription Interface. To add a new component to the interface, the user must select (click) the element on the tree and then to click on the place of the working area where the user wants the associated graphical component to appear. To remove a component from the working area, it is enough to click the corresponding element on the working area and confirm its elimination by pressing delete, and then, the graphical component disappears from the working area. To include several occurrences of the same element in the interface, it is enough to click the element and locate it as many times as needed. Then, the component appeared as many times as clicked.
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
Configuration Interface allows the user to easily design the most appropriated Integration Interface according to his/her preferences, and at the same time, ensuring that the designed interface is consistent with respect to the document structure and contents. XML Schema compliance of the Transcription Interface is ensured. The tool checks that mandatory elements appear in the working area. Moreover, for those elements that appear several times in the interface design, our tool checks that the number of occurrences agrees with the specified minOccurs and maxOccurs restrictions in the XML Schema. Therefore, the Configuration Model prevents the transcriber from making data entry errors while designing the Transcription Interface.
Transcription Interface The Transcription Interface is the window the transcriber uses to read and write genealogical data. At the bottom of the Transcription Interface, the digital version of the document may be shown. Several commands can be used to zoom the image, to navigate through the image, to browse through
all images of the directory where document is stored, etc. This functionality is especially interesting since it allows the user to read and transcribe a document in the same computer window. In the central part of the Transcription Interface there are all the data entry components used to transcribe records of the genealogical document. Buttons at the top of the Transcription Interface allow the user to save a transcribed record, activate and deactivate visualization of the document or exit from the Transcription Interface. Data-entry process consist on writing each field of the genealogical document register sequentially left to right and top to down using the tab and spacebar keys. Some function keys are used to accessing the help with transcription rules, guidelines and recommendations. In some cases, such secondary windows are used to write specific genealogical information (such as relationships between participants of the baptism event) or to note down observations about difficult to understand document fields. In our opinion, the most efficient way to transcribe a genealogical record is to have a data entry interface that allows the user to transcribe
Figure 5. Transcription interface
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a field on the corresponding interface component, while reading the document. Therefore, the Transcription Interface must be designed to have the same fields the user will find in the document and in the same order. As we have already said, document structure may vary from one register to another. Therefore, each time this situation occurs, we recommend re-configuring the Transcription Interface accordingly. That is, to open the Configuration Interface and to change the interface design to adapt it as much as possible to the new document structure and contents. Then, the user comes back to the Transcription Interface and goes on with the transcription process.
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CHARACTERISTICS AND EXPECTED BENEFITS OF THE INTERFACE TOOL At the present moment, the interface tool is under construction and we do not have yet the tool implemented. We have developed an initial prototype, where some of the proposed functionalities are simplified. Therefore, we cannot provide a qualitative nor quantitative evaluation of the tool. However, considering the approach we follow, the used technologies and the described design, we expect that the use of our tool will provide the genealogical transcriber with the following benefits: •
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Intuitive, Easy and User friendly. Our tool has a user interface which is really easy to use and very intuitive to adapt to each user needs. To personalise the transcription interface, the user only has to select elements from the tree structure and click them in place. Additionally, some decorating and design features may be used to intuitively group a set of data entry fields.
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Versatile and adaptative to different kinds of documents. Our tool has the possibility to transcribe different kinds of genealogical documents, each of them described by its particular XML Schema. Flexible to make different transcriptions of the same document and integrate them afterwards. Our tool is based on an XML Schema (XSD) describing the maximum potential contents of a definite genealogical document. Because of this, every user has the flexibility to choose which subset of fields of the XSD s/he wants to transcribe. In this sense, there may be several different transcriptions of the same document, but all of them are coherent with respect to the global XML Schema. And a very important benefit is that all of them may be integrated afterwards to create a bigger and more complete transcription. This flexibility also allows the generation of partial transcriptions, like indexes. Dynamic and reconfigurable at any moment. The personalization and adaptation of the transcription interface are dynamic and may be performed at any moment during the transcription process. It is not necessary to stop and start again the transcription process. It is enough to pause the process to modify the interface and go on with the transcription process. Agile and with automatic assistance. The transcription user interface has been designed to allow the user to have fast data entry activity with help from both the keyword use and automatic aid. For example, number of pages or dates of consecutive data entries are automatically provided by the tool to
An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription
•
•
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avoid repetitive entries by the user. The tool gives other automatic aids by means of some derivation rules of XSD element. For example, while entering surnames of a baptism, the tool may provide automatically the parent and grandparents surnames that the transcriber has entered for the baby. Moreover, the help functionality provides the necessary information to assist the user to make a high quality transcription following standards and guidelines defined by genealogical associations and expert transcribers. Coherent transcribed data. Transcribed data is stored in an XML file, which conforms to the XML Schema (XSD). So, any transcription of the same kind of document should have the same structure. Useful for individual genealogists and genealogical associations/documentation centres. Our tool is useful both for individuals and groups of genealogists because of its flexible and user-friendly interface. It is easy to use, and it is adapted to the document structure and contents, so it is adequate for technologically inexperienced genealogists. Besides, the existence of the same XML Schema for all genealogical documents of the same type, promotes the sharing and collaboration among different people or centres. Notice also that the genealogist does not need to have any specific knowledge about XML technology nor computer science. Useful to transcribe and to review transcriptions. Our tool focuses basically in making new heritage document transcriptions. However, the tool can also be used to complete a partial transcription of the
same document adding new information that has been omitted in previous transcriptions. In a similar way, the tool may be used to review and correct transcriptions made by non-expert transcribers. These two latter options only require loading the XML file containing previous transcription (with the XML Schema and used Interface Design Specification) when the reviewing session is initiated.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The user interface tool we describe in this chapter is the first result of a wider project to build a genealogical transcription repository at The Catalonian Society of Genealogy (SCGHSVN). Transcriptions performed by volunteers using this tool will be stored into a relational database. All information will be accessible with a webpage interface to members of this society, to genealogists and, in general, to all researchers interested on genealogical information. Therefore, in this way, we will contribute to the preservation and diffusion of heritage information discussed in the introduction of this chapter. We are also working in the definition of a conceptual model or ontology to describe the common structure and contents of all different kinds of genealogical documents in the same XML Schema. In fact, all of them have some important similarities. Therefore, each specific genealogical document type will have an extension of this template or stereotype. This uniform way to describe structure and contents of all documents will improve the access, the integration and the sharing of all document transcriptions in a homogeneous way. Finally, after obtain a stable implementation of the tool, we will evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively the efficiency improvement of the
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transcription process of our tool with respect to other alternatives.
ones. And it can be used also to create indexes of genealogical documents.
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Transcription limitations are basically due to the absence of a common and universal schema of genealogical document contents, to the absence of tool support for transcribers, to the inexperience of genealogists using (advanced) computer tools and, in some cases, to not having active collaboration and sharing policies between genealogic associations. The non-existence of friendly genealogical transcription tools induces that most transcriptions are limited to vital record and census indexes, instead of complete transcriptions of genealogical documents. Most transcriptions are written down in plain text or poorly structured files. Moreover, it is not strange to find duplicate transcriptions of the same document, sometimes with different contents making it impossible to successfully integrate them. Taking into account this situation and genealogists needs, we have been developing a first contribution to solve transcription limitations. Our proposal is based on providing a tool that facilitates and simplifies the transcription task. Our genealogical transcription tool gives a flexible and user-friendly tool to the genealogist, who wants to make a document transcription. Using an XML Schema of a genealogical document, our tool allows the user to adapt and personalise their transcription interface according to the document contents and his/her preferences. This adaptation is dynamic, intuitive and may be changed at any moment during the transcription process. Our tool is not restricted to a fixed document type, because it is adaptative and flexible depending on the specified XML Schema. The tool can be applied to make new transcriptions, to complete them or to review previous
This work has been partly supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under project TIN2008-00444/TIN. I would like to thank Teresa Calveres and Pau Lladó for their contribution by implementing the tool prototype, and Núria Roca for her comments on previous versions of the chapter.
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REFERENCES Ancestry. (n.d.). Ancestry.com. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http://www.ancestry.com Droettboom, M., Fujinaga, I., MacMillan, K., Chouhury, S., DiLauro, T., Patton, M., & Anderson, T. (2002, July). Using the Gamera framework for the recognition of cultural heritage materials. Paper presented at the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Portland, Oregon, USA. eogen. (n.d.). The encyclopedia of genealogy. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http:// eogen.editme.com/Home FSIP. (n.d.). Family Search Indexing Project at FamilySearch Labs. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://indexing.family search.org/new user/nu home.jsf Gamera. (n.d.). Gamera Project. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http://gamera.informatik. hsnr.de GeneaNet. (n.d.). GeneaNet. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http://www.geneanet.org GenServ. (n.d.). Genealogical GEDCOM server system. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http:// www.genserv.com
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Griffiths, T., McKirdy, J., Forrester, G., Paton, N., Kennedy, J., Barclay, P., et al. Gray, P. (1998). Exploiting model based techniques for user interfaces to database. In Proccedings of the IFIP TC2/ WG 2.6 Fourth Working Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB4), L’Aquila, Italy (pp. 21-46). New York: ACM. GSU. (n.d.). Genealogical Society of Utah. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http://www. familysearch.com Hispagen. (n.d.). Asociación de Genealogia Hispana. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http:// www.hispagen.es IJDL. (n.d.). International Journal on Digital Libraries. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www.dljournal.org International Organization for Standardization. (2006). ISO/IEC DIS 19757. Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) — Part 3: Rulebased validation— Schematron. Jameson, D., Garwood, K., Garwood, C., Booth, T., Alper, P., Oliver, S. G., & Paton, N. W. (2008). Data capture in bioinformatics: Requirements and experiences with Pedro. BMC Bioinformatics, 9(183). Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http:// www.biomed central.com/1471- 2105/9/183 JCDL. (n.d.). ACM/IEEE CS-Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www.jcdl.org/index.shtml Karger, D. R., & Quan, D. (2004). Prerequisites for a personalizable user interface. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces: Workshop on behavior-based user interface customization, Funchal, Portugal (pp. 372-373). Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www.research.ibm. com/iui-work shop/ papers/quan- adaptiveui.pdf MDA. (n.d.). OMG Model Driven Architecture. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www. omg.org/mda
Mills, E. S. (1999). Working with historical evidence: Genealogical principles and standards. [NGSQ]. National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 87(3), 165–184. OCROPUS. (n.d.). OCROPUS Project. Retrieved December 15, 2009 from http://code.google. com/p/ocropus/ Opocenska, K., & Kopecky, M. (2008). Incox- A Language for XML Integrity Constraints Description. In proceedings of 8th workshop annual workshop on Database, Texts, Specification and Objects, (DATESO), Desna, Czech Republic (pp. 1–12). Pedro. (n.d.). Pedro Tool. Retrieved December 15, 2009. from http://pedrodownload.man.ac.uk/ SCGHSVN. (n.d.). Societat Catalana de Genealogia, Heràldica, Sigil·lografia, Vexil·lologia i Nobiliària. Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www.scgenealogia.cat XML. (n.d.). eXtensible Markup Language Specification. WWW Consortium (W3C). Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/ TR/ 2008/REC-xml- 20081126/ XSD. (n.d.). XML Schema. WWW Consortium (W3C). Retrieved December 15, 2009, from http:// www.w3.org/XML/Schema
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Data-Entry Interface: Computer interface that facilitates the task of reading hand-written or printed records and writing them into a computer to be stored in a permanent support. Document Transcription: Writing some form of data into another form, usually by means a computer application. Forms of data that people might transcribe include handwritten documents or simple data like names and addresses.
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Genealogy: The study of families, the tracing of their lineages and history, and the supplying of additional details about their lives and historical context. User Interface Personalization: Successful user interface design based on users tasks and the context in which they are accomplished. To identify those interface features that users consider
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valuable related to the usability, understanding and efficiency of the interaction with a computer application. XML Schema: XSD is the specification of the structure of an XML document. It expresses a set of rules to which an XML document must conform in order to be considered ‘valid’ according to that schema.
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Chapter 16
Urban Memory in Space and Time Dimitrios Ringas Ionian University, Greece Eleni Christopoulou Ionian University, Greece & University of Patras, Greece Michalis Stefanidakis Ionian University, Greece
ABSTRACT Cities are places where various aspects of past events are projected and expressed through personal memories and narrations; urban memory can be regarded as an expression of collective memory that has been shaped within a particular space as time goes by. This chapter considers urban memory as an important aspect of the cultural heritage of a cityto be captured and preserved for future generations. This chapter introduces the concept of urban memory and how it is related to space and time. It presents a survey of applications that aim to capture, preserve and exploit urban memory and proposes a system that allows citizens to interact with urban memory both by offering their memories and by viewing others’ memories. The proposed system aims to transform cities in a cultural environment where cultural heritage is both preserved and enhanced.
INTRODUCTION Memory is the mental capacity through which events are stored, preserved and recalled in mind; memory according to Halbwachs (1992) is a matter of how minds work together in society as “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories”. Each group or society shares a collective memory; Halbwachs (1992) identifies DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch016
the role that space plays in shaping the collective memory and Nora (1989) defines the value of specific places (les lieux de memoire) in this process. Boyer (1994) considers that a city as a whole can be regarded as a collective memory. Therefore, cities are places where events that have occurred during the time are projected and various aspects are expressed through personal memories and narrations. Lately, a number of researches have been conducted on the topic that Crinson (2005) names “urban memory”.
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Urban memory can be regarded as an expression of collective memory that has been shaped within a particular space as time goes by; thus it expresses relations between the past and the present of the place that we live. Traditionally individual memories pass through generations via narrations and are enclosed within narrow communities, like families, without interacting and without composing collective memories. Therefore as the time goes by the individual memories are either lost along with their carriers or altered due to the changes in the physical environment. We believe that it is crucial that individual memories are recorded, preserved and passed on to younger generations and through interactions are combined to form the urban memory. We consider the urban memory as an important aspect of the cultural heritage of a city, as unlike other aspects it can be captured and preserved for the next generations. This chapter introduces the concept of urban memory and how this is related to space and time. The main objective of this chapter is to present a survey of applications that aim to capture, preserve and exploit urban memory and to propose a system that can allow citizens to interact with urban memory both by offering their memories and by viewing others’ memories. The proposed system will transform cities in a cultural environment where cultural heritage is both preserved and enhanced. In the following section we introduce key terms like collective memory and urban memory, and then we present a survey of systems that aim to capture, preserve and share urban memory on the web. Next, we identify the features of a system that allows citizens to interact with urban memory using ubiquitous computing technologies, we present the lifecycle from an individual memory fragment to the urban memory and we present in detail the architecture of the system that we propose. We discuss how individual memories can be collected and preserved, then we present how they can be processed in order to be semantic annotated based on temporal, spatial and thematic context and we
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demonstrate how urban memory can be projected and presented to citizens exploiting ubiquitous and mobile computing technologies. Finally we conclude reflecting on how such a system can transform cities in cultural environments where cultural heritage is both preserved and enhanced.
FROM COLLECTIVE TO URBAN MEMORY Memory has always been very important to people as history springs from it; in Greek mythology this is represented by the fact that Mnemosyne, a titaness that personified memory, gave birth to Clio, the muse of history. The name Clio derives from the Greek verb kleo (Greek: κλέω/κλείω) which means to “recount”, “narrate”, and “make famous”. Muse Clio is the scholar or researcher who ignites the desire to record, to research and to give an account of events in time. Although memory and history are often considered synonymous, nowadays research considers them as fundamentally opposite. According to Nora (1989) memory is life; it remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction of what is no longer. In essence, memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present whereas history is a representation of the past. Memory can be characterized as the lived experience, whereas history the preservation of lived experience (Crane, 1997). According to Halbwachs (1992) history is the remembered past to which we no longer have an “organic” relation while collective memory is the active past that forms our identities; therefore both history and collective memory are publicly available social facts, the former “dead,” the latter “living”. As Halbwachs (1992) identified the study of memory is not a matter of reflecting on the properties of the subjective mind; rather, memory is a matter of how minds work together in society.
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“It is in society that people normally acquire their memories” and “it is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories” (Halbwachs, 1992). Therefore, the term “collective memory” emerges in order to express the social contextualization of all individual memories. Each individual memory can only be recalled in the social framework within which it is constructed, and as individuals belong to many social groups there are as many collective memories as the social groups that support them. Halbwachs sets the roots of identifying the role that space plays in shaping the collective memory (Olick, 2007); every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework. Since space is a reality that endures, it is in space – the space we occupy, we traverse and have continual access– that our understanding of the past is preserved. Nora (1989) identifies that the modern way of life, which is radically different than that of our forebears, has disconnected us from our past and there are no longer real environments of memory (milieux de mémoire); thus we consciously cultivate sites of memory (les lieux de mémoire). As Huyssen (1995) mentions we are searching for and building places of memory that can provide a sense of “temporal anchoring” in a world of upto-the-minute media saturation and “information overload”. Boyer (1994) considers that a city as a whole can be regarded as a collective memory. Therefore, cities are places where events that have occurred during the time are projected and various aspects are expressed through personal memories and narrations. Lately, a number of researches have been conducted on the topic that Crinson (2005) names “urban memory”. Urban memory is a kind of collective memory that is constituted by individuals’ experiences within the place itself and through its history and social environment (Postalcy et al., 2006). Urban memory, as any kind of collective memory, ultimately is located not in sites but in individuals and their will to remember; there-
fore it can contribute to retrieve lost ambience in urban sites due to the constant change of the physical environment as time goes by. Among its characteristics, though, is its limited temporal horizon; this horizon does not extend more than eighty to one hundred years, which equals to the Latin saeculum, the maximal life span of those who remember a generation. The importance of urban memory is highlighted in a special issue of GeoJournal (Rose-Redwood et al., 2008) that presented issues around collective memory and the politics of urban space. In this special issue a number of articles highlighted the importance of critically examining the spaces of public commemoration, the use of a commemorative space as a “narrative medium” and the power of photography to evoke historical memories. As urban memory is an important aspect of the cultural heritage of a city, it should be captured and preserved for the next generations; the next section presents a survey of applications that aim to capture, preserve and exploit it.
SHARING URBAN MEMORY ON THE WEB The Internet is the most powerful new tool we have had for storing and sharing information since the Gutenberg press (Reding, 2005); therefore a number of initiatives have been started aiming to collect cultural heritage and citizens’ urban memory and share it via the web. The Global Memory Net is a model global digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. Its initial collection started with the images of the First Emperor of China’s 7000+ terracotta warriors and horses. This initiative evolved to the World Heritage Memory Net, a system that provides universal access to multilingual and multimedia information, including photographs, videos and audio clips, on 830 World Heritage Sites in 138 countries. The system offers traditional search by country, region, name
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of site, etc., but also by finding similar images and obtaining appropriate annotations. The CultureSampo (Hyvönen et al., 2009a) is a system of creating a collective semantic memory of the cultural heritage of the Finnish nation. The system addresses the semantic challenges of aggregating highly heterogeneous, cross-domain cultural heritage into a semantically rich intelligent system for human and machine users. It is also an approach to solve the challenge of organizing the underlying collaborative ontology development and content creation work of memory organisations and citizens. The CultureSampo system (Hyvönen et al., 2008) is based on three pillars: a national cross-domain content infrastructure FinnONTO, a content creation process that allows content production and harvesting from museums, libraries, archives, individual citizens, etc, based on a set of metadata models, and a Semantic Web 2.0 portal that allows semantic searching and browsing as well as semantic visualisations for both human and machine end-users. Since 1999 the Dutch government introduced the policy of the “cultural biography”, in which not only experts such as curators, but also citizens would have a say in which artefacts should be made part of the collective memory of The Netherlands. The purpose of the project “Cities and citizens writing history and shaping the future” was to address theoretical questions relating to the digital production and storage of material contributing to the biography of a city, and the coconstruction of digital representations of the city and the city itself. The city of Maastricht was one of the first local governments to implement this policy together with cultural heritage institutions and the University Maastricht and they extended the initial scope from material artefacts in museums to the city as a whole. Experts and citizens alike were invited to describe and to assess the qualities and identities of the historical city and its future urban extensions. This dynamic “cultural biography” was written in two ways; in the form of a website and in the form of events on location
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in which cultural expressions add stories and give meaning to the chosen sites. In northern Australia Aboriginals were concerned that younger generations are growing up without a robust indigenous identity based in a strong grasp of their community’s knowledge traditions. The “Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management” project in Northern Australia seek to make collective memory with computers. A database and file management system for indigenous use was developed; TAMI (Text, Audio, Movies and Images) is a cataloguing-type software aimed at providing a visually-based system, for Aboriginal people with little or no literacy skills, to manage their own digital resources for perpetuating collective knowledge traditions (Verran, et al., 2007). Maps and satellite photographs were used as navigation interfaces to access collections of TAMI. A central issue has been whether digital archiving technologies are compatible with indigenous knowledge, which is always local and integrated in lands and peoples and the lives they lead. There are a number of storytelling projects which generate content from the audience itself, creating diverse archives of personal history. The “StoryCorps” mission, for instance, is to remind us of the importance of listening to and learning from those around us and to tell people that their lives matter and they won’t be forgotten. At the StoryCorps project anyone can record his story, by arranging an interview with someone important in his life, like a grandparent, sibling or friend; collections of these interviews are available as CDs, books, and even online. The City of Memory project is an online community map of personal stories and memories organized on a physical geographical map of New York City. It offers an online interactive map that plots stories on the urban landscape either as points or as paths; content is open to anyone who wants to contribute. Analogous is the StoryMapping project, a project that aims to capture stories digitally about various places and to project them onto Google Maps.
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Similar approaches were followed at Queensland in the Kelvin Grove Urban Village community (Klaebe et al., 2007). The Sharing Stories project mission was to inform the community on the Village’s history. Stories, photographs, archival information and digital stories were shared from the past and the present by students and community participants who chose to share their memories, inspirations and research. The History Lines project used a Google Maps interface to illustrate residential history and migrational churn. Aceti (2009) at his artistic project called “Without Visible Scars: The Memory Walk” has used digital art to overlay diverse sets of narratives, different timelines and visual systems of representation. He exploited on-line digital platforms, such as Google Maps, for their capacity to display and compare invisible and contrasting narratives. Memories, oral narratives and personal interpretations of survivors of the Second World War were pinned down on online virtual representation of physical spaces aiming to re-present a new “real” world, which is continuously compared to the memory and narratives of the lost world. The idea of capturing and sharing war memories appears also in (Sas et al. 2006), in which a video diary application enabled users to report their own war related memories; video diaries were then made available to visitors in two ways, as a multi-screen projector system and as a collection accessible via a web site. The popularisation of the Internet and Web 2.0 changed the direction of communication on the Internet. With the Web 2.0 people were able to express their opinions freely and connections with others enabled more active communication; apart from exchange of information, which was the main aim of the Web 1.0, personal experiences and memories surfaced. Specifically, according to Kim et al. (2009) a visitor of a blog may view a reminiscing post of the past and remember relevant memories to this post; if the visitor leaves a comment about his own experiences or memories, a collective memory is formed.
A system that exploits the features of Web 2.0 is the PESE (Cao et al., 2008), a collaborative Web 2.0 storytelling environment, which combines ideas of multimedia production with the Web 2.0 idea of prosuming users, i.e. users who are media consumers and yet can become media producers. In PESE a user model is integrated, which represents the behaviour and influence of every user in the system and allows feedback and rating mechanisms for stories. The PESE perception is that knowledge is exchanged within communities when stories are told and non-linear storytelling is a kind of interaction between communities and media; it allows people’s participation and profile-based story search. The evolution towards the ubiquitous computing has revealed the potential to create and support relationship that surpass established social and cultural boundaries and enable new practices around place, identity and community. Urban computing has emerged in the intersection of architecture, social interaction and design of computer systems for use in urban areas where users may be living, working, or visiting and thus have very different needs for information (Hansen & Gronbaek, 2008). The mobile applications that already exist are mostly oriented towards browsing and presenting information; urban computing strives to address the need to let users create and share information in-situ. The Urban Tapestries project (Angus et al., 2008) exploiting the ubiquitous computing technology aims to explore the potential of public authoring, which is mapping and sharing local knowledge, memories, stories, sensed information and experiences. This project relies on the people who participate in sharing content to create it rather than on the consumption of mass produced content, therefore users are both authors and consumers of media as they go about their everyday activities. Users can add new content via their mobile phones by marking the location boundaries that the content relates to and adding media such as
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text, sound, images or video; content can be linked together creating “threads”. An application that aims to exploit the potential of mobile computing is the Urban Pilot (Goel, 2002); According to Goel (2002) the exploration of a city is a three-way process of communication between the user, who has particular needs and characteristics, the information, which is a representation of a set of spatial and temporal relationships, and the physical place around the user. Goel targets to create a handheld city guide addressing the issue of information portability using mobile handheld devices. In order to experience the physical space meaningfully the key factor is to access the right kind of information, at the right time and at the right place. The city is neither about information accessed, nor about the technology; it is about the people, their experiences and their connection with the city. Therefore, Goel (2002) proposes a system that accumulates the personal memoirs of the users as they retrieve, edit and add information and allows their sharing. Users can explore space given a base map; the system makes general recommendations at the beginning and more personalised once as the system records travel data. Hansen and Gronbaek (2008) have developed a lightweight infrastructure for urban Web applications based around the concept of ubiquitous links anchors. The infrastructure supports multimedia blogging of tagged physical objects and GPS tagged locations in order to allow ways to anchor digital information in the physical environment. Hansen and Gronbaek (2008) demonstrate a number of urban and social computing applications for mobile users in a city environment, which illustrate how the infrastructure supports both browsing of location-sensitive information as well as user-generated content in the city. One of these applications is a local heritage application developed with Struer city museum in northern Denmark, which is a mobile application that supports access to local information provided by the museum on 2Dbarcodes in the city, as well as it
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supports local citizens and visitors to supply local history through the mobile blogging service, but also through a traditional Web based interface for larger amounts of text and materials. We have presented a number of applications that aim to capture and preserve collective and urban memory for the next generations. The most common approach is to present urban memory on the Web using interfaces that vary from the traditional browsing of digital collections to locating digital memories on maps. Current approaches, though, have three major limitations; the first is that they permit limited interaction between the user and the memories as the user may just view a memory or add his own, the second is that memories are retrieved and presented via a simple search based on location or description of content, and the third is that they are designed to be accessed via a computer and the memories are not really connected with the physical space as the user usually is not present at the site connected with the particular memory. Following we will present an appropriate system for the true exploitation of urban memory that addresses the aforementioned limitations and exploits the capabilities of semantic web and urban computing.
CLIO: AN URBAN COMPUTING SYSTEM FOR URBAN MEMORY In this section we will present Clio, a system that exploits urban computing capabilities in order to preserve and make accessible to the public the urban memory. Initially, we identify three key issues that such a system has to address; first how can people interact with the stored memory, second what types of access have to be offered in order to mediate this interaction, and third how semantic annotation can benefit the organisation and presentation of this memory. Next we present the lifecycle from an individual memory fragment to the urban memory; the architecture of a system that can indeed address these issues follows and
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related technical aspects are highlighted. Finally, a number of scenarios that demonstrate how the presented system can realise the urban memory lifecycle are provided.
Key Issues Any system that aims to collect and preserve any sort of collective memory and offer these in urban settings has to offer at least services that allow citizens to view the memories that have been already collected and to contribute new memories. Viewing the memories has to be possible via a number of media and devices, personal or public, stationary or mobile; similarly, adding memories has to be possible exploiting a number of different media, both from stationary settings and on the spot, easily allowing the user to annotate the media with semantic information. Most of the systems presented in the previous section offer some variation of these two services; we argue that in order to offer a system that truly contributes to the development of a collective memory, in our case urban memory, more advanced forms of interaction should be offered exploiting mobile and ubiquitous computing. Collaborative creation of collective memory can be promoted by allowing people to reply, comment and rate the collected memory fragments; replying allows one to contribute a memory that adds to an event or offers a different point of view, commenting allows to broaden the perspective either by supporting or by negating the point of view of a memory, and rating can assess the trust level of a memory for instance by evaluating to what extend a memory is supported by written sources of that era. Another particularly important form of interaction is the ability to combine pieces of memory in order to create threads of related memories that can be used for educational or research purposes. The next issue that needs to be addressed is what types of access have to be offered in order to mediate the interaction described earlier. Focusing on the devices that have to be supported
the variety spans from stationary pc’s, to portable netbooks and modern highly equipped mobile phones; additionally there have already been a number of cases using public city screens. As for the media that can be used, it includes the use of web, map applications like Google Earth and city embedded annotation technologies like 2D QR codes. The possible combinations of devices and media are extended; several of them can offer limited access that allows one only to view the collected memories, whereas others offer a much richer experience allowing one to add memories that he recalls. Finally, for a system to truly contribute the development of urban memory semantics has to be used in order to transform the highly heterogeneous, cross-domain cultural heritage content into a semantically rich intelligent system (Hyvönen, et al., 2009b). Urban memory in such a system has to be semantically annotated based on temporal, spatial and thematic context; this requires the development of a number of cross-domain ontologies in order to represent all metadata. The urban memory has to be presented through intelligent search and browsing; thus the system has to provide semantic search, semantic browsing and recommendation as well as other intelligent services like personalisation, historical and contemporary maps and time lines.
Urban Memory Lifecycle The system that we propose aims to offer the means to transform the memory fragments that each individual carries to an urban memory; the purpose of this system exceeds the requirement to permanently store citizens’ memories as it seeks to enable an iterative lifecycle in which a collective memory is gradually built and embedded in the city’s landscape thus offering an ever richer urban memory. The process of capturing the collective memory at its lowest level is the collection of individuals’ memory fragments. Each memory fragment is a
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valuable building block of the collective memory as not only it reveals part or all of an event, but it can also trigger others’ memory fragments (Livingstone, 2006). This step appears to be the beginning of each new spiral on the figure that depicts the urban memory lifecycle. Citizens who carry personal remembrances contribute them in the form of narratives, on audio or video recordings, pictures, personal diaries, etc. Following the collection process, comes the process of semantically annotating the memory fragments. Annotation of memory fragments aims to relate memories based on content, context or narrator as well as tags that citizens can apply. The target of this step in the memory lifecycle is to relate memories both to each other and to the context they appear in; this will later allow for the access of memories through context-aware applications that will present citizens with a relevant part of the urban memory. Relevance will be determined by a number of context parameters, most important of which are space, time, user’s activity and profile. Figure 1. Urban memory lifecycle
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For the memory lifecycle to result in the creation of urban memory, memories have to be embedded in the city. Using an urban computing system, citizens can interact with the memories while being on the physical space that they refer to, by not only viewing them but also contributing fragments, interrelating them, tagging them, etc. Certain points of reference can act as anchors to memory fragments; for instance 2D QR codes can associate a memory fragment with the specific place or can be used to associate a newly contributed memory to a certain location. This last step of the lifecycle that embeds memories in their physical space and offers access to them triggers interest for more contributions thus leading to new lifecycle iterations.
Clio’s Architecture The Clio system that we propose aims to realise the urban memory lifecycle depicted in Figure 1, exploiting features of urban computing. Our perspective on urban computing is the one that
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Paulos et al. (2004) have first articulated, i.e. the research field that studies the implications of embedding ubiquitous computing technologies into modern cities. This differentiates our approach on urban memory from earlier ones, like Verran, et al. (2007), as they only allow one way access to memories or allow only access via a web interface, which sets a distance between the space and the memories. Using an urban computing system the user can interact with the memories while being on the physical space that they refer to, not only by viewing memories but also by contributing fragments of memory. The process of capturing the collective memory in our system is at its lowest level the collection of individuals’ memory fragments. Each memory fragment is a valuable building block of the collective memory as not only it reveals part or all of an event, but it can also trigger others’ memory fragments (Livingstone, 2006). Memories can appear in a number of media, i.e. they can be narratives that an individual contributes, photos, text, audio and video recordings, etc. Additionally, each media type can appear in a number of formats (IEEE-TCDL, 1997), e.g. in the case of video in varying screen resolutions and bit rates making it suitable for different playback settings and available bandwidths. Setting high quality recording standards, e.g. by utilising specialised studios (StoryCorps, 2009) or recording settings (Sas, et. al, 2006), limits the fruitful spontaneous interaction that the public can have with the collective memory. In the Clio architecture, we allow for exploiting inexpensive equipment in an open peer-reviewed capturing process. The devices that can be used span from video cameras, to audio recording devices and to standard photo cameras. This enables a distributed collection process, in which the public or semistructured organisations, like student groups or volunteers, can participate in and collect memories that will enrich the collective urban memory. Citizens who wish to contribute a memory which they have captured can upload it via a rich web
interface that can be accessed from any pc. Alternatively, while being on the spot this same procedure can be executed via a simplified version of this interface using a smart phone. Contributed memories are then semantically annotated in order to become part of the collective urban memory. Most of the initiatives in this area annotate memories adding spatial and temporal data, some also categorise the content based on thematic context. Spatial annotation in its simplest form is performed by pin-pointing a memory to certain spot on the map; on the desktop web interface this is achieved via an included Google map on which the user places a marker, while on the mobile smart phone interface the GPS coordinates are automatically attached to the submitted memory, an approach similar to the one followed by Vodafone 360 and tagcrumbs.com services. Spatial annotation, though, can refer to areas of interest, for instance when a memory recalls festivities that were held in part of the city; this can be achieved by attaching text tags that refer to areas or places of interest to the submitted memories. Similarly, temporal characterisation of a memory may refer to specific dates, periods of time like a decade or time span of a well known event, recurring events like anniversaries or seasons. Finally, for the thematic annotation of a memory the user adds text tags that describe it. Users are free to choose the text tags that they add for a specific memory; in the rich web interface, in particular, as the user types tags that are already known are proposed to the user in order to assist him. Periodically all collected tags are co-related as “similar to”, “next to”, “close to”, “previous than”, etc, and these relations are exploited in order to provide better recommendations to the users that access the memories. Clio places particular importance on the selection of appropriate memory fragments for each user as in today’s information-rich world it is important to make the right information available at the right time in the right way (Fischer, 2001). Therefore it has been designed aiming to support
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context-aware applications for the interaction with urban memory, i.e. applications which use context to provide relevant information to users or to enable services for them; relevancy depends on a user’s current task and profile. In an urban context-aware application there are various context providers; the physical space is a primary one as it provides location, orientation, characterisation of space as public or social, etc, the devices provide context information that characterises the execution space of the application and its capabilities, the landmarks in an urban space also provide information as context, time can be represented in a number of formats denoting exact time or a period and finally the user himself through his profile, preferences, activities and interactions provides context. The context knowledge in Clio is modelled using ontologies in order to combine it with the semantically annotated urban memory and apply logic rules to both. A number of context-aware applications use ontologies to represent context, like the iMuseum (Yu, et al., 2008), the SMARTMUSEUM (Ruotsalo et al., 2009) the ImogI (Luyten and Coninx, 2004) and the Active Museums (Jbara, et al., 2007), as according to Wang et al. (2004)ontologies can share vocabularies across different tools and systems, and allow reasoning based on domain knowledge. The ontology-based context model that we have integrated into Clio has emerged from previous works (Christopoulou & Garofalakis, 2010). In this model context knowledge is divided into two layers: the lower one describes the basic concepts of context while the upper one represents specific instances of these concepts. All context knowledge is expressed in OWL-DL, which is the ontology language with the most powerful expression ability to guarantee the reasoning completeness. In order to describe logic rules, which can derive new facts and knowledge from the ontology knowledge base, SWRL is used as it allows us both to define rules and to express queries.
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In Clio users can provide context related to their memories by attaching text tags that describe the space, time, event, etc; this is in effect a form of semantic annotation of memory fragments. As knowledge accumulates in our system, it can propose text tags as the user types. The user, though, can introduce his own tags, which are stored in the ontology knowledge base as instances; in order to achieve this the graphical interface is designed to guide the user to relate new tags to a specific domain, like space, time, event, etc. Inferring knowledge exploits relations among concepts and instances stored in the ontology knowledge base; the new instances that are introduced by the users have no relations among them apart from the ones that they inherit from their main concepts. In order to enable a more efficient inference experts are invited to create relations among the new instances introduced by the users’ tags. For example, text tags that the users provide for location are stored as instances of the main concept space; an expert can define more elaborate relations such as ones denote proximity with other locations. Clio has been designed focusing on the exploitation of context and the creation of context-aware applications. As depicted in Figure 2, context comes from a number of sources, like QR codes, GPS, smart phones, the user, etc. Context providers provide instances of basic concepts described in the ontology knowledge base. Context-aware applications that are created define their own context requirements and describe how context will be managed using rules; these rules are stored in a rule base and exploit concepts and instances already represented in the ontology knowledge base. The context management is an iterative process initiated with the collection of sensor measurements, followed by the application of rules and the reactions that these provoke; detailed description of the process is presented in (Christopoulou & Garofalakis, 2010). Clio has focused on allowing multiple projections of the collected memories aiming to allow for optimal representation of related memories
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Figure 2. Clio’s context management
both to users that access it through the rich web interface and to those who access the urban memory on the spot. The web interface is geared towards users who utilise a pc or a portable netbook with high connectivity; it is based on a Google map on which the memories are pined and if the user selects to provide his profile and preferences it can exploit this information to offer more relevant results. Alternatively, a user who is not focused on place related memories but event based ones, can exploit the web interface in order to browse through and search in annotation information and tags that the users have attached. Mobile users can select to follow Clio’s recommendations or can simply access specific memories related to their current locations; this is depicted in Figure 3. In the former case they can utilise the simplified interface and the GPS coordinates that their smart phone provides in order to view memories close to the location they currently are or even, as in web access, provide their profiles and preferences in order to follow relevant memories or paths. In the latter case their interest can be triggered by an embedded tag that relates a place to a memory, for instance a 2D QR codes on a historical building. Since mobile devices are rapidly enhanced with advanced capabilities Clio has to often allow for new representations; one
such area of particular interest for urban memory is currently the dissemination of content via augmented reality applications that run on smart phones, examples have been demonstrated by Takacs et. Al (2008) or Layar’s augmented reality browser. In order to support educational or special interest applications, Clio allows the compilation of related memories that refer to specific places or events into kml files that can be projected on the Google Earth application or on the Google Maps and Google Maps for Mobile. An area of research interest in order to support focused applications that exploit urban memory is the exploitation of public screens that can be used in order to present pre-compiled collections during special events and trigger interest for more memory contributions.
Applying Scenarios The impact of the system we have proposed in forming urban memory we believe that is best presented in the scenarios that follow.
Contributing a Memory Nikos, former mayor of the city, is strolling with his granddaughter around the city. Passing
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Figure 3. Mobile access to urban memory
by the ruins of an old church his granddaughter asks if he knows the name of the church. Nikos, recalls not only the name of the church but also the events of its destruction during the World War II. His granddaughter decides to capture his narration with her mobile phone and upload it to Clio. On the spot she adds various tags relevant to this memory, like the name and the status of the narrator, the time period in which it refers to and the location. In this scenario it is evident that a memory is related to a specific location of the city, in this case the church. The memory can be captured by any device and may have various formats; in this case it is captured as a video by a mobile phone. A memory can be contributed to the system either on the spot or later using a pc. The user in order to add a memory has to select the place at the city it refers to, note its time period, describe the narrator and add tags relevant to its content.
Learning through Urban Memory A group of students, 10 years old, have an assignment to identify professions of the past, locate where these took place in their city and take
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pictures of current settings. They walk around the old part of the city and using their netbooks they access Clio’s web interface. Passing by places where professions of the past took place, the system projects memories relevant to these professions and photographs that show how the places used to be. In this scenario we present how important is the context in order to select the memories that are projected. In this scenario the main aspect of the context is the location of the group of students, which can be acquired using a GPS, and this is related to the spatial semantic annotation of memories. The memories that are projected to the students are not only selected based on their location but the profile of the students group is also considered; therefore only memories relevant to professions of the past are projected.
Exploring a City through Urban Memory Nefeli, a 23 years old student of architecture, visits our city for the first time. As she walks around the city she notices that on certain buildings there are attached QR code labels. Pointing her mobile to a nearby label she has the chance to view memories
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relevant to this building on the screen of her mobile phone. The system proposes a number of relevant memories; however Nefeli selects the memories relevant to the use of the building. In this scenario we show a different way of accessing the system; here the user selects to access the system via a link embedded in the physical environment, i.e. the QR code label. The system projects memories based on the information from the QR code label, i.e. memories attached to the specific building, and the user has the ability to select which ones interest her.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE TRENDS Urban memory is an important aspect of the cultural heritage of a city, as unlike other aspects it can be captured and preserved for the next generations. The system that we proposed, Clio, can be exploited not only by younger generations in order to acquaint themselves with urban memory. The system inherits the benefits of urban computing in order to allow people to view and contribute to urban memory. Urban memory is a shared memory to which all people can contribute and may alter the perception of people on a place or on an event. Urban computing alters the people’s role in the shared memory; not only anyone can contribute to it, but also everyone has continuous access to it. This system does not alter only people, but also the city itself as it becomes enriched with urban memory. The city itself changes as the result of the diffusion of urban memory in it; e.g. it becomes a setting for learning. Still there are some open issues that are related to urban memory. The open process of collecting memories and storing them in the system may result to numerous memories that are never forgotten. However the urban memory is not all the memories that can be collected, but also the ones that people have chosen to forget. Therefore the system has to reflect this feature of human
memory; this is particularly important as not all memories are of equal value and significance. A user should not mark the value of a memory or that he wants it to be forgotten as these are subjective actions; the system itself has to recognize which memories should be forgotten, for example the ones that are rarely viewed. From the urban memory that appears on our system, researchers can identify signs and periods of the city that are worth examining based on combination of spatial and temporal relationships of the memory fragments. This can be beneficial to historical research; however urban memory is not historical memory as it contains mainly personal and subjective views of facts and events. We foresee that such an urban memory system can transform cities in cultural environments where cultural heritage is both preserved and enhanced. The urban memory of a city can be preserved and anyone can contribute to it and enhance it. Urban computing now allows us to embed urban memory into the city; therefore people will interact with the city in a different way appreciating the cultural aspect of it, not only the functional one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This study has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation.
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World Heritage Memory Net (WHMNet). (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2009, from http://whc. unesco.org/ en/news/326
ADDITIONAL READING Center for Digital Storytelling. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2009, from http://www.storycenter. org Fentress, J., & Wickham, C. (1992). Social memory. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Levene, D. S., & Nelis, D. P. (2002). Clio and the poets: Augustan poetry and the traditions of ancient historiography. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Local projects. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2009, from http://www.localprojects.net The Urban Memory Project. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2009, from http://www.theurban memoryproject.org/ Tonkin, E. (1992). Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urban Tapestries. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2009, from http://urbantapestries.net/
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Collective Memory: A memory or memories shared or recollected by a group, as a community or culture; any collection of memories passed from one generation to the next.
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Context: Any information that can be used to characterise the situation of entities (i.e. whether a person, place or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Context-Aware Application: An application based on an infrastructure that captures context and on a set of rules that govern how the application should respond to context changes. Mobile Computing: The ability to use technology in remote or mobile (non static) environments. This technology is based on the use of battery powered, portable, and wireless computing and communication devices, like smart mobile phones, wearable computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Ontology: A formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. A tool that can conceptualise a world view by capturing general knowledge and providing basic notions and concepts for basic terms and their interrelations. Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp): Technology that is seamlessly integrated into the environment and aids human in their everyday activities. The embedding computation into the environment and everyday objects will enable people to interact with information-processing devices more naturally and casually than they currently do, and in whatever locations or circumstances they find themselves. Urban Computing: Studies the implications of embedding ubiquitous computing technologies into modern cities. Urban Memory: A kind of collective memory that is constituted by individuals’ experiences within the place itself and through its history and social environment.
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Chapter 17
e-Infrastructures for Cultural Heritage Applications Giuseppe Andronico Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Catania, Italy Antonio Calanducci Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Catania, Italy Alessandro De Filippo University of Catania, Italy Giuseppe De Gregorio University of Catania, Italy Gaetano Foti University of Catania, Italy Giuseppe La Rocca Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Catania, Italy Giuliano Pelfer University of Florence, Italy
Ferdinando Portuese IR&T engineering srl, Italy
Alberto Falzone NICE srl, Italy
Monica Saso University of Catania, Italy
Giulia La Ganga Vasta University of Catania, Italy
Federica Tanlongo Consortium GARR, Italy
Salvatore Simone Parisi IR&T engineering srl, Italy
Domenico Vicinanza DANTE, UK
Pier Giovanni Pelfer Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Florence, Italy
Roberto Barbera Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Catania, Italy & University of Catania, Italy Graziana D’Agostino University of Catania, Italy Francesco De Mattia Conservatory of Music of Parma, Italy
Federico Ruggieri Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics – Roma Tre, Italy Salvatore Scifo Consorzio COMETA, Italy Enzo Valente Consortium GARR, Italy
ABSTRACT e-Infrastructures, made of high-speed networks and geographically distributed multi-domain computing and storage resources, are nowadays supporting many virtual research communities from various scientific disciplines all over the world, allowing their applications to run at a scale of complexity which DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch017 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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allows unprecedented studies of very important multi/inter-disciplinary problems. In this chapter the authors show how such platforms can also be beneficial for arts, humanities and cultural heritage at large. Some exemplary hardware infrastructures, middleware services, and software applications will be shown, in order to provide the readers with updated information on the state of the art approaches.
INTRODUCTION Since the onset of the 21st Century, the way scientific research is carried out in many parts of the world is rapidly evolving to what is nowadays called e-Science, i.e. a “scientific method” which foresees the adoption of cutting-edge digital platforms known as e-Infrastructures throughout the process from the idea to the production of the scientific result. The e-Science vision is depicted in Figure 1. Scientific instruments are becoming increasingly complex, and produce massive amounts of data which are in the order of a large fraction of the whole quantity of information produced by all human beings through all means. These data often relate to inter/multi-disciplinary analyses and have to be studied by ever-increasing communities of scientists and researchers, called Virtual Organisations (VOs), whose members are distributed all over the world, and belong to different geographical, administrative, scientific, and cultural domains. The computing model which is emerging as a “de facto” standard to turn the above vision into reality is the so-called “Grid”, Figure 1. The “vision” of e-Science
i.e. a large number of computing and storage devices, interconnected by very high-bandwidth networks, on which a special software called middleware (acting as an interface between the hardware and the operating system and the codes of the applications) is installed, and make them behave as a single distributed supercomputer. Such virtual computing facility “dissolves” in the fabric of the Internet and can be accessed ubiquitously through virtual services and high-level user interfaces. In this chapter, we will discuss e-Infrastructures and general purpose middleware services to create and operate digital repositories. The description of some exemplar use cases will help demonstrating the benefits their exploitation can bring to Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage at large. The chapter is organized as follows. Next section “e-Infrastructures and Their Services” will provide the definition and some declinations of the concept of e-Infrastructure. General purpose middleware services for high level user access, data management, and digital repositories’creation and maintenance will be described in sections going from “The GENIUS Portal: a Grid Gateway for e-Science” to “The Transactional Grid Storage Access Framework”. Some success use cases, belonging to the Cultural Heritage domain, will be presented in sections going from “The ASTRA Project” to “The ArchaeoGRID Project”. Conclusions will then be drawn at the end of the chapter.
E-INFRASTRUCTURES AND THEIR SERVICES The grid and the underlying network constitute together what it is commonly referred to as an e-Infrastructure (see Figure 2). 342
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Figure 2. e-Infrastructure model of the European research area
The European Commission is heavily investing through its Framework Programmes in e-Infrastructures, and this platform is nowadays considered as one of the key enablers of the European Research Area (ERA). In fact, on top of the three-layers model of an e-Infrastructure lies the most important “network”: the human collaborations among scientific communities of researchers that work together on unprecedentedly complex inter/multi-disciplinary problems, whose solution is expected to have a dramatic impact on society and the progress at large. In the next two sections, some outstanding examples of network and grid infrastructures, relevant to the applications addressed in this chapter, will be shown.
THE GENIUS PORTAL: A GRID GATEWAY FOR E-SCIENCE Due to the complexity of the data to be processed, the demand for computing power and storage in scientific research is met with a rise in provision of infrastructure and High-Performance Computing facilities, and has resulted in the popularity of novel utility computing infrastructures, such as grid and cloud computing. Grid technology has rapidly enabled researchers to collect, process and store vast amounts of data in extremely short times. The “grid (r)evolution” has recently also
affected the institutions belonging to the cultural heritage community. The revolution introduced by this new technology requires however the definition of new tools and services to collect, retrieve and manage the available set of data. Despite the increasing available resources, the broad uptake of these facilities and infrastructures is not following the same pace. The main reasons for this lie in the complexity of the human-computer interface to these e-Infrastructures. To change this trend, grid portals, based on standard web technologies, are increasingly developed and used in order to provide “friendly” interfaces to users interested in accessing/using distributed computational and storage resources, spread worldwide, regardless of their geographical location. In this scenario, the GENIUS grid portal (Andronico et al., 2003; Falzone et al.. 2003; Barbera et. al., 2007; https://genius.ct.infn.it/) is an increasingly popular solution powered by EnginFrame (www.enginframe.com) for developing customizable, web-based interfaces to access and exploit grid resources and services. In this section the architecture, the features and the solutions exposed by this portal to address the fundamental requirements coming from cultural heritage applications will be presented.
The Architecture of the GENIUS Portal The GENIUS grid portal is the outcome of a joint collaboration started in 2002 between NICE srl (www.nice-software.com) and the Catania Division of INFN (www.ct.infn.it). The business logic of the portal is built on top of EnginFrame (http:// nice-software.com/web/nice/products/enginframe), a Java framework developed by NICE. The architecture of the portal is shown in Figure 3. The client side (top left in Figure 3) is represented by a user’s workstation running a web browser. Thanks to modern technologies, many kinds of devices can be used in addition to usual notebooks or workstations, like palmtops or new
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generation mobile phones. Users can exploit different protocols (top right in Figure 3) to access the presentation engine over services: the exposed gateway are available for portlets, web services and RSS. At present, these protocols can only be used by third party clients, and not vice versa. The server side (right side of Figure 3) is a User Interface (UI) machine (equipped with middleware services capable of submitting jobs and managing data on the grid), which runs the Apache Web Server, the Java/XML portal framework EnginFrame (see next subsection) and GENIUS itself. The server block is composed by: •
•
•
The presentation engine for the rendering of layouts and XSL/XML streams, based on leading web standards, that provides access to the underlying services via https, including html, soap and rss; The XML virtualization layer also provides a set of XML processing functions that simplify the management of information coming from plug-in extensions; The layer of the Authentication and ACL (Access Control List) management, which is a core component with many options to restrict the views of services to different profiles of users, influencing the behaviour of other services; The Data Management and Virtualization layer, that provides an abstraction to access remote data.
The Application kits (left centre side of Figure 3) implement the abstraction layer that hides the business logic of specific end-user applications. Other transversal services (right centre side of Figure 3) allow VOMS authentication through X.509 digital certificates, access to X11 interactive applications, and job monitoring. The remote resources (bottom right in Figure 3) are the computational resources and distributed data stores available on the grid.
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Figure 3. The GENIUS architecture enabled by EnginFrame
Robot Certificates: How and Why Grid security is based on the public key infrastructure of X.509 certificates (International Telecommunications Union, 2005), and the procedure to get and manage those certificates is unfortunately not straightforward. For these reasons, sometimes the adoption of digital certificates can represent a barrier to the full spread of this new technology. This drawback is particularly true for user communities without a strong IT background. Recently, several European Certification Authorities (CAs) such as those in Italy, the Netherlands and UK have allowed the issuance of the so-called “robot certificates”. These new certificates have been introduced to allow users, who are not familiar with personal certificates and do not belong to any specific organization, to experience the grid paradigm for their research activities. The adoption of robot certificates in e-Science, and in particular by the cultural heritage community, can really contribute to virtually eliminate the initial barriers and extend the benefits of e-Infrastructures to much larger numbers of users. From a technical point of view, a robot certificate is still a X.509 certificate and, thus, still supported by the Grid Security Infrastructure. The main advantage introduced by this new type of certificates is that they can be used:
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To identify a person responsible for an unattended service or process acting as client and/or server; To authenticate the service to another grid entity and perform some repetitive services which do not involve interactions with users.
Two are the fundamental characteristics of robot certificates. The first one is that each robot certificate is always related to a specific application, which the developer wants all members of a generic organization to share. A generic robot certificate includes not only the full name of the subscriber, but also a function reflecting the purpose of the robot entity, i.e. the application that can be executed with the certificate (see Figure 4). Figure 4 shows an example of robot certificate, released for a well known bioinformatics application (MrBayes, portal.litbio.org/Registered/Help/ mrbayes.html). The credentials of the certificate will be shared with all the members of the given organization to run this application on the grid. Since the private key of a robot certificate is not protected by a password, to avoid mis-uses and abuses, it is usually installed on a smart card (e.g., an Aladdin eToken PRO 32K or higher, www. aladdin.com/etoken/default.aspx). These e-tokens are called smart cards with an USB form factor. They can be used to securely generate and store X.509 certificates and/or SSH keys. The public part of an X.509 certificate can be accessed by an Figure 4. An example of robot certificate
application but the corresponding private key can never be copied off the e-token. This makes such a device ideal for storing sensitive data such as grid certificates. The main advantage of robot certificates is that they can be installed behind a portal, in order to simplify the grid access to nonexpert users. In our case-study, the EnginFrame Java/XML framework, on which GENIUS is built, has been extended to include the support to this new type of certificate, in order to improve the exploitation of grid technologies and foster the uptake of this new paradigm by the cultural heritage community.
Robot Certificates in GENIUS The extension of the EnginFrame framework to support robot certificates simplifies the access and the usage of grid infrastructures as shown in Figure 5. As shown, each time users try to access the portal and the USB token is plugged in the User Interface (UI) machine the GENIUS server is running on, an automatic service will drive the user to create a temporary proxy. Strictly speaking, a proxy is a “certificate” which allow users to prove their identity and perform such operations on remote grid sites on their behalf. Proxies usually have a lifetime of only a few hours (typically, 12 hours), so that the potential damage is fairly limited. Using proxies, users can run applications on the grid and/or interact with other remote services. The only requirement for users is to have an account on the server where the GENIUS grid portal supporting robot certificates is running. This approach opens grid infrastructures to a much larger number of potential users, reducing the hurdles represented by the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) on which grids are based. The support to robot certificates has also been accompanied by the development of a Users’ Tracking System (UTS) to monitor the behaviour of all users who access the grid with the credentials of a robot certificate and produce accounting
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Figure 5. Access grid infrastructures with the GENIUS portal and robot certificates
data for post analysis. To limit the access to the UTS, restricted Access Control List (ACLs) were defined in order to allow only the administrator to interact with the underlying MySQL database and extract the accounting data. Figure 6 shows the accounting data retrieved from the UTS (La Rocca et al., 2009).
THE gLIBRARY FRAMEWORK gLibrary (Calanducci et al., 2007; https://glibrary. ct.infn.it) challenge is to offer a robust, secure and
easy-to-use system to handle widespread digital assets stored on a distributed grid infrastructure. All entries in gLibrary are organized according to their type: a list of specific attributes describe each kind of asset to be managed by the system. These are the same attributes that can be queried by users. Figure 7 shows an example of types and their attributes, that can be used for a digital library of multimedia contents. Each type can have multiple subtypes with additional attributes and all types share a common attribute list (root type), defined at the library creation time. Before users can start uploading assets, a hierarchy of types has to be defined by
Figure 6. The accounting data extracted from the users’ tracking system (UTS) Figure 7. Example of a type tree and related attributes list
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Figure 8. Browsing screenshot of a audiovisual digital library
selected groups or just a single user. Users can view in the browsing interface only those entries, types and categories for which they have access rights.
The Grid Middleware and gLibrary gLibrary is built on top of the EGEE gLite middleware (www.glite.org). and makes use of the following services: • the library administrator. Figure 8 shows an example of hierarchical type structure. Assets are associated with the proper type in the registration/upload process. An asset catalogued as a given subtype inherits the attributes of its parent type. Of course, types will be defined according to the users’ needs and taking into account the assets they want to manage. The flexibility and extensibility offered by this system allow different communities to adopt gLibrary for many cataloguing purpose. When uploading a file, users have to link this asset with a suitable type, filling its attributes. Input files can be read from local disks, network shares, HTTP/FTP servers, and replicated to one or more storage elements on which the user is authorized to write. gLibrary can also manage assets already present on grid resources, through direct access to File Catalogs, to discover the physical location of files. No data copy is performed in this case. Instead, users only have to select the right type and set the required attributes. gLibrary servers can host multiple libraries, which can have their own hierarchy of types and can be accessed by different users. Moreover, types and related entries are only visible by users with appropriate privileges. A fine-grained authorization mechanism can be used when setting permissions: each asset, type and category has a set of ACLs that restricts its usage, allowing asset owners to grant access to
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The Storage Elements (SEs) that provide uniform access to data storage resources. They can be single disks, large disk arrays or tape-based Mass Storage Systems; The AMGA Metadata Catalog (amga.web. cern.ch/amga) that stores metadata describing the contents of Grid files, allowing users to search for entries based on their descriptions; The LCG File Catalog (LFC) that maps logical filenames onto the physical locations of replicas of a file stored in one or more Storage Elements; The Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS, voms.forge.cnaf.infn.it), that allows a detailed definition of users’ privileges and roles according to abstract entities called “Virtual Organizations” (VOs), which group users, institutions and resources in the same administrative domain; The Information Service (IS), that provides information about grid resources and their status. In particular, the IS is used to discover the SEs available for a given VO.
THE TRANSACTIONAL GRID STORAGE ACCESS FRAMEWORK Cultural Heritage, Health Care, and Earth Sciences applications (just to mention some examples) have their own application logic, presentation styles and also data management rules according
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to a “vertical dimension” (proprietary customization), indicating the uniqueness of model of the application itself. However, looking at the layered architecture of each application, there is always a common level where most of required operations are shared. For instance, many applications need to create files, browse directories, add files, delete files, renames file, define metadata schemas, change metadata values and a lot of other data/metadata management operations. We can also talk of a “horizontal dimension” made by all these shared functions. The development of applications that adopt grid as a digital repository is not very easy, since several problems affect both designing and programming principles. First of all, grid architecture respects the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) recommendations. This means that several services (each independent from the others), work in a standalone mode, cooperating to provide data and metadata management capabilities. Moreover, within the grid environment, files are stored inside Storage Elements (the grid services that take care of data persistency). They can be replicated on several SEs for ubiquity, security, and sharing purposes, while relationships among locations of files, replicas and their logical names are kept within a specific File Catalogue Service. For each file, it is possible to associate some descriptive attributes (as metadata schema) that can be valorized (schema instance), modified, quantified and queried through a specific Metadata Catalogue Service. Furthermore, specific modules take care of reliable and asynchronous data transfer from/ to different sites (File Transfer Service). This scenario, characterized by a considerable fragmentation in terms of both the number of services and related APIs, leads to several problems: 1. APIs fragmentation forces software engineers to implement specialized and decoupled software components according to a vertical architecture;
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2. Each application must handle by itself the semantic coherence, integrity and consistency among sequential operations on the same data set; 3. Developers need specific technical knowledge about grid programming (several APIs means several syntaxes); therefore, they are usually busy learning API usage, rather than debugging applications; 4. The absence of appropriate design patterns produces different codes to implement the same features; maintenance of code and linear architecture become hard to be enforced. This is considered a big limitation of the grid storage system and our effort has been addressed in this direction, trying to think up a software layer that could solve these common problems. According to a 3-layer software architecture of enterprise application, the Grid Storage Access Framework (GSAF) can be effectively classified as the Data Access Layer for the gLite grid middleware (Scifo et al., 2007; Scifo, 2009; Torterolo et al., 2009). It is an appropriate interface that allows business components to manage data stored by the Data Management System and presentation objects to search and retrieve data from Storage Elements. Figure 9 shows the logic architecture of GSAF. The File Manager provides functions to interact with the Storage Element allowing to upload/ download files to/from the SE. The Catalog Manager is related to the File Catalog Service and provides functions to register and de-register files. Figure 9. GSAF architecture
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It also allows browsing and managing virtual directories. The Metadata Manager interfaces the Metadata Catalogue Service wrapping all metadata related functions. The VOMS Manager is responsible to get a valid proxy from the VOMS server with the right user role(s) and capability(ies). The main module, the GSAF Interface, works as a dispatcher for application requests and as a coordinator of the underlying components. Concluding, we can consider GSAF as an Object Oriented Framework built on top of the gLite Metadata Services and gLite File Services that exposes classes and related methods for applications located above (black box principle).
Framework Overview The core of the application is designed to be a plug-in in order to embed it easily in several applications. Its design covers several Object Oriented design patterns, such as the singleton method, the strategy method, the factory method, the template method, the iterator and the composite methods that make the module generic enough and adoptable by any applications independently of their specific domain. This also ensures a very clean and simple software architecture, with an high degree of cohesion and decoupling. Inside the framework, all logical entities (such as file, directory, collection, entry, attribute, ACL, user, group, etc.) are modeled by Java objects and they represent the basic data structures (data/object mapping principle). One instance for each data object composes the GSAF Context Base object that is used as a kind of execution environment for each GSAF Operation (information hiding and composite pattern). The GSAF Operation interface defines all functions allowed on data set and each function is bound inside a specific class identified by an operation code (command pattern). The functional library is thus built by each GSAF Operation implementation, which encapsulates the algo-
Figure 10. GSAF transaction service
rithms to be performed in the given context and on the given data (template pattern). Thanks to GSAF, in order to perform any wanted data management interaction, applications developers just need to instantiate the context and quantify it with the right parameters (data references and operations on them), according to the business rules of their application and pass it to the manager object. Through a Transaction Manager module, shown in Figure 10, GSAF is also transactionsaware and can perform roll-back operations, using the Compensative Model, in case one or more of the atomic operations fail.
Web Manager Overview A Java web application has been developed on top of the GSAF framework in order to provide a web based manager for the gLite Data Management Services. No syntax knowledge is required and users do not lose the high level of their metadata schemas. User authentication and authorization features are provided by the integration with the VOMS service thus once a user successfully logs in through the login applet using his personal X.509 certificate, he/she is able to interact with the managing interface. The web application customized to browse the data relative to the ADAT project (see dedicated section below) is shown, as an example, in Figure 11.
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Figure 11. GSAF Web interface
THE ASTRA PROJECT Introduction The ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) project (www.astraproject.org) is coordinated by the Conservatory of Music of Parma (www.conservatorio.pr.it) in close synergy with the Conservatory of Music of Salerno (www.consalerno.com), the Division of Catania of INFN (www.ct.infn.it) and other international partners. The project, running since 2006, aims at providing the Cultural Heritage community with an application to reconstruct the sound/timbre of ancient musical instruments. By applying the physical modelling synthesis, a complex digital audio rendering technique which allows modelling the time-domain physics of an instrument, the experts that are carrying out the project can recreate models of some musical instruments that were lost for ages (since hundreds and hundreds of years) and reproduce their sounds by simulating their behaviours as mechanical systems. The application is really computer intensive and this is the main reason why it runs over last-generation research and academic networks such as GÉANT (www.geant.net) and EUMEDCONNECT2 (www.eumedconnect2.net).
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The ASTRA Reconstruction Technique ASTRA is a truly multi-disciplinary project and makes use of archaeological data as fragments from excavations, written descriptions, pictures. In ASTRA are involved people with different backgrounds: physicists, historians, archaeologists, computer scientists, software engineers and musicians. The project, thanks to the GÉANT and EUMEDCONNECT2 backbones, allows researchers, musicians and historians to collaborate, communicate and share experiences on lost instruments and bring their sounds again to life. The workflow performed by ASTRA to address this challenging goal is sketched in Figure 12. We can summarize the whole workflow considering three different steps. The starting point for ASTRA (top left in Figure 12) is represented by all archaeological evidence about the ancient instrument collected from archaeological data such as fragments from excavations, written descriptions, pictures on ancient urns, type of material used to built the instrument and, last but not least, how the musician interact with the instrument. All the information collected during this first step are used by ASTRA to create a computing model of the ancient instrument. The detection of the model of the instrument (top centre in Figure 12) plays a crucial role for the whole analysis. It requires a lot of effort because sevFigure 12. Modelling and computation of ancient instruments in grid
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eral information and parameters have to be taken into account. The more accurate is the model reconstructed by ASTRA and the closer to the reality will be the sound reconstructed at the end of the process. The technique used by ASTRA at this stage is the Physical Modeling Synthesis (PhM) (Smith, 1992, 1996), a complex digital audio rendering technique which allows modelling the timedomain physics of the instrument (Karjalainen et al., 2001). PhM methods are essential in computer music for obtaining qualities of sound which are not easy to produce with standard sound synthesis methods, such as additive or frequency modulation. The sound is recreated using a set of equations and algorithms to simulate the physical source. The corresponding waveform is generated using parameters that describe the physical materials used to make the instrument and the user’s interaction with it, for example, by plucking a string, or covering tone holes, and so on. The computing model of the instrument reconstructed by ASTRA is composed by several parameters: some of them are constants that describe the physical materials and dimensions of the instrument while some others are time-dependent functions that describe the player’s interaction with it. The “tuning” of some of these parameters is performed considering the sound spectra of a monochord, an ancient musical instrument played by Pythagoras. The sound of the monochord has been the first one to be reconstructed by ASTRA using this technique. ASTRA researchers built a real monochord in their labs and they checked that the model was correctly reproducing the sound of the physical instrument. Thanks to the expertise gained with the monochord, ASTRA moved to reconstruct the sound of ancient instruments which have never been heard such as the epigonion. Knowledge of this musical instrument, dating back from the Ancient Greek era, was based on archaeological findings, historical pictures and literature. It was a wooden string instrument, that
musicians have likened the sound to something similar to a modern harp or a harpsichord. The simulation of the model is another key point for ASTRA. It requires a big amount of computation because, in order to properly model the instrument, a lot of mathematical equations (differential equations of coupled oscillators) have to be solved. The computation depends also on the quality of the audio file one wants to obtain as output. In this scenario, the grid (top right in Figure 12), with its huge distributed computational and storage resources spread worldwide, can effectively contribute to speed up the simulation of the computing model and generate lost sound of ancient instruments. Thanks to grid, today ASTRA can generate entire libraries of digital sounds (bottom right in Figure 12), using computing power wherever it is located, and share these results with the whole cultural heritage community. Twofold are the benefits introduced by this approach. The most important one is that with this approach it is possible to build digital sound libraries that students, researchers and museums can easily access and use. The digital sound libraries reconstructed with the grid, for instance, can be used by musicians to perform live concerts (bottom left in Figure 12). Another main advantage of ASTRA is to bring experiences and knowledge together. Using the research networks ASTRA allows archaeologists, having many interesting relics and findings, software developers and historians to work together.
Computational Aspects of the Physical Modelling Synthesis In this section we will focus on the computational aspects of the technique used by ASTRA during the sound reconstruction process. Physically-based modelling is a way to make sounds starting from the physics of mechanical systems. It offers great potential both to musicians looking for one of the most convincing real-world sound emulations and for those interested in looking for unique never-
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heard-before sounds. The technique is based on complex algorithms that are used to describe the sonic of an acoustic instrument. From a technical point of view, a sound wave is the result of a mechanical or acoustical vibration of a body. The vibration is the result of the action of an external source which injects energy into the body, for instance a hammer striking on a membrane or a flow of air perturbing a pipe. Usually, the source of energy is called the excitant and the vibrating object is called the resonator. The type of coupling between the two objects is called the interaction. In general the excitant has a nonlinear behaviour and the resonator has a linear behaviour. By linear, we mean that it responds proportionally to the amount of energy applied to it. If we inject two signals into the system, we expect the output to be their sum. By non-linear, we mean a system that has built-in thresholds that, if exceeded, cause the system to respond in a new way, as if a switch had been thrown. Most types of sound can be decomposed into two different categories: transient sounds (sounds whose perceptual characteristics evolve quickly in time) and stationary sounds (sounds evolving slowly in time). Sounds in the latter category are easy to reproduce with the computer since Fourier theory gives us powerful methods to decompose and generate stationary signals. Traditional synthesis methods are based on Fourier theory and are thus appropriate for generating stationary sounds. However, Fourier theory presents some limitations when dealing with transient sounds, so alternative methods have been proposed as computational tools for generating sounds in this domain. We can overcome this type of limitation by using the Physical Modelling Synthesis technique. This modelling technique is not a new concept in acoustics and synthesis, having been implemented using wave equations created by Hiller and Ruiz in 1971 (Hiller & Ruiz, 1971). However, its practical use has only just become feasible when e-Infrastructures have started to
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connect computers together through the use of grid middleware services. Compared to other kinds of synthesis, this technique tends to be computationally intensive as the complex models of the musical instruments are solved by numerically integrating coupled differential equations. For example, to have 100 samples (corresponding to an instrument with 50 strings plucked in 2 different ways) 400 CPU hours would be needed on a standard computer. Using grid technology, those computations could be run at the same time (as independent grid jobs), automatically, on 100 different computers, providing results in just 4 hours. This is particular valuable, for example, when it is needed to create a large sound library. It would speed up by a factor of 100 (in this case) the overall computing time. To finally reach the computational power needed by the project and speed up the sound reconstruction, the ASTRA project then moved from a local computer cluster towards distributed computing resources. First tests have been successfully conducted within the GILDA t-Infrastructure (Andronico et al., 2005; Barbera et al., 2009) and later on the EUMEDGRID infrastructure which links computing resources across the Mediterranean region at up to 2.5 Gb/s through the GÉANT and EUMEDCONNECT2 research networks (www.eumedconnect.net/upload/pdf/eInfrastructures_across_the_Mediterranean.pdf). The ASTRA application produces one or more sounds corresponding to different configurations of the instrument (i.e., different notes). To have a realistic reconstruction of a musical instrument, namely a nice dynamics while playing the instrument with a natural feeling from the point of view of a musician, more that 7100 sound samples (corresponding to different energy levels, sound emission techniques, configurations) are needed. The physical reason is that the sound spectrum is changing a lot from weak to strong plucking, as a real instrument. The total size is around 20 GB of disk space after cropping and filtering. On a single computer this would require more than 2700 hours
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(i.e., a few months) of computation. Using grid technology, the total time can be brought down to 10 hours. Grid computing is thus the natural platform where the instrument reconstruction application could run. The reconstruction interface is available through the GENIUS portal for the GILDA Virtual Organization and is reachable at https://glite-tutor.ct.infn.it.
ASTRA on the Grid In this section we are describe the distributed grid environment set up, in order to allow non-expert users to speed up the creation/reproduction of the sounds of ancient instruments at a large scale. This task was carried out by the Catania Division of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in close synergy with the Music Conservatories of Salerno and Parma. As first step, the two distributed grid infrastructures have been successfully configured deploying, in dedicated software areas at all sites, all needed software requested by ASTRA to start the reconstruction process. A web-based interface to help musicians and historians to avoid the initial difficulty of managing digital certificates has also been developed. The web portal, based on GENIUS and EnginFrame (see above sections), provides endusers with a very intuitive interface which allows to access the distributed services and resources of Figure 13. The application workflow set up for ASTRA
a typical grid infrastructure in a transparent and ubiquitous way. Figure 13 shows the workflow which has been customized to perform the sound reconstruction in grid. In the top left part of Figure 13 the user selects the demo he/she wants to run on the grid. In the top-right figure the monitoring of the sound reconstruction process is shown. Once this process has finished, user can use the digital sound libraries reconstructed with the grid (see Figure 14).
Achievements and Outreach Activities Since September 2008, and for the first time in centuries, the harp-like strings of the epigonion have been “virtually” plucked thanks to ASTRA. The sounds of four epigonions re-created by ASTRA have been used to play a piece of medieval musical, making this the first time that these instruments have been heard performing together. Besides, by exploiting the distributed computational resources of grid infrastructures the following two actions have been undertaken by the project: •
For each musical note, 127 different samples have been generated. At last, a total of 7112 samples (about 20 GB) have been reconstructed in grid. Figure 15 (a), (b), (c) and (d) show the frequency spectra of the La3 note at 440 Hz played with three different intensities.
In Figure 15 (d), the three different frequency spectra have been overlapped. The figure shows how the sound timbre of the instrument depends on how the player interacts with it. •
Working in synergy with some architects of Parma, the 3D structure of the epigonion has been reconstructed. For this purpose, the following two additional software: Blender (www.blender.org) and LuxRender (www.luxrender.net) have been installed
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Figure 14. Running ASTRA applications through the GENIUS grid portal
on the grid resources and used for the three-dimensional rendering (see Figure 16). In December 2008, a unique concert was staged using the digitally reconstructed sounds of the epigonion alongside the Sonora Network Ensemble’s performance of the Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Psalm “Laetatus sum”, revised in a modern transcript and played with a basso Figure 15. Frequency spectra
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continuo by Francesco De Mattia (one of the coauthors of this chapter). It was the first time ever that an instrument of the past, reconstructed via compute-intensive modelling, performed alongside real instruments such as violins and flutes as well as voices (an excerpt of the concert is available for download from here: www.geant2.net/ upload/mov/concertdemo.mov). Other sound reconstructions examples can be downloaded for free from www.astraproject.org/download.html.
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Figure 16. 3D rendering of the epigonion with Blender and LuxRender (courtesy of F. Baghino and F. Ugozzoli, VisArc Studio, Parma, Italy)
Figure 17. 3D rendering of the barbiton with Blender and LuxRender (courtesy of F. Baghino and F. Ugozzoli, VisArc Studio, Parma, Italy)
Another notable step forward to improve the musical cultural heritage and brings history back to life has been reached on the 1st of December 2009 during the GÉANT launch event which took place in Stockholm, Sweden. During the meeting, researchers involved in the ASTRA project presented to all the community, as a world premiere, the sound of the barbiton (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Barbiton), an ancient Greek instrument similar to the double bass. Accompanied by percussion, the instruments were played by the Lost Sounds Orchestra following melodies from a musical score written by Domenico Vicinanza (another co-author of this chapter). The melodies of the barbiton, heard for the first time in 2,000 years, was sent 9,300 km from the venue in Stockholm across the GÉANT and TEIN3 (www.tein3.net) research networks to provide music for dancers from the Arts Exchange of Asia, allowing them to perform to the music at a simultaneous event in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia): the ASEM (ASIAEurope Meeting) workshop Gala Dinner. The video about this performance can be downloaded from this link:
As well as for the epigonion, also for the barbiton a 3D rendering of the instrument has been created thanks the computational resources of the grid (see Figure 17). The Lost Sounds Orchestra (www.lostsoundorchestra.org) is the ASTRA project orchestra. It is a unique ensemble all made by reconstructed ancient instrument coming from the ASTRA research activities. It is the first orchestra in the world composed only by reconstructed instruments. The orchestra is going to start its officials activities at the beginning of 2010. Epigonions are ready and the orchestra is performing with epigonion soloists alone or with other instrumentalists. The ASTRA project is currently finishing the modelling of a few ancient instruments, belonging to the same historical age: a chitara, a salpinx and a lyra. The next stage will be the modelling of the syrinx, a pan flute.
www.geant.net/Media_Centre/Media_Library/ Media%20Library/ASTRA_musicians_09. mp4.
FEDERICO DE ROBERTO’S DIGITAL REPOSITORY Traditionally, the main goal of libraries, archives, and museums has been to preserve and spread the knowledge and the cultural heritage. Today, this really important function can take advantage of the development of digital technologies. In fact, digi-
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tization allows avoiding deterioration phenomena of original copies, caused by the handling of physical material, creating an accurate reproduction of the original ones, ensuring the usability of the contents and improving the access to documents such as books, manuscripts, parchments, leaflets, cartographies, musical scores, photos, paintings, videos, audios and three-dimensional objects. Converting information and data, belonging to a certain cultural heritage, into a digital format, plays an important role in communication and didactic activities, making data available on a larger scale. We can say that digitization would represent a primary tool to allow a wide and distributed access to culture, being the only resource we have to provide next generations with such pieces of information. Data grids offer redundant and huge distributed storage capabilities, providing an ideal and secure place for the long-term preservation of digitized literary works and documents of artistic and historical relevance. Grid authentication and authorization mechanisms allow as well a finegrained access control to archives by single users, groups or entire communities. Moreover, metadata services allow for a structured organization of digitisations for fast searches. The amount of data produced out of the digitization process varies depending on the number and type of documents. Several scanning workstations, working in parallel, are able to create up to several hundred of Gigabytes of data per working day (considering digital copies of manuscripts taken with very high resolution and colour depth). Due to the very high speed with which technology becomes obsolete, a particular care has to be put on the storage strategies and backup methods, to guarantee the access to data to next generations. Innovation and technology, in fact, enables better performances and high-level computation but, on the other hand, the risk of handling formats becoming obsolete (and not any more usable), is always around the corner.
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Among the several different components of the cultural heritage to preserve through digitization, manuscripts surely represent a fundamental element. The ancient hand-written papers constitute maybe the most valuable documentation of a particular author and its time. The manuscripts are single-exemplary (no copies or duplicates generally available) and they are the basis for many researches in literature. Making available historical and philological aspects of ancient books through the conservation and digitization of such documents, with the support of cutting edge technology, surely guarantees the possibility to study, analyze, and compare artists from a wider perspective, keeping data for a long time. In this particular case, the “Fondo De Roberto”, a manuscript collection of the famous writer Federico De Roberto physically stored in the library of the “Società di Storia Patria per la Sicilia Orientale” (Catania, Italy), contains approximately 10,000 documents to be acquired and preserved such as manuscripts, rough drafts, notes, newspaper articles, letters, geographic maps, press cuttings, and photographs. The size of most part of the documents is between A5 and A3, with some exceptions (e.g., 7x7 cm2, 3x15cm2, etc). Many additional sheets have been added to some documents, and there are pages with lateral notes glued to margins and refolded. Finally, the digitized documents had sometimes hand corrections, cuts and notes on them (see Figure 18). When a document is completely digitized and stored (including collected cuttings, notes, additions and complements), a set of metadata is attached to it, for future reference and search purposes. Besides metadata automatically extracted by scanning devices (ImageWidth, ImageHeight, XResolution, FileSize, CreationDate and ModifyDate), additional ones have been inserted according to the XMP format (eXtensible Metadata Platform, ww.adobe.com/products/xmp), a XML management format used by Adobe and
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Figure 18. First page of notes for the De Roberto masterpiece “I Vicerè”
compliant with the Dublin Core standard (dublincore.org). The insertion has been performed in batch with the aid of Adobe Photoshop CS. The set of metadata includes Document, Title, Author, Description, Description Writer, Keywords, Copyright Status and Copyright Notice. The exported images have been processed to create PDF files, optimizing them for an online browsing.
Implementation of the Repository with gLibrary Once the acquisition stage has been concluded, there was the problem of finding a way to make available online the scanned images, in order to ensure their access according to a pre-defined utilization strategy. The main requirements were to have a system capable of ensuring continuous availability on the net and to provide the consultation from all over the world through a simple and intuitive web graphic interface. Those requirements have naturally led to the choice of using a grid infrastructure and gLibrary, the framework mentioned in one of the above sections, for storage and handling purposes. The flexibility and the customization features offered by those type of systems made it possible to achieve the archiving and cataloguing on the net of the De Roberto’s valuable manuscript col-
lection. Adopting the grid resources offered by the COMETA Consortium (www.consorzio-cometa. it), the De Roberto digital repository (DRdr) was created. A beta version of the front-end is available at https://glibrary.ct.infn.it/. Once a user successfully logs in through the login applet using his personal X.509 certificate, he/she is able to interact with the browsing interface. It offers an easy-to-use search system among the assets, represented by the digitized manuscripts: the contents are organized by physical and semantics characteristics through the definition of types and categories and results are filtered by the selection of one or more attributes from given lists. Example of filters are: DocumentGenre, the work genre (e.g., short story, essay, lyric tragedy); Title, refers to the work title; FileType, scans file format (tiff, pdf, jpg, etc.); ScanQuality, gives information on the quality of the scan; DocumentType, specifies the kind of the document (manuscripts, typescripts, draft, etc.); PublicationStatus, PublicationYear, Publisher, reports the publication status (published/ unpublished) the publication year and the name of the publisher; Location, provides the physical location of the documents, the number of the envelope within which it is contained. The selection of filters, with cascading application, allows to easily find a document. The choice of a filter value dynamically influences the values of the adjacent filters narrowing at the same time the set of results and quickly locating the desired item (see Figure 19). Two examples follow to illustrate how filtering can be applied to quickly find a needed document or a group of documents: •
First case: a scholar may need to look for all the drafts printed in the year 1919. He/ she will select “Scansioni” (scans) from the Type tree, then “testi a stampa” (printed drafts). Choosing the PublicationYear as filter, and selecting 1919 as value among the available years, he/she will get as re-
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Figure 19. An example of browsing of the gLibrary De Roberto repository in using search filters
•
sult all the assets satisfying his/her request. The search can be further-refined choosing Publisher as second filter, to group drafts by Publisher. Second case: a linguist may need to undertake the study and the analysis of “varianti d’autore” (author’s variations) of the Ermanno Reali text. He/she will need to find out all the available existing versions, from the manuscripts to the published works. Through the selection of “Scansione” among types, and setting Title as filter with the value Ermanno Reali, he/ she will be able to retrieve the whole list of manuscripts and all the versions of printed drafts, with related modifications and corrections if any, of selected works, ordered by year.
With a browsing system like the one provided by gLibrary, it is possible to make searches on contents while taking into account at the same time the physical preservation of documents, scan quality, physical format, etc. Each item of the result set can then be inspected with a single click (see Figure 20). Once the document requested has been located among the results, the download can be
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Figure 20. Document metadata inspection with gLibrary
started immediately with a click on one of the available replica links (see Figure 21).
THE ADAT PROJECT Introduction As already stressed in the previous section, nowadays the preservation of cultural heritage is becoming more and more important, as several patrimonies have been completely destroyed because of atmospheric agents, natural disasters and/or human faults. Digitization is a convenient way to preserve these heritages from every kind of alteration including those deriving from physical restoration. The ADAT project (Digital Archives of Ancient Texts, www.progettoadat.it), funded by the Regional Government of Sicily (Italy) addresses the three following important topics: • •
•
Preservation of ancient books and texts; Digital restoration with sophisticated software techniques that are able to cope with the most frequent sources of damage; World-wide access to the heritage by means of the adoption of grid technology.
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Figure 21. gLibrary download manager
Digital restoration and access to the grid repository are detailed in the two following sub-sections.
Figure 22. Before-and-after effect of the ADAT methods to cure cracks and scratches
Figure 23. Before-and-after effect of the ADAT methods to cure breaks
Digital Restoration Techniques and their Effects The objectives of the digital restoration of ancient manuscripts are to: • • •
Remove both the mechanical and physical/ chemical alterations of the paper; Reconstruct the damaged areas of the sheet; Recover the damaged text.
Among mechanical alterations, the most common ones are cracks and scratches and breaks. Cracks and scratches frequently appear as vertical deformations of particularly thin papers. Usually, the direction of a crack or scratch is the same for all its length. In the framework of ADAT, cracks and scratches on digitized papers have been detected using some edge or boundary operators and repaired either through an anisotropic diffusion filling method or by inpainting (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Inpainting). The effect of the used methods is shown in Figure 22. Breaks can dramatically compromise ancient documents, as they can interest large portions of the paper sheets. In the framework of ADAT, breaks have been detected using a uniform pre-
defined background colour during digitization and cured using inpainting algorithms. The effect of the used methods is shown in Figure 23. Among physical/chemical alterations, oxidation, foxing and water blotches are the most common ones. Oxidation is a natural process that affects every old paper. This effect is characterized by a yellowing of the paper. The removal of this defect makes the background more homogeneous and improves the readability of the document by optical character recognizing algorithms (OCR). In the context of ADAT, an algorithm has been used to cure oxidation which tries to separate the text from the background partitioning the luminance histogram. The restoration occurs by adjusting the colours of pixels that belong to the background with their median. The effect of the used methods is shown in Figure 24. Foxing is chemical alteration characterized by reddish-brown spots of various size. There are many theories about the origin of these blotches: fungal growth on the paper, oxidation of metals from which some papers were made, etc. Foxing
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Figure 24. Before-and-after effect of the ADAT methods to cure oxidation
has been detected in the context of ADAT through the analysis of the Cr-chrominance matrix (in the YCrCb space) thanks to the particular colour of the foxed areas. The restored image is reconstructed by merging a shifted high-pass luminance image (in the foxed areas) with the original luminance values in the remaining parts of the image. In addition, the chrominance matrix Cr and Cb are adjusted to correct the colour of the foxed areas. The effect of the used methods is shown in Figure 25. Water blotches are usually due to the adverse environment in which a book has been conserved. They are characterized by irregular shapes (surrounded by a visible edge) and by the darker colour of the background with respect to the original one. Water blotches can be detected
Figure 25. Before-and-after effect of the ADAT methods to cure foxing
through segmentation algorithms. The method used in the context of ADAT performs a segmentation through a sequence of morphological reconstructions. The restoration is achieved by solving an equation describing the corrupted area as a function of the original one (the additive/ multiplicative model). The effect of the used methods is shown in Figure 26.
The ADAT Digital Archive The architecture of the grid repository implemented by ADAT is shown in Figure 27. The grid services listed in the right part of the figure are those provided by the gLite middleware while the Grid Archive Application and the Grid Data Access Framework, shown in the left part of the figure, are based on T-GSAF, described in one of the above sections. In particular, ADAT archive makes use of the following gLite services: • •
The Storage Elements (SEs) in order store physical digitalized book pages. The AMGA Metadata Catalog to store metadata describing the contents of the books, allowing users to search for entries based on their descriptions;
Figure 27. Architecture of the digital archive implemented in the context of ADAT
Figure 26. Before-and-after effect of the ADAT methods to cure water blotches
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•
•
The LCG File Catalog (LFC) to maps logical filenames onto the physical locations of replicas of a file stored in one or more Storage Elements; The Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) to allow definition of users’ privileges and roles according to abstract entities called Virtual Organizations (VOs), which group users, institutions and resources in the same administrative domain;
Figure 28. Metadata navigation map of the ADAT grid repository
The metadata navigation map of the web interface to the repository is shown, as an example, in Figure 28.
The ADAT Logical Data Organization As it is shown in the architecture picture, the metadata schema of the ancient books library is based on the AMGA metadata service and all digital resources are inside the Storage Elements services. Data are hierarchically arranged in two layers. The first layer is formed by the metadata schema that contains information about the entire book: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Author; Title; Publication; Description; Note; Stamp; Detail; Material Type; Language; Country; Subject; Classification; Condition; Library; Location; ID; Availability;
• •
Content; Edition.
The second layer if formed by the folder structure which hosts all images relative to the pages of the book on the Storage Elements. For each book, ADAT defines two folders: •
•
Light: for low resolution images, encoded with JPEG codec and having a size of about 200 KB; Heavy: for high resolution images encoded with the TIFF codec (lossless) and having a size of about 50 MB.
THE MEDITERRANEAN NETWORK FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE Introduction The Mediterranean Network for Cultural Heritage aims at creating a distributed digital repository for more than 7,100 items of cultural heritage belonging to about 20 countries around the Mediterranean (besides Italy). The initiative’s idea was born from the awareness that peoples of the Mediterranean established an osmosis of
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knowledge, over the millennia, through cultural and social exchanges which enabled the “Community of the Mediterranean area” that goes well beyond the geographical boundaries. The continuous exchanges carried out in the past are visible on the shores of the Mediterranean, where even today there are architectural and archaeological military, religious, and civil heritages belonging to different traditions but with obvious stylistic and geometric similarities. The initiative has been undertaken by the Digital Architectural Archaeological Cultural Archive (DA2rCA) team of researchers at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Catania (Italy) and the first pilot project has been funded by the Sicilian Regional Centre for Design and Restoration of Palermo to determine a risk map of the famous archaeological area of Taormina. The pilot project consisted of two parts: the collection of hundreds of 3D laser scans and thousands of pictures of about 30 monuments located in the Taormina’s area and the creation of a digital repository based on grid technology. Both aspects are described in the following sub-sections.
Collection of Images The images of the monuments are collected by means of a high-definition Leica Geosystem HDS3000 laser scanner (see Figure 29). As examples, some of the images gathered in the framework of the pilot project mentioned above are shown in Figures 30 and 31. Figure 29. The Leica Geosystem HDS3000 laser scanner
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Figure 30 refers to the cloud of points taken by the scanner while Figure 31 refers to the texture mapping applied afterwards. 3D laser scans are complemented by hundreds of drawings and many thousands of high-resolution photographs.
The Grid Repository The digital repository of the Mediterranean Network for Cultural Heritage is implemented using the gLibrary framework described in one of the previous sections. The archive will provide users with two levels of information. The first one is related to the 7,118 item of cultural heritage present around the Mediterranean (outside Italy) while the second one is related to the above 5,000 items of cultural heritage present in Sicily. For each of the elements of the first ensemble, the following metadata have been defined: • • • • • • • • • • •
Identity code; Nation; Area; District; Locality; Municipality; Hamlet; Type; Denomination; Hierarchy; Typology;
Figure 30. 3D laser scan (cloud of points) of Taormina’s Naumachias
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• •
Studies and surveys; Photo,
While for each of the elements of the second ensemble, the following metadata have been added: • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Address; Current denomination; Denomination of origin; Building; Subject; GPS coordinates and altitude; Conservation status; History period; Study and survey’s source; Database source; Enclosures; Note; Date of updating.
The search interface, the metadata browser, and the picture download manager of the repository implemented with gLibrary are shown in Figures 32, 33 and 34, respectively. It is worth noting as those figures look very similar to those shown in the section on the digital repository of Federico De Roberto’s works. This stresses once again the generality and the customizability of the framework which allows the quick creation of very diverse repositories. Figure 31. 3D laser scan (texture mapping) of Taormina’s Naumachias
THE ARCHAEOGRID PROJECT Introduction ArchaeoGRID is an international initiative that provides the possibility to exploit advanced grid computational and storage technologies in archaeology and history for curation and analysis of big amount of data coming from written sources, field surveys, excavations, and laboratories. ArchaeoGRID also allows the development and test of data simulation models with many variables and multiple space-time information. Archaeological and historical knowledge building is a collective work performed by the entire community of researchers, and this fits very well with the grid paradigm of Virtual Organisations (VOs) using large and distributed computing and storage resources. Easy access to, and management of large data set and complex software packages, allowed by e-Infrastructure, is hence an asset for the production of archaeologically and historically relevant knowledge. In fact, archaeological and historical data are getting not only larger and larger, but also their complexity and heterogeneity are increasing, implying that the extraction of meaningful knowledge requires more and more computing and storage resources. Data include contributions from scientific fields as diverse as physics, chemistry, Earth Figure 32. Search interface of the digital repository
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Figure 33. Metadata browser of the digital repository
Figure 34. Download manager of the digital repository
sciences, biology, geography, anthropology and social sciences, as well as techniques developed according to the archaeological methods and theories. Modern archaeological science depends on large collections of diverse, mundane objects such as potsherds, stone tools and debris, animal and plant remains - rather than small collections of treasures. Sites are unique, non renewable resources easily destroyed by erosion or modern land use and data curation aspects are increasingly important. Old collections, original field notes, and reports of previous work have enduring research value. Archaeological and historical data also lose much of their meaning when they are taken out of the original space-time context in which they were discovered. This spatial and temporal context of modern archaeological research spans from the dig site itself to much larger regions and long time periods. Traditional archaeological field and laboratory research was highly individualized. So, simultaneous access of this huge amount of available data is not easy. Data can be of different types like separately compiled databases held by museums,
governmental agencies, private companies and individuals and can reside on different computer platforms. Often, data classifications and terminology vary, are regionally and temporally specific, and are inconsistently applied. There are databases containing years of accumulated paper records, voluminous unpublished literature consisting of limited distribution reports, images, maps and photographs embedded in museum catalogues and archaeological reports, both published and unpublished. Large part of these data are also not in digital format. One of the most important goals of ArchaeoGRID is then the development of digital repositories of archaeological and historical data containing space-time information. Central problems of modern archaeological and historical research concern the understanding of the social and ecological factors leading to global change and to biodiversity crisis. The integration of the human history and the development of ancient societies with the Earth system evolution implies the knowledge of the origin, growth and collapse processes of past societies and the interactions of the environmental and social processes that have contributed to determine human and environmental dynamics such as the emergence of the city and the state. The past is the only “laboratory” we have to test our hypotheses and models on the dynamics of social and ecological processes (Cecchini, 2007; Pelfer,
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2007). Unlike similar initiatives, ArchaeoGRID takes expressly into account time evolution of data in computer simulations performed on grid infrastructures.
Objectives and Challenges The ArchaeoGRID project is based on the adoption of the grid paradigm which allows new ways of sharing resources in a inter/multi-disciplinary collaboration among researchers belonging to sciences and humanities. ArchaeoGRID combines and enables the advantage of multidisciplinary research –specialists work alone using appropriate techniques – and of interdisciplinary research – specialists cooperate and discover new aspects of their data. ArchaeoGRID, by fostering new international groups/applications and by enabling new kind of world-class collaborative solutions, is becoming a new “tool” for the cognitive process in archaeology and for advancing in archaeological knowledge unification and integration. ArchaeoGRID is a project connected with the fields of the archaeological and historical activities like: •
•
•
The archaeological and historical research for production, sharing and diffusion of archaeological and historical information and knowledge by the methods of ancient topography, field survey and excavation, archaeometry, simulation, telearchaeology, visualization, and narration; The archaeological heritage management, from preservation to access, of the archaeological digital data in a period of “crisis of curation”; The economical exploitation of the archaeological information and knowledge by tourism, education, edutainment, heritage preservation, archaeological risk management, land management (Cecchini, 2007; Pelfer, 2007; Pelfer 2008).
By means of ArchaeoGRID, archaeological research, made until now by small and dispersed research groups, will evolve towards a new perspective where large multi-disciplinary Virtual Organizations of academics perform semantic analyses on large amounts of data coming from many independent sources.
The ArchaeoGRID Infrastructure The ArchaeoGRID Infrastructure shown in Figure 35 is an unique platform for inter/multidisciplinary research in archaeology and history. Its structure is very complex and challenging. Computing and permanent storage resources available on e-Infrastructures are to be accessed by the grid middleware services. But more layers on top of the middleware one must be built: the common grid services layer for accessing virtual laboratory services; digital library services and advanced grid services for analysis, visualization and narration; the geospatial-temporal data infrastructure layer for the management of geospatialtemporal archaeological and historical data and metadata and for their analysis by distributed grid-GIS services and by Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) platform services. The access to other grids in sciences and humanities for retrieving data and for using analysis tools connected with many different disciplinary Figure 35. The ArchaeoGRID infrastructure
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fields that are needed for a truly multidisciplinary research, is built using grid portals like P-Grade (Pelfer, 2008). The following archaeological and historical research programs are being undertaken on the ArchaeoGRID Infrastructure (Pelfer, 2007): •
•
•
•
The reconstruction of social, ecological and economical landscape of crucial historical periods in a spatial and temporal multi-scale perspective, using written sources and archaeological, geological, biological and ecological information, as well any other useful available data; The simulation, with models from theory of complex systems, of social, ecological and economical processes dynamics; The validation of the simulated processes by reconstructed landscape in a holistic top-down approach; The creation of digital multi-media documents, for narration purposes, allowing visualizations of digital libraries of archaeological documents such as maps, images, draws, tables, etc. linked by text. Textual parts, i.e. the narration, connect all the elements of the documents in a coherent vision based on a theoretical model or a subjective intuition.
Example of ArchaeoGRID Applications Paleoclimate The term archaeoclimatology designates a particular approach to the estimation of past climates along time, according to the spatial scales suitable and appropriate for the use of archaeologists. Because cultures change on less than the millennial scale, and because people live in relatively restricted areas, whatever data or model is used it must be nearly site-specific and with high timeresolution.
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This subspecialty of paleoclimatology is largely concerned with bringing together various sources of estimation of past climates, models, and proxy estimates from field studies, to provide the most consistent estimates of the past climatic environment at particular places and times. Paleoclimate evaluation is relevant for evaluating topics and aspects such as: agricultural and pastoral activities, forests extension and distribution (wood has been a key resource for tools, habitation, ship fabrication, ceramic production, metallurgy, etc.), exchanges and trades (terrestrial roads, fluvial ways, maritime routes, harbors, etc.), environment (geomorphology, hydrography, sea level and temperature, etc.), habitation and dressing, epidemiological situation, etc. (Pelfer, 2007; Pelfer, 2008). During Holocene, the last 10,000 years of Earth’s history, the impact of human activities on the environment has continuously increased, starting from the rise of agriculture in Neolithic. Any study of paleoenvironment aspects, including paleoclimate, needs a clear understanding of relative influence of anthropic and non-anthropic factors. Archaeology contributes at environmental knowledge by data on land use and land cover, domesticated plants and animals (charcoals, seems, pollens, wood remains, bones, etc.), paleosoils, paleolandscapes, tests and validation of paleoclimate models (Pelfer, 2007; Pelfer, 2008). The fine grained space-time scale weather simulation use data from CCSM (Community Climate System Model, www.ccsm.ucar.edu) Global Circulation Model paleoclimate runs to input the Mesoscale MM5 Model (www.mmm. ucar.edu/mm5/) with the aim to produce regional weather. The MM5 Mesoscale Model (Pelfer, 2009) needs data on topography, land cover and land use, and produce seasonal weather. Stochastic Weather Models produce the daily weather used in simulations. The CCSM Global Circulation Model and the MM5 Mesoscale Model have been already used for archaeological paleoclimate
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simulation as: the African Humid Period (AHP) dated between 8,000 and 6,000 years BP; the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) dated ~21.000 years BP; the Mesopotamian Settlement Systems during ~4500 years BP. The CCSM is a coupled climate model for the simulation of the Earth’s climate system. It is composed of four separated models, simultaneously simulating atmosphere, ocean, land surface, sea-ice, and a central coupler component. Data on weather from paleoclimate CCSM runs can be found on the NCAR site (www.ncar.ucar.edu) and used as input data for MM5. CCSM packages can also be deployed on grid and run with the values of full parameters’ list: Earth’s orbital parameters, volume mixing ratios for the greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O, CFC12) set in a reasonable way for the period under study, solar constant, etc. For the MM5 paleo runs the input for static fields include data on topography, land water distribution, and vegetation cover. Since the MM5 package contains files of digital data related to the present situation, it is needed to modify these files using data from geology, paleo-botanics and paleo-zoology, archaeology, etc. to reconstruct ancient topography, land cover and land use. The input for non-static fields include also data on sea-surface temperature, initial and boundary conditions, 3D fields of basic meteorological parameters such as temperature, wind and humidity (data for some periods are available from paleoclimate CCSM runs) (Cecchini, 2007; Pelfer, 2007; Pelfer, 2008).
ArchaeoGRID Applications on the GILDA and EUMEDGRID Infrastructures
been successfully carried out. Figure 36 shows the Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the Mediterranean region, at a resolution of 1 km2, used as input domains in MM5. Work is currently in progress to reconstruct paleo-environmental data needed as input for further MM5 simulations.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION E-Infrastructures, composed by high-speed networks and geographically distributed multidomain computing and storage resources, are nowadays supporting many virtual research communities from all over the world, belonging to various scientific disciplines, making their applications running at a scale of complexity that allows unprecedented studies of very important multi/inter-disciplinary problems. In this chapter we have shown some exemplar e-Infrastructures and reported on how the e-Science paradigm can be useful and beneficial also for Art, Humanities and Cultural Heritage at large. The very general purpose middleware services reported in this chapter, used in several applications belonging to several cultural heritage areas, have proved their effectiveness and can be adopted in many other contexts and domains.
Figure 36. Digital elevation models used as input of MM5 ArchaeoGRID simulations
The mentioned ArchaeoGRID paleoclimate applications were deployed both on the GILDA t-Infrastructure and on the EUMEDGRID infrastructure, to produce the first results for feasibility studies. In both cases, the “gridification” of MM5 with CCSM present data coming from NCAR has
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We hope that this seminal contribution can be useful to other researchers in the field and can pave the way to e-Humanities and we are of course open for contacts and collaboration.
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Chapter 18
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts through Their Historical Development Wajeeh Daher An-Najah National University, Palestine & Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education, Israel Nimer Baya’a Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education, Israel
ABSTRACT This chapter describes how teachers can use technology to build learning materials and non-traditional lessons that incorporate heritage and history. Students are expected in these lessons to be engaged by a combination of mathematics, cultural heritage, and technological presentation. The chapter describes a project carried out in a teacher training college and presents the structure of the web-based learning environment. Preservice teachers who participated in the project developed the online materials and carried out the educational activities. The technological tools used to build learning materials were based on ICT pedagogical models and were integrated into the mathematical lessons. The chapter also describes various models and teaching settings in which heritage and technology can be utilized and integrated, followed by an example lesson plan which elaborates on the model. The chapter also describes the educational, pedagogical, technical, and logistical difficulties that the preservice teachers confronted during the project. They also struggled with reading historical material and relating it to mathematics. Semi structured interviews revealed that the preservice teachers overcame these difficulties by reflection and by communicating and collaborating with each other and with their lecturers. A questionnaire with yes-no items was used to collect data about attitudes and perceptions of the preservice teachers during the project. They viewed this technological project connected with their heritage as fun, benefiting them, making them proud of their mathematical heritage, and encouraging them to use such projects in their future teaching. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch018 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts
INTRODUCTION Educational researches point at the advantages of project based learning (Railsback, 2002; Boaler, 1998a, 1998b; Moore et al., 1996), technology based learning (Arroyo, 1992; Daher, 2009; Koller, Harvey, & Magnotta, 2006) and learning that emphasizes history (Arcavi et al., 1982; Daher, 2005; Kaye, 2008). This is true especially for mathematics education. In this chapter it is our aim to describe preservice teachers’ experiences in developing project based, technology based and history based mathematics lessons for middle and elementary Arab schools in Israel. These preservice teachers, majoring in mathematics, computer science and information and communication technology (ICT) in Al-Qasemi teacher training college, built internet sites which include mathematics lessons that use historical materials and technological tools. We will describe the rich experiences of the preservice teachers in developing their projects: building internet sites, designing technology based and history based learning materials and writing mathematical lessons. As well, we will describe the preservice teachers’ difficulties in developing their projects and the ways they used to overcome these difficulties.
which are expected to lessen their fear of change, provide them with personal training in successful methods which use technology to produce history based learning materials. At the same time, these experiences would give the preservice teachers alternative teaching models, motivate them to learn in a supportive climate of peers and lecturers, and thus qualify them to use these alternative teaching models as future teachers. Wang (2006) describes technology projects as influencing positively aspects of students’ empowerment: autonomy, equality and skill building. This makes technology projects a tool for preparing preservice teachers for a teaching profession that empowers students and contributes to their autonomy, equality and skill building. Fullan (1982, p. 107) stated that “educational change depends on what teachers do and think--it’s as simple and complex as that.” We believe that the preservice teachers, developing projects rich in technology and history, will adapt to these new methods and encourage their future students to learn by developing such projects. The adaptation to technology based projects will empower the preservice teachers as learners and future teachers (Keengwe et al., 2007), and thus empower the future generation of students.
Research Rationale
The Research Goals
Bitner and Bitner (2002) developed eight areas to look at when considering teachers’ success to integrate technology into the curriculum: (1) fear of change (2) training in basics (3) personal use (4) teaching models (5) learning base (6) climate (7) motivation and (8) support. Thus, giving preservice teachers opportunities to develop projects that involve building technology based and history based mathematical materials will encourage the preservice teachers to use projects, technology and history of mathematics (which is related to their cultural heritage) in their future teaching. This encouragement will result from their experiences
1. To show how mathematical heritage could be utilized technologically and educationally to produce electronic mathematics lessons. This would help educators of other nations, for example, Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, etc. to develop mathematics (or other sciences) lessons and internet sites that are connected to their own history and heritage. 2. To describe the structure of the sites and lessons which the preservice teachers built. 3. To describe the sequences of action taken by the preservice teachers in carrying out their projects.
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4. To describe models of lessons and teaching settings that the preservice teachers used to integrate heritage and technology. 5. To describe the types of learning materials that the preservice teachers developed. 6. To describe the technological tools and ICT pedagogical models which the preservice teachers used to develop the learning materials. 7. To describe the difficulties of the preservice teachers in building their sites and developing their learning materials and lessons, and how they overcame these difficulties.
BACKGROUND Project Based Learning Railsback (2002) pointed at the advantages of project-based instruction: (1) it prepares students for the workplace (2) it increases the motivation of students (3) it connects learning at school with reality (4) it provides collaborative opportunities to construct knowledge (5) it increases social and communication skills (6) it increases problemsolving skills (7) it enables students to make and see connections between disciplines (8) it provides students with opportunities to contribute to their school or community (9) it increases students’ self-esteem (10) it allows students to use their individual learning strengths and apply diverse approaches to learning, and (11) it provides a practical and real-world way to learn how to use technology. Chang and Chang (2003) found that most of the junior college students participating in their research believed that their engagement in project based learning did improve their collaboration and communication skills. They also believed that it enhanced their thinking and problem-solving skills. Tan (2002) reported that secondary school boys thought that the project based learning had positive effects on teamwork and communication skills, problem-solving and thinking skills, as
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well as self regulation skills, whilst Chua (2004) found that the students participating in project based learning had positive perceptions of their attainment in cooperation, knowledge application, communication and independent learning. These advantages of project based learning were among our concerns when we chose to prepare our preservice teachers majoring in mathematics and computers to use projects and technology tools in their future teaching
Technology Based Learning Technology based learning, according to Koller, Harvey and Magnotta (2006) holds the promise of substantially transforming the way students learn because of its various advantages: (1) it fosters greater accessibility to learning by offering anytime and anywhere delivery (2) it is scalable to both large and small groups since it can accommodate larger numbers of learners at little extra cost and smaller groups of learners that otherwise would not be able to participate in traditional classroom training for lack of enrollments (3) the content of its courses, especially those that are delivered online, can be centrally developed and updated whenever the need arises (4) due to the previous property, the cost of replacing outdated course materials and retraining teachers and instructors drops significantly (5) it can be self-paced and matched to the learner’s needs (6) it offers the prospect of promoting greater comprehension and retention, particularly for complex materials, because of its clear opportunities for the handson manipulation of course materials and the use of simulations and game-playing. The previous advantages of technology based learning encouraged us to choose technology as means by which the preservice teachers develop their projects. Some factors support teachers and encourage them to use ICT in their classrooms. Cox, Preston and Cox (1999) found that the factors most important to teachers in their teaching, when
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts
using ICT, were: ICT makes the lessons more interesting, easier, more fun for teachers and pupils, more diverse, more motivating for pupils and more enjoyable. Cox, Preston and Cox (1999) say that additional more personal factors could influence the teachers’ use of ICT: ICT improves presentation of materials, allows greater access to computers for personal use, gives more power to the teacher in the school, gives the teacher more prestige, makes the teachers’ administration more efficient and provides professional support through the Internet. Letting preservice teachers carry out build lessons based on technology is expected to give them means that support their future teaching and give them power as learners and future teachers. Some factors may prevent teachers from using ICT in their classrooms. Pelgrum (2001) describe many of those obstacles, among which the following ten obstacles were the most mentioned by school principals and the technology experts in the schools (from the most influencing to the least influencing): Insufficient number of computers, teachers’ lack of knowledge/skills, difficult to integrate in instruction, scheduling computer time, insufficient peripherals, not enough copies of software, insufficient teacher’s time, not enough simultaneous access to WWW, not enough supervision stuff, and lack of technical assistance. Jones, A. (2004) reported, depending on reviewing literature, that the teachers’ level of confidence in using the technology is a very significant determinant of teachers’ level of engagement in ICT; i.e. teachers who have little or no confidence in using computers in their work will try to avoid them altogether. In addition, there is a close relationship between levels of confidence and many other issues like the amount of personal access to ICT that a teacher has, the amount of technical support available, the amount and quality of training available, and the resistance to change. Requiring preservice teachers to carry out technology-based projects is supposed to increase their confidence in
using technology and thus increase their engagement in using it in schools.
Using History in Teaching Mathematics: Connecting the Preservice Teachers to Their Heritage An increasing number of researches point at the advantages of integrating mathematics history in the mathematics lessons, if to the mathematics student or teacher. These researches show that integrating the history of mathematics in mathematics lessons improve the awareness of the teachers of mathematics regarding this subject and regarding their approach to teaching mathematics (Arcavi et al., 1982; Fauvel, 1991; Furinghetti, 2000). Rose (2001) mentioned that integrating the history in mathematics lessons leads students to look at the history of mathematics as a factor which connects between the various fields of mathematics. This integration helps students, as well, to experience mathematics as it evolves and develops, so they look at mathematics as a human project. It also causes students to lessen their fear of mathematics (Marshall & Rich, 2000; Switz, 1984). We chose that the preservice teachers projects involve Islamic history of mathematics, so, in our case, in addition to previous advantages, the preservice teachers were expected to connect to their cultural heritage and thus develop self confidence in mathematics, develop pride in their ancestors’ accomplishments, and thus develop motivation to learn and teach mathematics.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Research Setting and Participants This chapter describes technological projects which were the final assignment in a pedagogic training course of third year preservice teachers
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majoring in mathematics and computers. The number of participants in the course was 30 and they had different levels of mathematical content and pedagogic content knowledge. The authors of this chapter were the lecturers who gave the pedagogic training course. The preservice teachers studied in a teacher training college in Israel called Al-Qasemi Academy; which includes Muslim preservice teachers and is surrounded by Arab schools whose most students are Muslims. It was intended that the preservice teachers’ projects involve building internet sites that include materials for teaching and learning mathematics in middle and elementary Arab schools. These materials were required to be rich in historical resources and technological means. It was decided that the historical resources involve historical mathematics content that was developed and created in the Muslim era, so to connect the preservice teachers and the students to their mathematical heritage. We hoped that this connection would motivate the preservice teachers to be more involved in teaching and learning mathematics, and the students to be more involved in learning mathematics, due to their pride in their mathematical heritage. Every internet site that the preservice teachers were required to develop had to include: • • •
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The life history of a mathematician. The historical development of a mathematical concept or procedure. Learning materials developed based on various ICT pedagogical models using appropriate technological tools. A mathematics lesson that utilized all the learning materials developed.
Data Collecting Tools •
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Interviews with the preservice teachers: We interviewed the preservice teachers for almost thirty minutes each about their
•
experiences in carrying out the projects that involved writing mathematics lessons that integrated technology and history. The interviews were semi-structured and included questions such as: what sequences of action did you follow in carrying out the project? What ICT pedagogical models did you implement in the learning materials? What technology tools did you use to develop the learning materials? How did the lecturers’ directions influence the carrying out of the project? Describe the difficulties you faced in carrying out the project and the solutions that you used to overcome these difficulties. Questionnaire: We required the participants to state their agreement or disagreement with 15 statements regarding their experiences in carrying out the project, and their perceptions of implementing such projects in teacher training and in the schools. The questionnaire included statements, such as: I enjoyed the process of carrying out the project, carrying out such project in my training encourages me to base my future teaching on such projects, the project benefits my future work as a mathematics teacher, the project makes me proud of my heritage, such projects motivate school students to learn mathematics.
Data Processing and Analysis We used the grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) to identify the sequences of action taken by the preservice teachers in carrying out their projects, the models of lessons and teaching settings that the preservice teachers used to integrate heritage and technology, the types of learning materials that the preservice teachers developed, the technological tools and ICT pedagogical models which the preservice teachers used to develop the learning materials, the diffi-
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culties that the preservice teachers encountered in carrying out their projects and to identify the solutions that they found for these difficulties. The grounded theory approach has three stages from which we used the first two: •
•
Open coding: Identification of repeated behavior that can be characterized. In this stage we divided each type of collected data into segments and examined the segments for similarities and differences. For example, at this stage, one of the objectives was to identify categories of difficulties and solutions that occur in carrying out the projects, place similar difficulties or solutions in the same category, and characterize each category. Axial coding: After identifying the categories and characterizing them, we examined the relations between the categories and their subcategories. For example, we characterized the difficulties and solutions according to the context in which they occurred and according to the conditions of their occurrence.
MAIN FOCUS OF THE CHAPTER Preservice Teachers’ Projects, Internet Sites Developed, Mathematics Lessons Developed The Structure of the Main Site and Its Sub-Sites The main site1 – Mathematics in Islamic Eyes – that was developed by the preservice teachers, is a web-based learning environment (as defined by Baya’a, Shehade & Baya’a, 2009) and contains the following sections: mathematicians, mathematical stories, lesson plans, historical sites and a section on other civilizations (yet to be constructed). Figure 1 represents screen shot of the main site. The mathematicians section includes three sub-sections: selected mathematicians, alphabetical index and chronological index. The selected mathematicians sub-section contains sites about the life and contributions of the Muslim mathematicians whom the preservice teachers used at least one of their mathematical contributions to integrate in their lessons, while the indexes include all the Muslim mathematicians as found in MacTutor History of Mathematics ar-
Figure 1. A screen shot of the main site
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chive2. The chronological index was arranged according to centuries, where each century includes the Muslim mathematicians who died in that century. Each mathematician name in the indexes is linked to a proper internet site. The section of mathematical stories contains six sub-sections that include mathematical concept stories about functions, numbers, equations, circles, quadrilaterals and triangles. These concepts constitute most of the mathematics curriculum for the middle schools in Israel, as well as some of the mathematics curriculum for the elementary school. The lesson plans section contains the same previous sub-sections and parts, because each mathematical concept story is used in a corresponding lesson plan. Each part includes the lesson plan for teaching a mathematical concept using its historical story and proper learning materials developed by the preservice teacher. The historical sites’ section contains two subsections: categorization according to language and categorization according to content. The categorization according to language sub-section has three parts: Arabic sites, Hebrew sites and English sites. The categorization according to content sub-section has also three parts: historical sites, educational sites and mathematical sites.
Sequences of Action in Carrying Out the Projects We found that the preservice teachers followed two main sequences of action in carrying out the projects: Current to history 1. Deciding on a mathematical concept from the current mathematics curriculum. 2. Searching for historical resources and stories that could be related to the mathematical concept.
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3. Planning the lesson based on the historical resources and stories. 4. Deciding on ICT pedagogical models (electronic presentation, video presentation, web-based learning environment, WebQuest activity, electronic worksheet, simulation) that could be used to illustrate, present or investigate the mathematical concept and the historical story. 5. Deciding on the technological tools needed to generate and develop the pedagogical models. 6. Building the learning materials according to the selected pedagogical models using the proper technological tools. 7. Writing the lesson plan and delivering it with the corresponding learning materials to the leading group. History to current 1. Browsing internet historical sites and books involved with Muslim mathematician and their contributions to mathematics. 2. Searching for historical stories that describe the development of a mathematical concept or procedure developed by Muslim mathematicians and, at the same time, could be taught in the middle or elementary school. 3. Choosing such concept or procedure which is included in the current mathematics curriculum. 4. Deciding on ICT pedagogical models that could be used to illustrate, present or investigate the mathematical concept and the historical story. 5. Deciding on the technological tools needed to generate and develop the pedagogical models. 6. Building the learning materials according to the selected pedagogical models using the proper technological tools.
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts
7. Writing the lesson plan and delivering it with the corresponding learning materials to the leading group.
Technological Tools Used To Build Learning Materials Based On ICT Pedagogical Models Table 1 describes the technological tools that the preservice teachers used, and the learning materials that they built using those tools according to a specific ICT pedagogical model.
Models of Lessons That Integrate Technology and Heritage The preservice teachers used different models to integrate technology and heritage in their lessons. We will describe below the main models of lessons that they used. Doing so, we will describe the ideational aspect of the model and the ICT pedagogical models used through it in the specific sequence of their occurrence.
Table 1. Learning materials built according to an ICT pedagogical model using technological tools Technological tools
ICT Pedagogical model
Learning materials
• Presentation program • Picture editor • Voice recorder
Electronic presentation
• Animations illustrating mathematical concepts or procedures. • Animations describing historical mathematical stories. • Presentations describing the life and contributions of mathematicians. • Presentations giving summary of lessons.
• Digital video camera • Movie editor • Video format converter • Picture editor • Voice recorder
Video presentation
• Animations describing real world phenomena. • Movies describing the life histories of mathematicians.
• Web design editors • Web design programs and platforms • Web design script languages • Picture editor • Graphics editing program
Web-based learning environment
• Sites on the life, contributions and accomplishments of a mathematician. • Database of Islamic mathematicians in alphabetical and chronological order. • Database of internet sites that deal with mathematics history, according to the language of the site or according to the emphasize of the site (pedagogical, mathematical, historical). • Sites presenting the historical stories and the corresponding resources. • Sites presenting the lesson plan with the corresponding learning materials.
• Web design editors • Web design programs and platforms
WebQuest activity
• Web pages activities that direct students to explore the history development of mathematical concepts.
• Word processor
Electronic worksheet
• Electronic texts that require the students to Investigate and study mathematical concepts or procedures. • Electronic texts that require the students to solve exercises in order to evaluate their understanding.
• Web applets • Spreadsheet program
Simulation
• Mathematical web applets available in the internet. • Dynamic maps available in the internet. • Dynamic text constructed using a spreadsheet program.
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Lesson Model I
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Presenting the life history of a mathematician like Al-Khwarizmi, presenting a specified mathematical contribution of that mathematician, for example how Al-Khwarizmi solved specified types of the quadratic equation, giving the students quadratic equations to solve following the Al-Khwarizmi method, connecting the historical method to the current method, evaluating the understanding of the students and giving a summary for the lesson.
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The sequence of the pedagogical models: ◦◦ An electronic presentation – using a presentation program - describing the life history of the mathematician and one of his contributions to mathematics. ◦◦ A couple of electronic worksheets for the investigation part using a word processor. ◦◦ An electronic worksheet for the evaluation part using a word processor. ◦◦ An electronic presentation for the summary part using a presentation program.
Lesson Model II Presenting current mathematical procedure; for example multiplication, presenting the Muslim way of performing multiplication, giving the students numbers to multiply in the Muslim way, connecting the Muslim way to the current procedure, evaluating the understanding of the students and giving a summary for the lesson. The sequence of the pedagogical models: ◦◦ An electronic presentation – using a presentation program - describing the current procedure of multiplication. ◦◦ An electronic presentation – using a presentation program - describing the Muslim way of multiplication.
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An electronic worksheet for the investigation part using a word processor. An electronic worksheet for the evaluation part using a word processor. An electronic presentation for the summary part using a presentation program.
Lesson Model III Presenting real world aspects of a mathematical phenomenon like the golden section, linking the mathematical phenomenon to mathematical heritage, for example the use of the golden section in the great mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia and which was founded around the year 670 A.D., investigating the golden section phenomenon, evaluating the understanding of the students and giving a summary for the lesson. The sequence of the pedagogical models: ◦◦ A video presentation describing the golden section phenomenon in the nature, and in the Islam period - the preservice teacher used a movie editor and a voice recorder to make the description in Arabic. ◦◦ A WebQuest activity for the investigation part using a web design editor. ◦◦ An electronic worksheet for the evaluation part using a word processor. ◦◦ An electronic presentation for the summary part using a presentation program.
Lesson Model IV Requiring the students to work with an applet to discover a mathematical phenomenon; for example addition of fractions, linking the mathematical phenomenon to history and heritage; for example showing how Al-Kashi added fractions, giving the students fractions to add following the
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts
Al-Kashi method, evaluating the understanding of the students and giving a summary for the lesson. The sequence of the pedagogical models: ◦◦ A simulation on addition of fractions using an applet from the internet. ◦◦ An electronic presentation – using a presentation program - describing the method of Al-Kashi for adding fractions. ◦◦ An electronic worksheet for the investigation part using a word processor. ◦◦ An electronic worksheet for the evaluation part using a word processor. ◦◦ An electronic presentation for the summary part using a presentation program.
Models of Teaching Settings That Integrate Technology and Heritage We will describe now the two teaching settings that the preservice teachers suggested to be used when integrating heritage and technology in teaching mathematics. The two teaching settings suggested were: (1) online teaching in a regular class (2) online teaching in a computer laboratory. These settings are described below. Online teaching in a regular class: In this setting, the teacher uses a computer connected to the internet and to overhead projector, and a regular screen or smart board (interactive board) connected to the teacher’s computer screen. The teacher in this setting presents the teaching/learning materials to the students, and manages the investigation and discovery through discussions with the students. Online teaching in a computer laboratory: In this setting, the teacher uses a computer connected to the internet and to overhead projector, and a regular screen or smart board connected to the teacher’s computer screen. The students have access to computers individually or in pairs, where all the computers are connected to the
internet. The teacher in this setting presents the teaching/learning materials to the students, and guides them while they perform individually (or in pairs) the investigation and discovery activities given to them. In this setting, the students are given the chance to discover mathematical relations, concepts and procedures independently while working with technology.
An Example of a Lesson Plan for Teaching the Circumference of a Circle The lesson plan is intended to be applied in a double lesson for a period of almost 90 minutes for ninth graders in the middle school. The lesson is divided into four parts: introduction, investigation and discovery, summary and evaluation. The teaching is suggested to be done in one of the two models of teaching settings: online teaching in a regular class or online teaching in a computer laboratory. We describe now the teaching/learning materials and processes that the preservice teacher prepared and planned for the four parts of the double lesson.
Introduction The teacher starts the lesson with a video presentation prepared from a video clip taken from a TV episode about the Muslim Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun who is the son of the great Caliph Harun Al-Rashid and is known for the prosperity of sciences in his era. In addition, the preservice teacher prepared in the introduction a 5 minutes electronic presentation, which illustrates the story of measuring the circumference of the globe in the time of AlMa’mun. The story tells that Al-Ma’mun informed the mathematicians known as ‘Sons of Mousa Ben Shaker’ that he had read about the possibility to set a point on the globe and go around it passing through the earth poles holding a rope. Arriving back at the same point with the same rope would
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give us a length of 24,000 miles. Al-Ma’mun ordered the mathematicians to investigate this fact and to bring him a proof or to do the measurements by themselves. The sons of Mousa chose to do the measurements by themselves. The first step they did was to pick a straight land in the desert of Sinjar (in northwestern Iraq of today). Then, they set a point and took the direction of the North Pole, using a compass, and started stretching a rope. They continued connecting ropes and measuring the change in the angle of their location relative to the North Pole using the tool of Astrolabe. They stopped when the change in the angle was one degree. Then they did the same thing going south to check if they get the same rope length for one degree change south. The distance they measured in both directions was 66 and 2/3 miles. They computed 360 times that distance to get a complete circle and found the circumference of the globe to be 24,000 miles, which is close to the measurements that we have today (almost 40,000 km which is almost 25,000 miles).
Investigation and Discovery In this part the preservice teacher prepared three activities for the students. The first activity uses
Google Earth, where the students are required to find the town of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq of today and present the grid (in the View list in the main menu) of the longitude and latitude lines. The students are directed then to use the Ruler in the Tools list in the main menu, and to use the Line tool to measure the distance between two points on the same longitude line that are one degree far from each other on the latitude line in the area of Sinjar. Then the students are asked to multiply their measurements (which should be around 69 miles) by 360, and to compare it with the result that the Muslims got in the time of Al-Ma’mun almost 1200 years ago, and the measurement of today as they can find in the internet. Figure 2 describes a screen shot of the result that Google Earth gives for the distance between two points that are one degree far from each other on the latitude line in the area of Sinjar, on condition that the two points are on the same longitude line. In the second activity, the students are asked to open the applet of computing pi3 in order to build a circle of diameter one and measure its circumference using the applet. To do so, they are required to build two regular polygons, one that is inscribed in the circle and one that circumscribes it, and then measure their circumference using
Figure 2. A screen shot of the result that Google Earth gives for the distance between two points on the same longitude line that are one degree far from each other on the latitude line in the area of Sinjar
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Figure 3. A screen shot of the applet when the number of sides is 8
Figure 4. Investigating the Pi value: Beginning stage
the applet. They are asked to start from a square, repeat the same operations with a regular polygon of 8 sides, 16 sides and 32 sides. Then, the students are asked to compare the circumferences of the polygons with the circumference of the circle and draw proper conclusions. Finally the students are guided to notice the relation between the number of sides of the polygons to the accuracy in the estimation of the value of Pi. Figure 3 describes a screen shot of the applet when the number of sides is 8. In the third activity, the students are encouraged to investigate the Pi value algebraically; i.e. to investigate the relation between the circumference of a circle, estimated by an inscribed regular polygon, and its radius, and consequently get an approximation of the value of Pi. The students are given the following directions:
2. Express the length of the polygon side in terms of r. 3. Express the value of the polygon circumference in terms of r, and divide it by 2r to get an approximating expression for Pi. 4. Divide each side equally and draw a perpendicular to the side from its midpoint until it meets the circumference of the circle. 5. Draw a new regular polygon that connects all the new and old points on the circumference of the circle. 6. Use algebra and the Pythagorean Theorem to express the length of the side of the new polygon in terms of r - the length of z in the following figure (Let us call it Figure 5 in this chapter). 7. Go back to step 3 and repeat the process again for the cases of 16 sided regular polygon, and 32 sided regular polygon. 8. Do you see a pattern of an algebraic expression that approximates the value of Pi?
1. Approximate the circumference of the circle by the circumferences of regular polygons inscribed in the circle, starting with a square and each time doubling up the number of the polygon sides. The following figure represents the beginning stage (Let us call it Figure 4 in this chapter).
Summary In this part the preservice teacher prepared another electronic presentation that summarizes all the conclusions and results that the students were supposed to arrive to.
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Figure 5. Using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the side length of the new polygon
Evaluation In this part the preservice teacher prepared a WebQuest activity that requires the students to search the internet for another stories about the calculation of the circumference of the globe in other cultures. Then the students are asked to find various approximations of Pi through the history until the expansion of Taylor: Π=4*(1-1/3+1/5-1/7+…)
Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Carrying Out Projects Connected With Heritage and Technology The preservice teachers perceived their work with the technological projects connected with their heritage as fun, making them proud of their heritage, benefiting them, encouraging them to use such projects in their future teaching and increasing the school students’ motivation to learn mathematics.
Difficulties and Solutions Tables 2 and 3 in the Appendix describe the difficulties which the preservice teachers confronted while carrying out the projects and the solutions
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they used to overcome these difficulties. Table 2 concentrates on the difficulties of the preservice teachers who developed the learning materials – the regular groups (The preservice teachers worked in 8 regular groups of 3-5 members each, where each regular group constructed a site about a selected Muslim mathematician), and Table 3 emphasizes the difficulties of the preservice teachers who built the main site – the leading group (the leading group consisted of 3 members who constructed the main site and arranged links to the mathematicians’ sites. Furthermore, the leading group built the two indexes of the mathematicians). We will elaborate on these difficulties and their solutions in the discussion section below.
DISCUSSION Utilizing Mathematical Heritage and Technology Muslim mathematical heritage was utilized educationally to build internet sites that include the life histories of mathematicians and the historical development of mathematical concepts and procedures. In addition, the Muslim mathematical heritage together with technological tools, were used to develop learning materials to be used in mathematics lessons. Every lesson, used learning materials based on ICT pedagogical models and utilized the mathematical heritage. Searching for specific stories of mathematical heritage to fit into a lesson was of particular importance, as well as choosing ICT pedagogical models and technological tools that fit the presentation and/or examination of the chosen story of mathematical heritage. This successful utilization of heritage in writing mathematical lessons would encourage the preservice teachers from one side and inservice teachers from the other side (who would be introduced to the sites and lessons) to use the sites and the lessons in their teaching, which may motivate students to increase their engagement in
Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts
mathematics learning (Glevey, 2007), especially when this learning is done through exciting technological means and related to their own culture and heritage.
Models of Integrating Heritage and Technology in Mathematics Lessons The preservice teachers had the freedom to choose the ICT pedagogical models and the historical materials that could be integrated in their lesson plans. They also had the freedom to use any technological tool or learning material connected to their heritage in each part of the lesson they prepared. This freedom made them build nontraditional lessons that differed in structure, type of heritage material, way of presentation and tools that the students would use to explore and investigate mathematical concepts and procedures. Generally the preservice teachers wrote the lessons in two sequences: (1) starting from the historical material and advancing to the current learning material (2) starting from the current learning material and returning to the historical material. Regarding the first part of the lesson, some preservice teachers used mainly electronic presentations, or video presentations or simulations to present the mathematical concept, procedure or the life history of the Muslim mathematician. Then they utilized electronic worksheets, WebQuest activities or simulations to let the students discover and investigate mathematical concepts or procedures. Electronic presentations were also used in the summary part which means that (1) it was easy for the preservice teachers to work with electronic presentations (2) the preservice teachers considered the electronic presentations an educational tool that the teacher can utilize during various parts of the lesson. Another ICT pedagogical model which was used intensively by the preservice teachers is the video presentation which empowered the preservice teachers because it allowed them to present every day phenomena
or life histories of Muslim mathematicians from their own perspectives. They did that using various technological tools, especially movie editors, to change components of the video, removing some of them, adding others and recording their own comments. This empowering influence of technology is mentioned by Heafner (2004) who says that technology empowers students by engaging them in the learning process, in our case the teaching training process. He adds that technology gives flexibility to diversify tasks, and this is supported by what technology allowed the preservice teachers in our case, where they used various technological tools, ICT pedagogical models and heritage resources to build mathematical lessons.
Perceptions of Carrying Out Technological Projects Connected With Heritage The preservice teachers perceived their work with the technological projects connected with their heritage as fun, benefiting them, making them proud of their heritage, and encouraging them to use such projects in their future teaching. Igbaria, Schiffman, Wieckowski (1994) examined whether users are motivated to accept a new technology due to its usefulness or fun and found that the perceived usefulness is more influential than the perceived fun in determining whether to accept or reject microcomputer technology. We have not compared between the relative influence of each factor, but it seems that the two factors influenced the preservice teachers’ perception of the technological projects connected to technology. An important factor that influenced the preservice teachers’ perception is the heritage connection, where the historical mathematical performances of the Moslems made the students proud of their heritage and eager to carry out the projects. The preservice teachers also perceived learning of school students, based on carrying out or implementing similar projects, as increasing motivation to learn mathematics. This perception agrees with
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Blumenfeld et al. (1991) who described projectbased learning as a comprehensive approach to classroom teaching and learning that sustains motivation and thought.
Difficulties of Carrying Out the Technological Projects Which Utilize Heritage in Building Leaning Materials The preservice teachers who developed the learning materials had several difficulties which could be categorized as: 1. Difficulties due the absence of a clear plan for the project or specific examples on the various leaning materials that should be developed. This absence resulted in: a. Difficulties to choose proper models of integrating heritage and technology in the lessons. b. Difficulties in designing educational settings and choosing proper ICT pedagogical models for their lessons. 2. Difficulties of finding Muslim mathematicians and mathematical stories that could be integrated in mathematics lessons. These difficulties are of two types: a. Difficulties of finding mathematician who developed mathematical concepts which could be integrated in middle or elementary schools mathematics lessons. b. After finding several contributions of a mathematician, there was the difficulty of choosing one that can be integrated in the lesson more successfully than the rest. 3. Difficulties of verifying the real mathematician who developed a certain concept or procedure. 4. The difficulty to understand the mathematics of historical materials. 5. The difficulty to use a technological tool.
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6. Logistic difficulties to manage the selection of the materials. The first difficulty that the preservice teachers faced at the beginning of the project occurred because the lecturers had an idea of the whole project and its aim, but they did not have a detailed plan, models and examples of what they intended to develop with the preservice teachers. This difficulty was resolved through continuous discussion between the preservice teachers and the lecturers. Through collaborative work they developed an outline plan and refined it throughout the actual work. In addition, the collaboration between the preservice teachers and the lecturers resulted in good examples of lesson plans which the preservice teachers then followed. The lesson models and the lesson example presented in this chapter would help other educators develop similar projects and lessons with their students. The second difficulty happened because it was the first time that the preservice teachers integrate heritage stories in their lessons, so it was difficult for them to know how to choose an appropriate story or mathematical contribution in order to integrate it in their lessons. Coping with this difficulty led the preservice teachers to two sequences of action in carrying out their projects (current to history, history to current). The third difficulty could be explained by the fact that sometimes a mathematical concept could be related to more than one mathematician or one nation, for example, finding the circumference of the earth could be related to the Muslims or Greeks, i.e. there is a story how each of them discovered or re-discovered a way to compute the circumference of the earth. The fourth difficulty could be explained by the different representations and terms used nowadays and in the heritage texts to represent or name the same mathematical concepts. The fifth difficulty is expected because, though the preservice teachers majored in computers, they had not been acquainted with every new technological tool. The sixth difficulty occurred
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when the preservice teachers started selecting contributions of mathematicians and historical stories without coordinating the selection among them. Using a forum that included announcements of the preservice teachers regarding their selections overcame this difficulty. The preservice teachers’ leading group, who built the main site, faced several difficulties which could be characterized as: (1) design difficulties (2) maintenance difficulties (3) communication difficulties (4) technological difficulties (5) logistic difficulties. The first and third types of difficulties could be explained by the preservice teachers being new to site design, so they did not know how to choose between different site structures and did not understand that design issues could not be decided in one meeting or two, or that views and decisions may change from one meeting to another. The second type of difficulties could be explained by the innovation of the project which influenced the pace of the preservice teachers’ work. This innovation involved blending heritage and technology and made the building of learning materials more difficult and challenging, and thus it slowed it. Maintaining all the developed materials and organizing it efficiently urged the leading group to be creative in finding successful ways of data organization and data storage efficiency, thus we can say that the leading group demonstrated administrative effectiveness (Raudenbush, 2003). The fourth type of difficulties was due to the fact that the leading preservice teachers were new to the construction of internet sites, so they did not know which technological tools they should use to fulfill their goals. They started with tools that they knew, and cooperated with experts to decide upon tools that fulfill their special needs. They also learned special techniques and new tools that they did not know before. The fifth type of difficulties was inevitable because of the massive amount of learning materials and the large number of participants who carry out their final projects.
Regarding the solutions that the preservice teachers used to overcome their difficulties in carrying out the projects, the preservice teachers who developed the learning materials used the following solution types: (1) reflection (2) consulting and collaborating with the lecturers, each other or the computer lab experts (3) searching and consulting the web or history mathematics books (4) using a technological tool (forum). The preservice teachers who built the sites used the following solution types: (1) discussion and collaboration with the lecturers (2) consulting the lecturers and the computer lab experts (3) self learning and hard working (3) communicating with the preservice teachers who developed the learning materials (4) using data organization and storage efficiency. But overall, discourse with the lecturers and with peers was the main method to overcome the preservice teachers’difficulties. This role of discourse is known in the literature, for example Cobb, Boufi, McClain, and Whitenack (1997) found that discourse increased conceptual development, Latham (1997) found that discourse increased knowledge of a domain area, while Menke and Pressley (1994) found that discourse resulted in the improvement of task-related knowledge. The lecturers were always available for the preservice teachers to discuss any issue of the project and this facilitated the preservice teachers work in carrying out their project successfully. The importance of the lecturers’ role is supported by Usma & Frodden who emphasize the role of the facilitator in educational innovations.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS In this chapter we described how heritage and technology could be utilized to build mathematics lessons. Future research can examine how teachers and students use these lessons to teach and learn mathematics, how lessons based on heritage and technology influence the learning of students, their
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performances, their self esteem and pride, their attitudes towards and enjoyment of learning and their perceptions of mathematics.
CONCLUSION This chapter showed how heritage and history can be utilized using technological means to build learning materials and non-traditional lessons which students are expected to learn enthusiastically due to the link of the mathematics to their own heritage and to its special representation in an exciting technological way. This expectation depends on previous researches that describe the enthusiasm of students when learning in a novel technological environment (see for example Baya’a & Daher, 2009). The chapter described the difficulties that preservice teachers confronted in carrying out the project. These difficulties were mainly of educational, pedagogical, technical, and logistical types, added to the difficulties in reading historical material and relating it to teaching mathematics. They overcame these difficulties mainly by reflecting on the difficulty, communicating and collaborating with each other and with their lecturers. These means of overcoming difficulties confronted in carrying out the described technological projects were used by preservice teachers who carried out other technological projects for the first time, for example Daher and Baya’a (2008) reported that preservice teachers who managed online courses for the first time used communication as a means for overcoming their difficulties in managing the online courses. Confronting difficulties and overcoming them, the preservice teachers became more powerful in general and in working with educational innovations in particular. It could be said that the empowerment of the preservice teachers became possible because of the autonomy that they had in carrying out their projects (Usma & Frodden, 2003).
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REFERENCES Arcavi, A., Bruckheimer, M., & Ben-Zvi, R. (1982). Maybe a mathematics teacher can profit from the study of the history of mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 3(1), 30–37. Arroyo, C. (1992). What is the effect of extensive use of computers on the reading achievement scores of seventh grade students? (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 353 544). Baya’a, N., & Daher, W. (2009). Learning mathematics in an authentic mobile environment: The perceptions of students. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, 3(Special Issue), 6–14. Baya’a, N., Shehade, M. H., & Baya’a, R. A. (2009). A rubric for evaluating Web-based learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(4), 761–763. doi:10.1111/j.14678535.2008.00864.x Bitner, N., & Bitner, J. (2002). Integrating technology into the classroom: Eight keys to success. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(1), 95–100. Blumenfeld, P., Soloway, E., Marx, R., Krajcik, J., Guzdial, M., & Palincsar, A. (1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. Educational Psychologist, 26(3-4), 369–398. doi:10.1207/ s15326985ep2603&4_8 Boaler, J. (1998a). Alternative approaches to teaching, learning, and assessing mathematics. Paper presented at the European Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, Athens, Greece. Boaler, J. (1998b). Open and closed mathematics: Student experiences and understandings. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29, 41–62. doi:10.2307/749717
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Chang, T. T., & Chang, S. C. A. (2002, June 2-4). Assessing the project work: A teachers’ and students’ perspective. Paper presented at the Asian Pacific Conference on Education, Singapore. Chua, J. J. (2004). Evaluating the effects of project work on learning in a primary school. Unpublished MEd dissertation, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Cobb, P., Boufi, A., McClain, K., & Whitenack, J. (1997). Reflective discourse and collective reflection. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28(3), 258–277. doi:10.2307/749781 Cox, M., Preston, C., & Cox, K. (1999, September 2-5). What factors support or prevent teachers from using ICT in their classrooms? Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton. Retrieved from http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ educol/ documents/ 00001304.htm Daher, W. (2005). Integrating history of math in teaching and learning math. Jamea’a, 8, 422-470. Retrieved from http://www.qsm. ac.il/asdarat / jamiea/8/24.pdf Daher, W. (2009). Students’ perceptions of learning mathematics with cellular phones and applets. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in learning, 4(1), 23-28. Retrieved from http:// online-journals. org/i-jet/issue /view/51 Daher, W., & Baya’a, N. (2008). Managing online courses: Problems and worked-out solutions. In Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer Aided Learning, Amman, Jordan. Fullan, M. (1982). The meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.
Glevey, K. E. (2007). Students of African heritage, mathematics education and social justice. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 20. Retrieved from http://people.exeter. ac.uk/ PErnest/ pome20/Glevey% 20%20Students% 20of%20African% 20Heritage.doc Heafner, T. (2004). Using technology to motivate students to learn social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology & Teacher Education, 4(1), 42–53. Retrieved from http://www.citejournal. org/articles/v4i1 socialstudies1.pdf. Igbaria, M., Schiffman, S. J., & Wieckowski, T. J. (1994). The respective roles of perceived usefulness and perceived fun in the acceptance of microcomputer technology. Behaviour & Information Technology, 13, 349–361. doi:10.1080/01449299408914616 Jones, A. (2004). A review of the research literature on barriers to the uptake of ICT by teachers. Coventry, UK: Becta. Retrieved from http:// partners.becta. org.uk/page_ documents/research /barriers.pdf Kaye, E. (2008). The aims of and responses to a history of mathematics videoconferencing project for schools. In M. Joubert (Ed.), Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics. Retrieved from http://www.bsrlm. org. uk/IPs/ip28-3/ BSRLM-IP-28- 3-12.pdf Keengwe, J., Lawson-Body, A., Onchwari, G., & Arome, G. (2007). Empowering students to learn effectively with technology tools. In T. Bastiaens & S. Carliner (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2007 (pp. 2064-2068). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Koller, V., Harvey, S., & Magnotta, M. (2006). Technology-based learning strategies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. Retrieved from http://www.doleta.gov/ reports/papers/ TBL_Paper_ FINAL.pdf
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Latham, A. (1997). Asking students the right questions. Educational Leadership, 54(6), 84–86. Menke, D. J., & Pressley, M. (1994). Elaborative interrogation: Using ‘why’ questions to enhance the learning from text. Journal of Reading, 37(8), 642–645. Moore, A., Sherwood, R., Bateman, H., Bransford, J., & Goldman, S. (1986). Using problembased learning to prepare for project-based learning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York. O’Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E. F. (2009). The MacTutor history of mathematics archive. St Andrews, Scotland: School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews. Retrieved from http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk Pelgrum, W. J. (2001). Obstacles to the integration of ICT in education: Results from a worldwide educational assessment. Computers & Education, 37, 163–178. doi:10.1016/S0360-1315(01)00045-8 Railsback, J. (2002). Project-based instruction: Creating excitement for learning. Portland, OR: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Retrieved from http://www.nwrel.org/ request/2002aug/ textonly.html Raudenbush, S. W. (2003). Designing field trials of educational innovations. Invited speaker at the DRDC Conference “Conceptualizing Scale-UP: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” Washington DC (Nov. 2003). Retrieved from http://www.ssicentral. com/hlm/ techdocs/DRDC.pdf Tan, T. L. S. (2002). Using project work as a motivating factor in lower secondary mathematics. Unpublished MEd dissertation, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
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Usma, J., & Frodden, C. (2003). Promoting teacher autonomy through educational innovation. IKALA. Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 8(1). Retrieved from http://quimbaya.udea. edu.co/%7Eikala/ pdf/Ikala-Vol.8_5.pdf Wang, Y. (2006). Technology projects as a vehicle to empower students. Educational Media International, 43(4), 315–330. doi:10.1080/09523980600926275
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Heritage of Muslim Mathematicians: The life history and contributions of mathematicians from the Islamic empire era. ICT Pedagogical Model: A pedagogical model constructed using ICT tools which also apply these tools in the learning/teaching process. Examples on ICT pedagogical models are: electronic presentation, video representation, webbased learning environment, WebQuest activity, electronic worksheet and simulation. Mathematics History: History of the development of mathematical concepts and procedures. Project Based Learning: Learning which is based projects. These projects could be carried out in the classroom or out of the classroom. It is intended as an alternative learning method where the student is active and engaged in deep learning. Technological Tool: An electronic, digital or physical tool that can expand the human ability for performing tasks or generating products. For example: word processor, presentation program, spreadsheet program, graphics editing program, picture editor, movie editor, video format converter, web design editors, web design programs and platforms, web design script languages, web applets, voice recorder, digital video camera, etc. Technology Based Learning: Learning which is based on technology. This technology could be electronic, digital or physical. It is introduced to make the student work on the learning topic
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individually or collaboratively to discover the phenomenon associated with the learning topic. Web-Based Learning Environment: Any educational web site constructed by educators (preservice, inservice teachers or other educational experts) who attempt to wrap together knowledge in specific content areas and technological features in pursuit of learning goals.
ENDNOTES 3 1 2
At http://users.qsm.ac.il/islamath. At http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/. At http://illuminations.nctm.org/Activity Detail.aspx?ID=16.
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APPENDIX Table 2. Difficulties and solution during the carrying out of the projects, regarding the regular groups Difficulties
Solutions
There was no outline plan for what the preservice teachers were supposed to do.
The preservice teachers inquired from the lecturers about this difficulty and collaborated with them to put such a plan.
The lecturers did not provide a lesson model or a good lesson example of what the preservice teachers should do.
The preservice teachers inquired from the lecturers about this difficulty and discussed with them the various models of integrating heritage and technology in mathematics lessons.
The preservice teachers gathered massive material about Muslim mathematicians, and did not know what to do with it.
The preservice teachers reflected on the gathered material and selected with the lecturers the important mathematicians that their life history and contribution should be written in detail under the sub-section of selected mathematicians, while the other mathematicians were described in general under the sub-sections of the indexes.
The preservice teachers found many historical stories of Muslim mathematicians’ contributions, but faced the difficulty of selecting appropriate stories for their projects.
The preservice teachers reflected on the gathered stories and inquired about this difficulty from the lecturers who suggested that they should find a historical story of a concept or procedure which could be related to the current mathematics curriculum of middle schools.
The preservice teachers faced another difficulty with the historical stories. They did not know how to use it; just to tell it, or to present its historical mathematical concepts and procedures.
The preservice teachers Inquired from the lecturers how to utilize the historical stories and discussed the issue with them. They agreed to present the historical mathematical concepts and procedures involved in the story, relate them to current concepts and procedures and investigate their correctness with current mathematical techniques.
Some of the preservice teachers faced difficulties with some of the technological tools.
The preservice teachers supported each other and, in few cases, asked for support from experts in the computer lab in the college. In most cases, they found one among them who is specialized in the technological tool that they had difficulties with, or they cooperated together to get acquainted with the tool by reading its menu or trying it by themselves.
Sometimes the preservice teachers selected the same materials and argued among them on who selected the materials first.
The lecturers and the leading group started a forum which included the announcements of the preservice teachers regarding the materials that they selected, and the one who had the first dated announcement had the right on the selected materials.
Making sure that the contribution (concept or procedure) is actually for the mathematician to whom it is related to.
The preservice teachers browsed the internet and searched in mathematics history books for evidence of the mathematician who actually developed the concept or procedure. In some cases they found contradicting data on who was the first to introduce the concept or procedure.
Some preservice teachers had difficulty in understanding some of the historical mathematical materials.
The preservice teachers discussed the materials with each other and in some cases they consulted the lecturers.
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Table 3. Difficulties and solution during the carrying out of the projects, regarding the leading group Difficulties
Solutions
Choosing between different structures for the main internet site.
The choice was made by an agreed decision between the leading group and the lecturers. They did not arrive at an agreed site structure from the beginning, but developed the structure over and over again, and through different attempts.
Deciding on technological tools for constructing the main site.
The preservice teachers used technological tools that they had known and mastered already from other computer courses in which they participated. Sometimes they worked with the tools without prior knowledge to examine their fitness for their specific needs. In some cases they had to consult experts in the computer lab in the college and graphical experts that they knew.
Keeping the time schedule of the project and making their fellow preservice teachers deliver the learning materials on time.
They urged their fellow preservice teachers to deliver the learning material on time,andthentheyworkeddayandnighttouploadthesematerialstothemainsite. Sometimes, they had to involve the lecturers sometimes to make a formal request from their fellow preservice teachers and set deadlines.
Putting in the right place every page of the internet sites delivered to them by their fellow preservice teachers, and deleting the junk material that was forgotten by those fellow preservice teachers.
They worked day and night to clean the sites from junk materials, and set a structure of directories and file naming that all the preservice teachers had to follow.
The lecturers were not consistent and sometimes changed their views and remarks.
Discussing modeling issues with the lecturers made the leading group understand why the lecturers sometimes changed their views, so it was easy for them to comply with the lecturers’ new suggestions.
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Chapter 19
Multimedia Technology: A Companion to Art Visitors Giuseppe Barbieri Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy Augusto Celentano Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy
ABSTRACT This chapter describes the design and use of multimedia technology for personal guides and public projections for two exhibitions on ancient and contemporary art. The authors discuss the critical issues, suggest approaches and solutions, and evaluate the results. In both exhibitions, the researchers designed personal guides on Apple iPod touch devices, with rich information structure and rich multimedia content. In one of the two exhibitions they also implemented a narrative path in the exhibition rooms with large displays and projections. They evaluated the guide design with questionnaires and automatic tracing of device use. This chapter reports the project outcomes.
INTRODUCTION: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Compared to what has occurred for almost all other expressions of human creativity, the enjoyment of a work of art has remained essentially unchanged for over two centuries. To make a few examples, we acknowledge that the way we listen to music has deeply changed from the late eighteenth century; at that time photography was in its infant life; cinema would come one century later; radio and television have reached a mature DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch019
stage in the second half of the twentieth century, and only at the end of the last century the Net has started to gradually—albeit permanently—change our way to access information. Also the way we read, which is the most ancient and widespread cultural experience, has deeply changed in the meanwhile. In the visual arts domain the last radical invention concerning the fruition of works of art is due to Tommaso Puccini (1749-1811), superintendent of the Uffizi collections in Florence, Italy. In the middle of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century, he decided to affix a “card” next to each work in the Gallery; the card, a tag labeling the
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artwork, was telling the author’s name, the subject depicted, the date of execution, the techniques used, almost anticipating the golden rule of the five W of the Anglo-Saxon journalism (even if Why? remained in the background). The invention of Puccini is definitely a turning point in our way to approach art. Until then the relationship with art was mainly set on aesthetic parameters; the visitor directly facing artworks was mainly concerned in admiring masterpieces, perceiving the richness and variety of a collection, making small personal discoveries. Later on, the visitor’s attention was increasingly drawn to matters related to knowledge rather than to pleasure: finding authorship attribution (who made this work?), identifying complex subjects (what does it represent?), detecting relations (who or what has influenced it?), as well as distinguishing original work from replicas and copies. The way art was accessed before the Puccini’s invention was elitist in private collections and shared in public places like churches and other buildings of worship; both certainly ensured a great involvement of users, demanding for opinions and making art fruition a personal experience. The Puccini’s invention caused users to approach the knowledge side of art rather than its emotional side, favoring those users who were able to recognize the style of an artist, to solve an uncertainty about anonymity, to specify a date or an influence. Indeed, the historical artistic knowledge has been built on such a ground, as long as the taste of the public approaching art was going through refinement. As a consequence, the work of art has increasingly become an object of study, the “document” of a specific culture and not only the confirmation of the classical style; knowledge and reflection have replaced enjoyment and immediate experience. The concepts that have driven the study of art dynamics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were justified by the demand that art regain a social centrality after the storm of the French Revolution and the Napoleon season: due to the
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sudden weakening of the former ruling classes and the deletion of countless religious orders, a millennial population of art clients disappeared; the training protocol of an artist had radically changed, no longer held in the shop of an older master but within academic institutions, thus changing the attitude towards tradition; substantial changes occurred in the dynamics of the art market. Such a situation has forced the artwork into a kind of still aura, almost acting as a shield and obstacle in its fruition. Curiously, such a sacral esteem has been mainly rooted in highly advanced countries, like USA and Japan, which have rarely felt the need, even in recent years, to apply the growing technological resources to achieve a more engaging and participatory fruition. Especially since the mid-twentieth century onwards major investments were undertaken to refurbish and modernize the containers of art—when they were located in buildings not originally designed for that purpose—and to build new special exhibition spaces. In an early stage of this process the architects have naturally speculated on how to make more effective and enjoyable the access to artworks. However, very often their ideas resulted almost exclusively in the search for better light sources, in more adequate sizing and shaping of the spaces, in the choice of functional pathways and in the creation of accessory spaces, such as a cafeteria, a bookshop, etc.. In a second phase the research has been focused on designing innovative shapes for the art containers themselves; never was put into question the intimate process of art fruition, retaining the chronological alignment as a chief criterion for the presentation of the artworks. All this happened despite the history of art had, in the meanwhile, multiplied the tools and approaches for studying (much more than for enjoying) artworks; approaches based on iconographic methods, the social history of art, the conception of the artwork as a sign (in a semiology perspective), or as an brief, as in more recent
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proposals (Baxandall, 1985), have left few traces in the actual art fruition experience.
TOWARDS A NEW WAY TO ENJOY ART We believe—and we are not alone in such a belief—that we cannot get to a new way to know, explain and enjoy artworks without resorting to multimedia technology. Technology is certainly not a panachée, an all-purpose solution to problems, and multimedia technology makes no exception; rather, it creates a context in which art and artworks can be approached, explained, learned and enjoyed more fruitfully (Manning & Sims 2004; Ronchi, 2009; Stock & Zancanaro, 2007), following the theories about the relationship between perceptual consciousness and technology extensions discusses by Derrick de Kerchove (1991, 1995, 2001), on the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan’s works. Multimedia has a significant role in our cultural scene, and not only in recent times. Since long it has changed our experience of enjoying music (with portable players and video clips), human relationships (with mobile phones), leisure time (with video games). Nevertheless, despite the apparently pervasiveness of art related multimedia products, the presence of multimedia content in the spaces of art fruition is still accidental, constrained into marginal areas, keeping a distance from the artworks wanting to retain their aura intact, and devoted to shallow explanations, to low quality image reproduction and mostly to audio-based elementary comments. In some cases multimedia products are seen as dangerous competitors of the “catalog”, considered as the only authoritative collector of information and comments. Multimedia installations—most of times simple video loops—and guides are often provided with little and shallow content or, at the opposite, they are more lengthy than the average time a user can reasonably devote
to the visit, playing the role of an alternative, not a complement to the visit. It is worth to recall that the enjoyment of a work of art is not a collective but an individual experience, even if in a public space prone to socialization, hence requiring selectable, if not personalized, guidance. Audio guides for museums and exhibitions are used since long, but over time they have received very little changes in the features offered and in the usage style; operating modes and content rhetoric are basically unchanged despite the evolution of the—almost invisible—electronic technologies used. The techniques are different, electronic storage media and wireless transmission system have replaced magnetic tapes and compact discs; yet, in the age of interactive multimedia content is almost exclusively limited to bare audio, voice comments seldom accompanied by background music, unless music or iconography is the primary content of the exhibition itself. Interaction is provided at the minimum functional level by a numeric keypad, or in some pioneering cases—like the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm—by location based IR or RFID tags. There are experiences with the latest generation hardware, such as Windows Mobile PDAs or Apple iPod touch devices, but often they are chosen because trendy and bearer of a strong modern image rather than for the advanced functionalities offered. In principle the implementation of an interactive multimedia guide for a museum or for a temporary exhibition should be a relatively easy task, encouraged not only by the advances of technology and the availability of sophisticated low cost portable equipment, but also by the early experiences of some important cultural institutions and museums, and the pervasive use of multimedia by publishing houses and software companies. Since the pioneering multimedia products on CDROM of the nineties to the applications for art and tourism downloadable freely or at nominal price from Apple iTunes and other dedicated sites the road has been long, but it seems it has eventually been walked.
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A few museums and cultural institutions are now crossing the border of the traditional audio guide model with modern hardware and multimedia content (Damala & Kockelkorn, 2006). The experiences, however, are still in an infant stage.
A Sample of Current Experiences The Ship Museum in Barcelona, Spain, (MMB, 2009) offers a guided tour on touch screen smartphones based on the Windows Mobile platform. The normal device functions are blocked; a software application presents audio pieces, short stories about the life at sea, complemented by short texts—mostly definitions of terms—and images. The selection of the tour section is made through a numeric keypad; a menu allows the user to choose the media items: audio, images, or texts. The images and texts can be bookmarked and at the end of the visit the user can issue a request to receive them as e-mail attachments. The bookmarked content is sent as a simple list of files without recalling the tour structure and the original content organization. More advanced interactive devices like the Apple iPhone/iPod touch are now appearing in museums, anticipating new experiences due to the excellent quality of audio and video playback and to the more natural interaction style, not to mention the fashionable appeal of the device itself. Guides based on the iPod touch are available, among others, at the New York MoMA and the Tate Liverpool Gallery, that for their reputation represent noticeable case studies. Despite the advanced interactive multimedia functionalities, in both institutions the iPod touch is used as a simple mediatheque featuring mostly audiobased content. The MoMA Audioguide program (MoMA, 2009) features presentations that can be downloaded on the visitor own iPhone/iPod from the local wi-fi network. The program structure relies on a simple hierarchical playlist delivering audio-only comments with limited interaction capabilities.
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At the Tate Liverpool Gallery an exhibition on Klimt masterpieces held in Summer 2008 was also supported by a catalog of audiovisual presentations with very simple visual content delivered freely on iPhone/iPod touch devices, downloadable from the Web site of the Gallery as independent audio clips (Tate, 2008). None of the two cases exploits video to deliver information (except for some interviews with experts and sample images in the Klimt guide), nor gestural interaction out of list selection. The choice of limiting the content to the audio channel instead of a complete multimedia (audiovisual) presentations is widely adopted for at least three reasons: simplicity of design and construction, ease of use—there are fewer controls to operate and the comment can be listened while looking at the artwork—and, not least, the absence of problems related to copyrights on imagery and visual media, which are usually expensive. We shall return later to this topic because we too had to face it in our project, with severe limitations. A low-end example of use of the new devices occurs at the Belvedere Galleries in Vienna (Belvedere, 2009) that provide iPod touch devices that “simulate” a traditional keypad audio guide (Figure 1). The user interacts with a virtual keypad drawn on the iPod screen, selecting artworks by number: audio comments are delivered as in an old-style audio guide with very limited playback control: there are no advance/back controls, the volume is adjusted by the hardware iPod buttons and the only allowed operations are pause/resume and back to the keypad for a new selection. The entire device is shielded into a rigid case preventing the visitor from executing other operations, downsizing a high level equipment to a very basic audio player. What is, then, the significance of a sophisticated appliance, potentially able to elicit the visitor’s emotional level, so poorly used as a simple audio device? The answer is surely non technical: the iPod touch is a very common device, especially among young persons; content can be
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Figure 1. The iPod audioguide at Belvedere Galleries in Vienna (photo by the authors)
downloaded from the Internet, allowing it to survive beyond the time of the visit. This is indeed the proposal of the MoMA and the Tate Gallery, which allows visitors to use their personal equipment in place of those provided on-site. Also, the modern design of such devices well matches the image of contemporary art: for the designers it is a privileged option even if technically redundant. A richer audio content is present where the museum or exhibition is about music and sound, as at the Haus der Musik in Vienna (HM, 2009) hosting the Wiener Philarmoniker Museum and a variety of experiments on music, voice and sound. In this case the audio guide (a quite conventional type) is a real complement to the information exhibited in museum, allowing a visitor to listen to audio content without interfering with the other visitors. This museum realizes also an interesting integration between public and personal devices, organizing the audio-based content around a mix of public booths, proposing on large touch screens audiovisual experiments to several visitors each with a separate headset, and private devices for individual content selection.
A different class of guides for the art is the class of multimedia applications and documents available on the World Wide Web and in on-line stores like Apple iTunes, playing the role of information supplement to know and learn in a time different from the visit. The landscape is very wide and highly populated, covering more the editorial domain than the domain of the art guides. It is a fast growing sector of education and knowledge delivery, trying to follow with renovated technology (but with a plain structure and much less interaction) the traces of some pioneering multimedia products on art (Microsoft, 1993; Louvre, 1997). We recall only a few representative examples from the iTunes catalog, like the applications based on the Pentimento system by Antenna Audio (2009), and the guide to the Louvre Museum (Louvre, 2009).
Some Advanced Attempts Such a situation of cautious opening to a more innovative use of multimedia technology has notable exceptions, like the Google Earth application for the Prado Museum in Madrid (Google,
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2009). While oriented to different goals than an art guide, it is representative of the new directions the interactive multimedia technology is undertaking. Recent experiments of the movie director Peter Greenaway (http://www.petergreenaway.info/) trace a different and smart road to present visitors the details of masterpieces: Nightwatching by Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Last Supper by Leonardo Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan and The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese at the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice; or to introduce them to the lifestyle of the 16th and 17th centuries with the movie Peopling the Palaces at the Palaces of Venaria Reale near Turin, Italy. They are, indeed, exceptions, implemented with major film techniques by using at full extent the ability, the instruments and the resources of a movie artist, hence restricted to exceptional events and not to continuous large scale education. The use of audiovisual content is, anyway, only a first step to a novel way to access art. Multimedia content is certainly one way to implement the Puccini’s tag at a larger extent, but does not contribute, per se, to a better understanding of art. The visitor is still depending on the content authors, on the curators and on their subjective view of the exhibition. Any real improvement should put the visitor in the center of a rich interaction system able to reveal the many facets of an artwork, an author, a collection, a period, etc., through multimedia technologies whose content, perspectives and reading pace should remain in the hands of the visitor himself. Multimedia technology should be a companion of the visitor, ready but not intrusive, attentive but discreet, able to answer questions without being superficial or pedantic. A goal hard to reach, not only on the technology side, but mainly on the content side, due to the huge amount of knowledge that even small artistic manufacts bring with them.
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AN EXPERIENCE IN ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITIONS In this chapter we shall describe the main outcomes of a project jointly carried by the Departments of Arts History and Conservation of Cultural Heritage and of Computer Science of Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy. We experienced multimedia technology with public installations and mobile devices in the context of two events held in our University during 2009. The first event, Nigra Sum Sed Formosa - Sacred and Beauty of the Christian Ethiopia, was an exhibition featuring about one hundred objects from the Christian art and tradition in Ethiopia during a time span of four centuries, belonging for the most part to private collectionists, hence never exhibited. The exhibition opened March through May 2009. The second exhibition, Bruce Nauman, Topological Gardens, was a section of the USA participation to the Venice Biennale di Arti Visive international art exhibition, open from mid June to mid October 2009. The two exhibitions are very different in content, goal, and period, compelling us to face a wide range of problems and to approach the use of multimedia technology in art enjoyment from different perspectives. The project is still in progress, continuing in 2010 with an exhibition on XX Century Russian art in April and with a partnership program with Palazzo Grassi to design multimedia catalogs and mobile guides for the François Pinault collection of contemporary art at Punta della Dogana in Venice. The organization of the exhibition on Ethiopian sacred art (from now on called with the abbreviated title Nigra Sum) was in large part designed under the control of the University, while in the second exhibition (from now on called with the abbreviated title Nauman) the University simply acted as a host, with no responsibility about its organization and structure. Such a difference was fundamental since in the first exhibition we could exploit multimedia technology at full extent in the
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public installation as well as in personal mobile guides, while in the second exhibition our work had to be restricted to the multimedia personal guides. Due to these differences, in the remainder of this chapter we shall put a major emphasis on the design for the Nigra Sum exhibition, receiving most of our efforts. We shall discuss at lesser extent the Nauman exhibition, focusing on the differences between the two multimedia guides and to the re-use of the design and of a large part of the implementation.
Figure 2. A composite video projection about Ethiopian ceremonies (photo by the authors)
Public Spaces and Multimedia The Nigra Sum exhibition was conceived from the beginning by looking at the integration between the original works and objects with supplemental multimedia material to implement an effective knowledge and enjoyment of the exhibition deep meaning; Figures 2–5 illustrate some of the actual multimedia installations. Indeed, the same exhibition content was demanding for a rich contextualization and a narrative style of presentation. We approached both needs with movie clips taken from historical archives, other videos filmed on purpose, animated sequences of photographs, and with the proposal of an articulated soundtrack accompanying the visitor in the exhibition rooms, each featuring sacred and traditional songs according to the room content. Interviews with experts, projected at real size on vertical panels, provide authoritative comments on the findings displayed. Multimedia presentations, such as a patch of magic scroll details projected on the ceiling at the entrance hall (Figure 6), induce a mood preparing the visitor to the exhibition themes. Unlike most museums, multimedia is not confined into a special room aside the exhibition but marks the visitor path; Figure 7 shows the placement of the seventeen multimedia installations in the exhibition space.
Figure 3. A vertical video projection at real size featuring a comment by an expert (photo by the authors)
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Personal Multimedia Devices Personal multimedia guides provide more accurate and detailed information on the exhibition content. Being personal, they are used at the pace and extent needed by each visitor, complementing the public multimedia installations. The design, implementation and deployment of a “good” multimedia guide—whatever “good” might mean in this context—involves many problems not easy to solve as a whole. The first Figure 4. A composite multimedia projection recreating the atmosphere of a painted Sanctuary (photo by Elisabetta Rossi, reprinted with permission)
Figure 5. The Fra Mauro’s World map with a presentation by an expert on the left and a zoomed projection of the map details on the right (photo by Elisabetta Rossi, reprinted with permission)
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important design decision is the choice of the type of guide, whose structure and content are not uniquely defined, and are indeed the real design challenge to which technology choices will naturally follow. In designing the guide for the exhibition Nigra Sum, our first event, we set as primary goal to overcome the old-style model based on a collection of isolated materials, with the ambition to provide visitors with a holistic view of the exhibition: not (or not only) a collection of works individually illustrated, but the presentation as complete as possible of a theme, the Christian art in Ethiopia, in the context in which it has evolved and expressed its meaning. Such a choice has two reasons: at one side, the theme of the exhibition was not generally known, hence it required a wide and articulated presentation to make visitors aware of history and traditions that eventually justify the displayed works; at the other side, visitors are living an experience they will remember to the extent to which it has been cognitively rich and emotionally engaging. We started the project along two directions: to engage the visitor with rich multimedia informaFigure 6. The setup of a ceiling installation in the entrance hall introducing the exhibition atmosphere with a composition of details from magic scrolls (photo by Elisabetta Rossi, reprinted with permission)
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Figure 7. The multimedia installations at the exhibition Nigra Sum. Ground floor on the left, first floor on the right. The letters identify the type of installation: i = projection of expert interview; m = multimedia presentation, slide show, etc.; v = video (movie clip, reportage); the grey area at the center of the ground floor is the ceiling projection visible in Figure 6
tion even in the small in size of a handheld device, reflecting and complementing the multimedia installations set up in the exhibition, and to carefully organize information and its presentation style to provide a guidance to the Christian art in Ethiopia as a whole. The work done has enabled us to test both the multimedia technology and the content design in a real context. Such a context is subject to the critical assessment of diverse visitors, hence much more complex than in a simulated academic experiment. The project has faced not only the technical problems of implementing a deliverable product, but also (and in retrospect mainly) the many organization and management problems that often in academic research are underestimated. For a technical description of the project details and the analytical evaluation of the results the reader is referred to two recent papers (Barbieri et al., 2009, Celentano et al., 2009). In next section we illustrate the design principle of the guide
DESIGNING INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA GUIDES The more we differentiate the multimedia guide from the ones most frequently used, the more we can experiment the visitors acceptance (or rejection) of our view about new approaches to art fruition. Novelties, anyway, do not come from wishful thinking but emerge from the analysis of the requirements in a specific context. Two main requirements emerged: use at visit time and mix of presentation styles. Use at visit time. The guide primary function is helping the visitor to understand the exhibition during the visit. It should be used to receive information on the objects displayed, to improve understanding by watching presentations of general issues about the exhibition themes, to review the issues as the visit proceeds and at the end, supporting different access paths to information, in particular to non-linear visits that differentiate the guide from a tour satisfying the needs of different visitor classes (Marti et al., 1999; Verona & Levasseur, 1983).
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Making the guide available as a stand-alone product, with downloadable content or on-line access, is an added value that deserves consideration but in our case conflicted with copyright restrictions. From a rights management point of view the guide was formally considered an extension of the catalog (for which the copyright was correctly regulated) at the price of confining it within the spaces of the exhibition itself, preventing any download and copy operation, due the difficulty of setting up in short time a correct protection system against unauthorized distribution. Mix of presentation styles. The exhibition included different categories of objects: sacred icons, crosses of different style and use, architectural drawings of worship buildings, scrolls with prayers and images, pictures representative of a religious style of life. Such a mix requires a multi-facet presentation style combining a catalog helping the visitor to explain single objects by their appearance and an essay presenting a more general description of themes, places, practices and history in a less schematic and more narrative style. We designed therefore a guide halfway between a catalog and a collection of short essays to be read according to different perspectives, independent but complementary: a type of guide unusual in the domain of art exhibitions, more similar to a travel guide or to a touristic guide. A travel guide presents a country or a city under different viewpoints by bringing together in one volume introductory presentations, practical information, descriptive cards of places and monuments, maps and plans, etc.. In our guide, along with a catalog containing a selection of the exhibition works and a map—information traditionally provided with audio guides and leaflets—we included two other perspectives that are one of the three novel and qualifying aspects of the project—the second being the user interface, the third the traces of users’ activity. The first additional perspective is represented by a series of short audiovisual essays and inter-
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views with experts who comment the exhibition as a whole emphasizing the major works in their historical and cultural context. Such material is organized into six sections giving visitors an context for exploring the exhibition. The second additional perspective is represented by a list of themes crossing the sections of the exhibition, accessed through keywords arranged in a “tag cloud” according to a Web 2.0 style. Each keyword identifies and groups different media items: comments on objects and artworks, audiovisual presentations, interviews with experts, which together explain in detail the idea synthetically defined by a tag. The second qualifying aspect of our project is the design and the structure of the user interface. Banned the keypad based model, we have used the native iPod touch interaction technology: brilliant graphics, ample screen, touch controls, natural gestures to scroll lists, to magnify images, to play and pause video, to control sound, and so on. We designed the guide look and feel to recall the visual elements of the exhibition and the colors and graphics of the Ethiopian art: the details of the crosses, the portrayal of the icons’ characters, the letters of magic rolls and manuscripts, the elegance of the scrolls in the large World Map of Fra’ Mauro, one of the exhibition masterpieces, are a guidance the visitor perceives as an element of emotional continuity, making the device an integral part of the exhibition: the technical instrument looses its distinctive appearance made of buttons, icons, item lists in branded colors and styles and wears the colors and shapes of the old—yet captivating—Ethiopian tradition. The third distinctive element of the guide, a direct consequence of the experimental nature of the project, is the ability to query the guide about the way it is actually used. We collected a questionnaire with the visitors comments, from which an overall appreciation emerged, but also some difficulties to identify all the guide features. Aside, we implemented a system for automatic detection of the user activity: each time a user
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scrolls through the catalogs, reads or browses the artwork pages, watches a video, listens to an audio and examines an image, the gestures made, i.e., the commands given, are recorded and sent to a database for a cumulative analysis. Results will be discussed in the “Lessons Learned” Section.
A Multimedia Guide for Ancient Art Figure 8a shows the structure of navigation among the guide screens of the iPod touch guide for the exhibition Nigra Sum. An initial presentation by an expert of Ethiopian art introduces the exhibition, then the main menu displays four section titles: the introductory section (simply called Guide), the catalog, the exhibition map and a tag cloud. As already noticed, we have organized the multimedia material to resemble the organization of a book about the exhibition, containing a collection of essays plus a catalog synthetically describing the works. The six chapters of the introductory section correspond to six main exhibition themes: Icons, Crosses, Devotional objects, Testimonials, Drawings and Religious architecture. Each chapter is introduced by a set of short multimedia presenta-
tions and video interviews with experts who provide an explanation of the theme main features. A catalog lists the objects pertaining to that chapter for individual explanation. The first three chapters introduce themes directly corresponding to the types of works: icons, crosses, devotional objects. The catalog part is dominant here, as the works deserve detailed descriptions as individual objects of art and tradition. Each object is portrayed by a small image and is described by a short text and an audio comment, as usual in audio guide, giving a bare level of satisfaction to visitors used to the traditional audio guides. Supplemental multimedia content are provided: one or more high resolution images can be zoomed on with standard iPod multitouch gestures to reveal details of small objects and hidden perspectives, e.g., the back face of an icon or of a cross. Where meaningful, a longer audiovisual presentation provides more information through slide shows and animations. Links to the introductory section presentations frame the object in the proper context with a coherent narration. The other three chapters—Testimonials, Drawings and Religious architecture—collect heterogeneous objects and show the full poten-
Figure 8. The navigation schema of the guides for the two exhibitions: (a) Nigra Sum; (b) Nauman
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tial of the guide organization, putting together heterogeneous multimedia files such as movie fragments, audio recordings, slide shows, religious music and a number of interviews with an expert and with one of the exhibition curators delivering comments about the exhibition organization and explanations about selected works. Also in these chapters catalogs index the relevant works. The interaction is based on iPod touch native gestures, kept to a minimum: tap to select, vertical slide to scroll lists, horizontal slide (flicking) to browse pages, two-finger gestures to zoom in and out images, virtual controls for media playback. Works are selected by tapping the catalog on the proper item. Catalogs correspond to collections of objects related by being in the same room or belonging to the same chapter. The other sections of the guide are the general catalog, collecting all the works and objects in a sequential order, suggesting a standard path of visit, a set of maps helping visitors to move room by room, exploring the guide content according to the exhibition physical layout, and a tag cloud indexing the exhibition themes orthogonally. Figure 9a shows a sample of screenshots. The most innovative contribution of the guide, besides its mixed style of narrations and descriptive pages, is the tag cloud, that mimics the unstructured classification of contents typical of Web 2.0 sites. The tags (fourth screen in the top row of Figure 9a) collect through evocative words multimedia items already indexed in the chapters of the Guide
section, offering an alternative order to explore the exhibition themes.
A Multimedia Guide for Contemporary Art Figures 8b shows the navigational structure of the guide for the Nauman exhibition. It is easy to perceive the two guides stem from a common design; the Nauman guide is simpler due to the small number of artworks and to their substantial homogeneity, while the presence of different types of artworks in the Ethiopian art exhibition makes that guide structure naturally more articulated. The guide is organized around three sections, missing the tag cloud section for time and copyright issues that prevented us to implement the same variety of material put in the Nigra Sum guide. According with the exhibition curator, we relied entirely on video clips based on interviews and presentations by the curator himself and his collaborators, and on movies about recent events related to the artist, such as the Honoris Causa Degree in Visual Arts from the IUAV University in Venice and the international prize Leone d’Oro of the Venice Biennale d’Arti Visive that were filmed and included in an introductory section. A soundtrack of minimalist music scans the pauses of the interviews with a background evocative of the author environment. Also the map section was simplified, since most of the rooms contained only
Figure 9. Screenshots from the two guides: (a) Nigra Sum ; (b) Nauman
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one or few works and installations of very large size. Figure 9b shows a sample of screenshots.
Tracing the Visitors Activity to Evaluate the Design Novel ideas must be careful evaluated to avoid to turn enthusiastic expectations into inappropriate boring results and failures. Interactive devices and applications can be perceived more or less useful, more or less captivating not only based on their—good or bad—design but also—and mostly—based on the fulfillment of user expectations, on their ability and needs and on the verified ease of use. Hence, the evaluation phase is of paramount importance, a well known claim in the human computer interaction community. We resorted on two techniques: a quite classical questionnaire proposed to visitors at the end of the visit, and the automatic tracing of their actions, capturing the commands issued to the guide. Each of them contributes to the evaluation, in different ways: the questionnaire exploits the subjective part of the user perception: satisfaction, interest, curiosity, perceived ease of use; the automated analysis of the way the guide is used exploits in an objective way the facts: how the guide has been used, how much it adheres to the interaction style designed, what part of the content has been explored; at the other side, how many times the actions performed evidence a problem, a pattern of use vicious or inefficient, a boring video presentation abandoned after a few seconds, and so on. The technique for tracing the users has been designed at the simplest level: each gesture, i.e., each command is trapped by the software application and logged. Gestures and commands correspond to pages viewed, to video played, to artworks selected, to menu accessed, etc.. Periodically, the log is sent to a server were it is accumulated. We have collected more than 100.000 records for the Nigra Sum guide and more then 20.000 records for the Nauman guide, counting for more than
2.000 different visits. The results are described in (Barbieri et al., 2009); in the next section we comment the main outcomes of the evaluation of the Nigra Sum guide, the most interesting due to the more articulated perspectives of exploration. The evaluation on the two guides is still in progress to discover further findings about the visit patterns.
LESSONS LEARNED Table 1 shows a synthesis of the guide use collecting about one half of the visits with the Nigra Sum guide. The matrix elements tell the number of times a user has moved from a content represented by a label in the left column to a content represented by a label in the top row. The table aggregates the content according to the following sets: Home, the initial page; Catalog, the general catalog of artworks; Sections, the section pages linking the introductory audiovisual content; Maps, the maps of the exhibition rooms; Tags, the pages accessed by keywords from the tag cloud; Seclist, the section catalogs; Maplist, the room catalogs; Video, any audiovisual content; Audio, the audio comments related to each artwork; Artwork, the pages containing the artwork descriptions. A few important facts come immediately into evidence: first of all, from the home screen most of times the visitors have selected the map, then the general catalog, then the section index and the tag index; such a behavior seems to denote a preference for a traditional way of use, relying on sequential catalogs and maps, rather than on a semantic content classification (sections, tags). The catalogs associated to the thematic sections have been used rarely, while those associated to the maps have been heavily used, showing some implicit trust in the physical organization of the exhibition. The multimedia content, i.e., the audiovisual presentations, have been reached a substantial number of times making it well accepted even
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Table 1. A bird-eye view of user navigation across the section of the guide for the exhibition “Nigra Sum”: the numbers tell how many times users have moved from a content type labeled on the left of the table to a content type labeled on the top of the table (Barbieri et al, 2009) Home Home
Catalog 1.699
Sections 1.254
Maps 3.035
Tags
Seclist
Maplist
Video
Artwork
928
Catalog
509
Sections
1.187
1.634
Maps
744
Tags
932
Seclist
94
57
Maplist
1.297
3.088
1.003 4.333
1.508 2.141
441
3.678 1.290
1.275 1.416
if more demanding of the visitor attention with respect to a simple audio comment. Finally, the user have frequently browsed the artwork pages showing a fast learning of the flicking gesture, a standard in the iPod world but a novelty outside it; however, they have very often returned to the home page or to the room map following in many cases non efficient patterns, as better evidenced by an analytical analysis of the command sequences, not evident in Table 1; such inefficient use is a symptom of a major difficulty of use of this type of devices with respect to the ancient but very simple keypad based guides. The difficulty was also confirmed by the questionnaires.
Where We Are A first positive assessment of this experience is that we succeeded in building a content-rich multimedia guide with a professional iconographic and musical quality in short time, meeting strict deadlines. The modularity of design and implementation and the use of the Apple iPhone development environment equally contributed to the goal, together with a passionate contribution by all the persons involved.
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1.524
1.219
Video Artwork
128
22
716
14.786
The second assessment, less positive, is that the multimedia guide has been judged complete and engaging by the visitors, but also difficult to use, preventing older users and users not accustomed to new technology from receiving a benefit. Indeed, the operations of a simple audio guide are learned in seconds, and often need not to be explained at all. For the Nigra Sum guide we provided on the device a help video illustrating with animations all the operations (Figure 10); short clips contextualized to local operations were available on the various guide pages. The complete video is about three minutes, a time too long in case of large public flow, and boring for the average user not already used to the iPhone/iPod. In the Nauman exhibition we have severely simplified the guide structure and operation, also due to the reduced content and to its greater homogeneity, and we have replaced the help video with still images that synthetically describe the allowed commands, graphically showing the gestures and their effect (Figure 11). It is necessary to point out that a contemporary art exhibition is more attractive for visitors with a mind and habits more prone to technology, hence more able to learn (or to recognize) a more sophisticated way of commanding a modern multimedia guide.
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Figure 10. Screenshot from the help video for the Nigra Sum guide
Figure 11. Help screens (still images) for the Nauman guide
What Prospects We Have The investment of time and expertise in a mobile multimedia guide for the art are relevant, mainly if compared to the duration of a temporary exhibition, and are justified only if the results can be generalized and reused. We have built a sort of conceptual model based on a mix of public and personal multimedia contents that can be reused but its customization to a new exhibition content demands for an effort comparable to the preparation of usual apparatuses such as catalogs, essays, books, but with the additional bonus of a greater and long lasting impact on the visitors. We have also built a software architecture that has allowed us to develop a guide for a completely different exhibition theme in short time with the guarantee of being correct, essentially at the cost of provid-
ing the new raw material, being its organization in the new guide a very limited effort. Nevertheless, the technical aspects are only one face of the coin, and other initiatives, also of commercial nature, are moving towards generic containers and development environments for specialized culture related content, like the already cited Pentimento system by Antenna Audio (2009). The other face of the coin is the user, who approaches an art exhibition with a great variance of culture, interest, skill, attention, making the design of a visit companion a hard task. We have proposed as a solution a large amount of rich multimedia content organized along several perspectives, leaving to the user the choice about what to play and in what order, but such a rich organization requires a skill that is not favored by the current media culture, more prone to consider the user a target of canned contents. To mediate
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between richness in content and simplicity in use a multimedia guide must offer a fan of operational possibilities filling the gap between the old audio guide and the new iPod-style personal device. We have made a partial experiment in this direction with the Nigra Sum guide, but time and organization constraints did not allow us to go beyond a proof of concept. The same materials we used in the guide: the artwork audio descriptions, the general comments, the expert interviews, the introductory presentations, arranged according to a simpler structure recalling the operational structure of the old audio guides, but providing richer content at the cognitive and emotionally level, could enable us to develop a family of multimedia guides, from the simplest to the more sophisticated, each tailored to a particular user, overcoming the problems of use that this experience has highlighted. Out proof of concept follows the directions of the MoMA and the Tate Gallery, using the basic concept of a playlist to organize and sequence the multimedia material, offering a simplified interface but the complete richness of full multimedia, instead of simple, limited, audio only content. We conclude with a short comment about a reaction that some people, visitors but also more experience cultural agents, have expressed about our project, and about media rich guides in general, assumed they are available also outside the exhibition site: such tools make the exhibition (the real one) useless because the guide contains everything you need to see and know, from artwork detailed images to explaining comments, up to complete narrative paths. An oversimplified, unexpected fear, nevertheless a symptom of the impact that multimedia technology is having on the fruition of cultural heritage also at the level of small size events. The answer (one answer) to this problem recalls a sentence in an essay of one of the authors of this paper (Barbieri, 2009), saying that multimedia “is used to nurture a relationship of genuine interaction between a specific set of works and the
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audience, and for this reason can derive only from the concreteness of the works that are exhibited”.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This project could not survive without the passionate collaboration of many persons with different roles. We acknowledge our colleagues Renzo Orsini and Fabio Pittarello of the Department of Computer Science of Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia for the fundamental contribution to the design of the guides for the two exhibitions. As a laboratory, the project involved several graduate and PhD students from Computer Science and Art History courses. We acknowledge their contribution: Angela Bianco, Valentina Cefalù, Marco Del Monte, Valeria Finocchi, Marek Maurizio, Elisabetta Rossi. This project has been supported by Banca FriulAdria - Crédit Agricole
REFERENCES Antenna Audio. (2009). Pentimento. London, UK: Antenna Audio. Retrieved from http://www. discoverpentimento.com Barbieri, G. (2009). Gli elementi di multimedialità e interattività di “Nigra sum”: una nuova via per la fruizione dell’arte. In Finocchi, V. (Ed.), La multimedialità da accessorio a criterio. Il caso Nigra sum sed formosa. Vicenza: Terra Ferma. (in Italian) Barbieri, G., Celentano, A., Orsini, R., & Pittarello, F. (2009). Understanding art exhibitions: From audioguides to multimedia companions. In A. Celentano, A. Yoshitaka, P. Maresca, Q. Jin & G. Stapleton (Eds.), DMS 2009, International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems (pp. 250-255). Skokie, IL: Knowledge Systems Institute.
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Baxandall, M. (1985). Patterns of intention: On the historical explanation of pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Belvedere. (2009). Belvedere Galleries. Vienna: Belvedere. Retrieved from http://www.belvedere. at Celentano, A., Orsini, R., Pittarello, F., & Barbieri, G. (2009). Design and evaluation of an art guide on iPod Touch. IxD&A - Interaction Design & Architecture(s), Design for the Future Experience, 5-6. Damala, A., & Kockelkorn, H. (2006). A taxonomy for the evaluation of mobile museum guides. In MobileHCI ‘06: Proceeding of the 8th Conference on Human-computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Helsinki, Finland.
Manning, A., & Sims, G. L. (2004). The Blanton iTour: An interactive handheld museum guide experiment. In proceedings of Museum and the Web, Arlington, VA. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics. Marti, P., Rizzo, A., Petroni, L., Tozzi, G., & Diligenti, M. (1999). Supporting emotional engagement in art settings with adaptivity. In Workshop on Adaptive Design of Interactive Multimedia Presentation for Mobile Users, in conjunction with i3 Spring Days’99, Barcelona, Spain. Microsoft Corporation. (1993). Microsoft art gallery: The collection of the National Gallery London, Redmond, WA. MMB. (2009). Museu Marítim de Barcelona. Retrieved from http://www.mmb.cat
De Kerckhove, D. (1991). Brainframes: Technology, mind and business. Utrecht: Bosch & Keuning.
MoMA. (2009). The MoMA iPhone App. New York: MoMA. Retrieved from http://www.moma. org/ explore/mobile/ iphoneapp
De Kerckhove, D. (1995). The skin of culture: Investigating the new electronic reality. Toronto: Somerville Publishing.
Ronchi, A. M. (2009). eCulture: Cultural content in the digital age. Berlin: Springer-Verlag
De Kerckhove, D. (2001). The architecture of intelligence: Principles of cyberarchitecture. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser. Google. (2009). The Prado in Google Earth. Mountain View, CA: Google. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/ intl/en/landing/prado/ HM. (2009). Haus der Musik. Vienna: HM. Retrieved from http://www.hausdermusik.com/ Louvre. (1997). Reunion des Muséèes Nationaux. In Le musée du Louvre: les collections & Musée d’Orsay: visite virtuelle. Paris: Montparnasse Multimedia Louvre. (2009) Muséè du Louvre. Neuilly-surSeine, France: Mastery International Pictures. Retrieved from http://www.mastery.fr/ museelouvre/index.html
Stock, O., & Zancanaro, M. (2007). PEACH: Intelligent interfaces for museum visits. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/3-540-68755-6 Tate. (2008). Gustav Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org. uk/ liverpool/exhibitions/ gustavklimt/tour.shtm Veron, E., & Levasseur, M. (1983). Ethnographie de l’Exposition. Paris: Bibliothèque Publique d’Information du Centre Georges Pompidou.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Content Management System: A system able to store, organize and select multimedia material to be included in a software application to present it in a variety of formats, structures and styles. Content management systems are often, but not
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always, used with web servers to dynamically provide the web pages content to clients according to several selection criteria. Human Computer Interaction: A discipline at the intersection between information technology, psychology, design and ergonomics, studying and evaluating the interaction between people and computers in terms of representation, operational metaphors, tools and systems. Its importance has boosted with the growth of personal, portable and multimedia application. Multimedia Guide: A multimedia guide is a handheld device able to display multimedia (e.g., audio and video) content related to a museum, an exhibition or a collection. Multimedia guides can be designed to be used off-site or on-site, i.e., during a visit. Their popularity is growing in the tourism domain, and some museums and recent exhibitions are beginning to use them as a replacement of the audio-only portable guides.
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Navigation: In the field of information searching and browsing navigation is the activity of moving among information units, often structured as web pages. The term navigation has also suggested the term orientation to denote the recognition of a virtual position in the set of information units and the surrounding information reachable by traversing links associated to specific information items. Touch Screen: A display that can detect the position of a touch within an active area, hence acting also as an input device, similar to a mouse or to a tablet. Touch screens are popular due to their use in smartphones and personal devices. An evolution of touch screen is the multi-touch screen able to discriminate the simultaneous touch in several points of its surface. User Logging: The recording of a set of user actions, often by means of automatic recognition of events related to user activity, e.g., touching a sensor or moving into a controlled area.
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Chapter 20
User Centered Technologies, Serious Games and Learning: A Critical, Speculative Perspective Giuseppe Conti Fondazione Graphitech, Italy Raffaele De Amicis Fondazione Graphitech, Italy Gabrio Girardi Fondazione Graphitech, Italy Michele Andreolli Fondazione Graphitech, Italy
ABSTRACT The widespread adoption of IT technologies by cultural heritage (CH) has transformed how cultural heritage is presented both to experts and the broad public. In the last few years a large number of multimedia applications, including virtual and augmented reality simulations, have been proposed by researchers and industry alike. However some of these technologies struggle to achieve mass diffusion, most probably due to limitations of their interfaces. Conversely, the recent widespread success of both serious games and mobile applications are laying the foundations for true extensive access to digital information on cultural heritage, creating new possibilities. This chapter illustrates this technological trend, highlighting their potential effects on the public and discussing a number of emerging scenarios of interest for the cultural heritage domain.
INTRODUCTION The domain of cultural heritage has benefitted, in the last few years, of an increasing use of IT technologies. A wide range of multimedia techDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch020
nologies have been adopted among museums, archaeological sites and libraries to name but a few. Interactive presentations, multimedia kiosks are nowadays often found at the premises of several cultural heritage sites or institutions (Conti et al., 2006).
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Similarly, interactive virtual reconstructions are becoming an ordinary feature at museums or on the web, as dedicated graphical hardware today have become a commodity. A growing number of research works have also proposed the adoption of state of the art technologies, including among others virtual and augmented reality set-ups, within the domain of cultural heritage. The scientific literature is rich in use of cutting edge technologies within the context of cultural heritage to deliver virtual reconstructions and interactive simulations. Nonetheless we argue that all these applications, albeit they should be prized for rising the attention towards cultural heritage of scholars, technology experts and people alike, in fact have only partially achieved mass diffusion mostly due to their limited usability and lack of user centric design. The main reason for their limited success is that all multimedia applications in fact, despite their well-known claims, are far from achieving a true user-centric approach. The truth is that most of these technologies adopt an underlying communication metaphor which has not evolved significantly in the last few years, and it is essentially based on a linear logical sequence of events. In fact in most of these applications users’ freedom is limited: the user can interact with the application along pre-sets information corridors. Whenever the application brings them to a “logical crossroad” they can only choose which logical branch they want to move next. This metaphor, essentially based on the hypertext-based access to information, provides limited degree of freedom to the user and it only partially fosters essential aspects typical of learning process such as engagement, discovery and experimentation. On the other hand cutting edge technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, have clearly shown their main limitation firstly in their set-up and maintenance costs and, secondly, in the true level of ergonomics ultimately delivered to the users. Usability in fact is often hindered by the need to wear stereoscopic goggles or head-mounted
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displays as well as to make use of tracking and interaction devices such as virtual gloves. This not only has posed a serious limit in the overall ergonomics but it does dismay and, most importantly of all, discourages most final users to use them. This is the case of audiences traditionally not familiar with, or even frightened by, IT technologies, such as elder people. In particular, for the latter group, a special care should be taken when creating interfaces that can truly facilitate the learning process. However in the last few years the widespread diffusion of some key technologies, namely video games and mobile IT technologies, is laying the foundations for a radical change. Since the early nineties both scientists and the industry have been paying a growing attention to educational aspects related to gaming activities and to the implementation of computer games for educational purposes. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated unambiguously the benefits that characterize the so-called Digital Educational Games (DEG), also known as serious games. The scientific literature is rich in studies bringing forward different approaches to design and use of DEG for didactical applications across several domains including cultural heritage (see Figure 1). If compared to standard VR reconstructions, which allow navigation and pre-set interaction with object present within the virtual scene, game-structured environments have a tremendous added value in that the entire environment is funded upon a plot, a challenging tasks that requires a speculative attitude that goes beyond mere navigation of a reconstructed virtual scene. This chapter will first illustrate the essential learning implications of the use of DEG by providing an historical perspective of how these can be designed to fit the different learning methodologies. The chapter will then describe the experiences of the authors, made in the context of a number of different projects, which have brought to the implementation of serious games for cultural heritage. We will illustrate how DEG has
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Figure 1. Different screenshots of a serious game on the history of Trento and (bottom right) an image of the user interacting with it through the Wii Mote™ controller from Nintendo
proved to be a very effective means to teach, especially young users, history and archaeology. Serious games have proven particularly effective when targeted to a younger audience, typically less interested by traditional passive forms of learning and, conversely, notoriously very interested in entertaining dynamics. A major objective of the authors was in fact to create interactive forms of interaction and communication that could encourage the use of the application through an experience that could feel more like a playful moment than as a traditional teaching tool. Besides the widespread use of serious games a second factor is radically contributing to a significant paradigm shift in the use of IT technologies in the context of cultural heritage: the fast diffusion of the latest generation smartphones, including iPhones, Android phones, to name but a few, which is causing a radical breakthrough in the way IT applications are conceived and used. The great level of portability, the unprecedented level of usability typical of mobile devices, let us think for example about the iPhone, makes it possible for the user to directly interact with the device either by touching the display or by
simply moving the device. This is fostering a new generation of applications designed around the users, whose interfaces are becoming virtually transparent thanks to the possibility to detect the user’s position (through a GPS receiver), the direction the user is pointing the device at (through an electronic compass), as well as the way the user is moving the device (through three-axial accelerometers). This is directly affecting the way mobile applications are conceived, in turn inspiring those designing applications targeted to address cultural heritage scenarios. In particular in this chapter we present an example of DEG developed for mobile users, based on iPhone (see Figure 2), developed to promote learning of the history of Trento, in Italy. The chapter will further discuss this paradigm shift, which sees the user finally moved to the centre of the application, and its societal implications, when one builds around the users a knowledge-rich environment. We will eventually conclude by introducing how this paradigm shift may lead to a number of new unexplored scenarios, by trying to envisage next generation mobile learning tools specifically designed to deliver
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Figure 2. An image of the DEG developed on the iPhone
ubiquitous, user-cantered and personalized access to cultural heritage.
BACKGROUND The two-thousand years old Latin adage “ludendo docere”, that is teaching -and therefore learning- by playing, is the proof that playing has long since been considered as on one of the most important forms of learning. The so-called “pedagogy of play” (Shultz Colby et al., 2008; Farné, 2005), had formalized this approach by emphasizing the role that the act of playing has in our first years of life. However the potential of games must not be constrained to early years learning and in fact, specifically targeted to adults, it has been extensively exploited to deliver a more compelling forms of teaching and training. More recently, alongside the widespread availability of video games, a growing number of scientists have explored the didactical potential and relevance of video games in the context of teaching and training. With regard to this, in the last decade, so-called “serious games”, also known as Digital Educational Games (DEG), have been extensively adopted in a wide range of learning and training scenarios.
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A limited number of early scientific works had shown a rather sceptical standpoint (Brody, 1993) with respect to the educational effectiveness of Digital Educational Games (DEG), by arguing that their entertaining nature did not ensured effectiveness in strict educational terms. Klawe (1998) stated that they are not suitable to support a specific learning process. For this reason, a number of research works (Virvou et al., 2005), have argued that the educational effectiveness of DEG is still to be assessed in a clear manner. This sceptical standpoint is clearly in contrast with a growing body of literature which acknowledges the significant didactical relevance of Digital Educational Games (DEG) and their essential role in a number of training and learning scenarios. Authors (2003) i (Aliya, 2002) highlight that Digital Educational Games can potentially improve thinking ability if properly engineered. Results from the EU-funded ElderGames project (http://www.eldergames.org/) also demonstrate that beneficial effects of video games can be extended to elderly population. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of the didactical relevance of DEG, most authors acknowledge that Digital Educational Games are effective at building motivation among players (Prensky, 2003). One of the major factors contributing to this is the immersive nature of games, mostly caused
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by their interactivity, which frequently triggers a specific mental state often referred to as Flow. This concept (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990), represents, from the cognitive standpoint, the feeling of being fully immersed in a new space (Gee, 2003), in this case the “game space”. This typical occurrence, often experienced by most video game players, greatly contributes to help people engage with the tasks required by the game. In turn this becomes one of the major factors that help players build a strong sense of motivation. As noted by many pedagogues, motivation by itself is one of the most important factors in learning (Paras et al., 2005) and therefore, being very effective at building motivation among users, DEG can potentially bring substantial benefits in terms of learning efficacy (Chan et al. 1999). Nevertheless (Paras et al., 2005) motivation alone cannot be considered sufficient to deliver an effective learning experience as this needs to be backed by a sound didactical framework. The need for assessing the pedagogical effectiveness of Digital Educational Games (Virvou et al., 2005) has resulted in a number of specific studies, (Conati et al., 2002), to assess the emotional feedback provided by students while engaged in Digital Educational Games. The method adopted builds on top of Ortony Core Collins - OCC (Orthony et al., 1988) theory of cognitive structure of emotions upon which a set of Dynamic Decision Networks (DDS) was developed. De Freitas et al. (2005) have developed a specific framework to help teacher assess the efficacy, in learning terms, of DEGs. A similar goal is also shared by aforementioned ElderGames project which aimed at developing play-driven tools that could be used by experts and elderly care supervisor to monitor patients’ quality of life in relation to their cognitive capabilities. This cognitive-driven approach has been complemented by research exploring the issue from very diverse perspectives related to learning potential of games, ranging from biological-driven analysis, to studies focusing on psychological
aspects, to attention-related issues (in terms of visual attention over a field of view) (Green et al., 2006), to research exploring neurocognitive implications (Smith et al., 1999) of games and on how serious games can be used for neuropsychological rehabilitation of children with learning or cognitive diseases. In particular the efficacy of video games is proved by their extensive use for cognitive training and neuropsychological rehabilitation of children. A comprehensive analysis of their use within this context is beyond the scope of this chapter, a broad historical review can be found in (Lynch, 2002). Despite all these multi-disciplinary research efforts, one can notice the lack of specific models capable to integrate sound learning theory (Kafai, 2006) with an effective and engaging game design strategy. In early works a number of scholars had taken a so-called instructionist approach whereby instructional games are created on top of instructional material edited in a form that can deliver a clear educational value (Bahr et al., 1989) (Malouf, 1988) (Malone, 1980). Concurrently several authors have tried to build on top of socalled experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984). The theory, which in turns extends the concept of experiential education philosophy formulated by Dewey (1938), predicates forms of learning through direct experience, rapid feedback and clear and user-tailored goals. An extensive coverage of experiential learning theory is beyond the scope of this chapter and can be found in (Moon, 2004). Last, but certainly not least, a third group of DEGs has followed a so-called constructionist approach. This was first proposed by the mathematician Seymour Papert (1980). According to his theory, games must be engineered to help students face situations (Papert, 1991) which can help them construct mental models of the phenomenon they are studying. The theory directly evolves from Jean Piaget’s constructivism learning theory (Wadsworth, 2003). An interesting analysis of both instructionist vs. constructionist
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approaches, in the context of games, is proposed by Kafai (2006). Taking a more project-oriented perspective, with specific regard to the domain of cultural heritage, several projects have developed game-like applications for didactic purposes. A number of them have focused on history including a number of them being specifically designed to teach the history of a city. Notable examples include the TrentoIeriOggieDomani project (Conti et al., 2009), a virtual exhibition which has reconstructed the evolution of the urban evolution of Trento (Italy). The project was inspired by a previous similar initiative, called DentroTrento (Conti et al., 2006), which has brought to the development of a virtual exhibition illustrating the life of the city of Trento during the Roman age. The EU-funded project NetConnect (www.netconnect-project.eu/) provides yet another example of development of a video game to teach history of archaeology. The same project has also developed a mobile application providing additional information for visitors of museums and archaeological sites. Among other relevant projects it is worth noting the Frequency 1550 project (http://freq1550.waag. org/), a mobile city game where pupils could learn about the history of Amsterdam through locationbased media-assignments on the city’s history. Further examples of such a new generation of applications making extensive use of mobile technologies, of interest for the cultural heritage domain, include Mobile 3D City (http://www. mobile3dcity.com/) which allows user to navigate the 3D model of cities and to access information of cultural interest in a very intuitive manner. Another key example of this trend is Layar (http://layar.eu/) a free application that overlays information on the user’s surrounding environment, including cultural heritage, on top of the images captured by their mobile phone’s camera. As the user holds the telephone as if he/she were taking a picture of the surrounding scene, the information on the user’s position and direction are used to render information on the surrounding
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environment directly on top of the images of the real world. If the user wants to know something about the environment he/she only needs to point the camera at the location of interest. Similar approach, mostly targeted to touristic applications, is shared by Wikitude (http://www.wikitude.org/). These commercially available solution, often available as freeware, provide similar features to complex technologies made available, until only a few years ago, by research projects through the use of complex hardware (Vlahakis et. al, 2002) (Stricker, 2001).
EXPERIENCING A PLAYFUL WORLD The most important buildings blocks of DEGs are their high interactivity and their ease of use, backed by the very nature of the logic of interaction typical of videogames, which is explicitly designed to promote a learning process among users, built on top of a sound teaching strategy. Since the use of serious games allows creating an experience very similar to the language of interaction typical of video games, as a result, the application becomes less demanding, and the user is encouraged to try and experiment with it. In fact one of essential elements underpinning the effectiveness of serious games, which distinguishes them from traditional video games, is the implementation of a clear strategy based on a specific educational and pedagogical experimentation, devoid of mis-educating elements. This approach typically triggers a number of positive feedback mechanisms in that it stimulates exploration among users, both young and adult, reducing the fear of an unknown elements, as well as the apprehension of being judged by other people including fellow students or teachers. This latter issue is extremely relevant when adult of elder user is involved. In fact, conversely from the so called “digital natives” (Prensky, 2003), a term used to address those being born during the digital age and therefore natively ac-
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customed to using digital technologies, most adult or elder users are “digital immigrants”. “Digital immigrants” typically learn to make use of digital technologies at adult age, and for this reason their approach to digital technologies often requires a significant cognitive effort. They consider interacting with digital technology as a challenge, sometimes with a certain degree of apprehension, while “digital natives” master interaction with digital technologies in a natural way, they are used to multitasking and to collect information from different sources through the use of a number of devices such as mobile phones, internet etc. What is important is that DEG, besides being obviously very naturally adopted by “digital natives”, they are also extremely effective when employed with “digital immigrants” who essentially perceive them as just yet another game-related experience. This psychological trigger is essential to let them take a more natural and relaxed approach, thus encouraging them to discover, experiment, try without fear of damaging the system or of being judged. Furthermore serious games can easily adapt to specific users’ personal needs since each individual is free to repeat at will or, vice versa, ignore, procedures and processes according to their level of knowledge. For this reason the mechanisms of active learning triggered by DEGs are in fact much more effective than traditional teaching methods based on standard learning.
THE EXPERIENCE OF SERIOUS GAME FOR MOBILE DEVICES The adoption of strategies typical of DEG can now also benefit significantly from the widespread availability of sophisticated mobile platforms. A number of devices, today readily available on the market, including, but not limited to, iPhones or Android phones, in fact allow an unprecedented level of freedom to software developers who can now take advantage of powerful computing capabilities, hardware support of 3D graphics,
large memory and extended storage space, highresolution touch screens, support for two hand interaction (e.g. in the case of the iPhone), availability of high-resolution on board cameras and of a variety of sensors including GPS antenna, proximity sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers. This plentiful of hardware devices is then complemented by the ubiquitous availability of internet connections either via Wi-Fi or through 3G, Edge or UMTS networks. The unprecedented success of these devices, with the iPhone alone estimated to be selling up to 10 million devices per quarter, is deeply affecting the way people consider mobile computing across a number of different domains and this is also going to have profound effects in the domain of cultural heritage. Moreover, since the video game market is one of the most segments it is foreseeable that consequently DEG will benefit of a rising interest also within mobile scenarios. In particular the requirements of a mobile set-up are fostering a radical change in the way games are conceived. Interfaces must be designed to benefit at most from the availability of the available sensors, for instance allowing the user to shake or tilt the device to perform a given task. Furthermore the built-in GPS receiver, the high-quality video camera and the electronic compass can be used to create mobile augmented reality applications. These metaphors are just few examples of usercentredcentred design strategies; they are essential to provide new means of accessing digital information in the most user-friendly and clear form. A DEG, developed by the authors, clearly epitomizes this emerging trend. The application has been developed to run on an iPhone or iPod Touch and it has been implemented using the Unity3D (http://unity3d.com/) game engine platform. The graphical user interface has been designed in a way that the user can play with the game either with a virtual joy pad (see Figure 5 - bottom left) or by moving the device, by taking advantage of built-in accelerometers.
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The overall structure of the game has been engineered as a virtual container of different micro games, each focusing on a given skill or user knowledge. The ultimate goal of the game in fact can be achieved only by passing a number of micro-challenges on logics, history, mathematics, all sharing the same common goal of teaching the history of the city of Tridentum, the ancient Trento, in Italy. Each micro game requires the user to interact with the device in a different manner, i.e. tapping on the screen, tilting the device, shaking it etc.
AND SO THE STORY GOES The DEG developed is an adventure game where the player has to move around the ancient city of Tridentum searching for useful pieces of information that will help them built a mosaic from a number of lost fragments. The environment itself is an accurate reconstruction of the old town of Tridentum, the ancient name of Trento, in the Italian Alps. The environment is a slightly simplified version of a 3D model which had been previously
created in the context of the DentroTrento project (Conti et al., 2006), optimized to be run smoothly on a iPhone. The 3D environment had been modelled on the basis of the information available to the historians, with the support of the local cultural heritage department. Expert had provided interpretations, based on similar evidence found in town of the same historical period, e.g. Pompeii, wherever direct historical information could not be found. The environment which is the setting of the game is therefore philologically correct and it represents a significant portion of the roman town of Trento at three different historical phases, 200 BC, 200 AD and today. The game starts with a video of a teenager girl while studying on a book the history of the city (see Figure 4). While reading she falls asleep, wandering, in her dreaming, why she is not able to learn the history of the city. At this point she is magically transported back in time to the ancient town of Tridentum where she finds herself standing at one of the town ancient gates. In order to return to her time she needs to piece together the fragments of an ancient mosaic. Once the fragments will be joined together the spirit of
Figure 3. An image of a user playing with the Tridentum game on an iPhone
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Figure 4. Two images of the first scenes of the game with the girl studying the history of the city of Tridentum
the ancient town, who has trapped her and brought back in time, will be freed and she will be able to get back to the current age. The pieces of the mosaic, which is a virtual replica of a real mosaic actually discovered during recent archaeological excavations, are scattered all around the city across different historical ages. To find them she will have to pass a number of tests, challenging her knowledge of the history of the town, and she will have to travel across different historical ages. As visible in Figure 5, the first part of the game is engineered to help the user get accustomed to the interface which uses a virtual joy pad located at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. The user can navigate the scene by touching the virtual joy pad with her thumb as if it was a real joy pad normally found by gaming consoles (e.g. PlayStation, Xbox etc.). More specifically the user has
to follow the directions provided by the game, a number of transparent blue boxes floating in midair, visible within the virtual scene, thus following a route that will bring her to the first challenge. After walking along the main street of the ancient town she meets a peasant (Figure 6) whose carriage has broken down across the street thus preventing her to walk on. In order to remove the carriage she needs to pass three different challenges, each contained within a micro-game, each engineered to help the peasant fix a part of his cart. The concept of a micro game has been adopted to create a number of independent spaces, logically set within the context of the main game, but which may have a different interaction metaphor. During each micro game the user needs to perform a very specific task by using his/her mobile device in various ways, for instance by interacting with the touch screen, tilting the device,
Figure 5. (left) An image of the first sequences of the game. A number of floating blue hotspots help the user follow a given route and get accustomed to the interface while exploring the virtual town. (right) An image of the interface used to select different tools available
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Figure 6. (left) An image of the scene and some hits (right) provided by the characters of the game to help the user
shaking it etc. Each micro game can be a theoretical challenge or a much focused practical game. This has the advantage of stimulating the user, since each game does not require long time to complete, and it ensures constant motivation through step-by-step gratification. The short duration and self-enclosure of each micro game is also an added value considering the typical use in a mobile scenario which often requires short gaming session while on the move. This makes it possible to move forward the game through a number of easy steps, which can be saved and retrieved back whenever the user needs to stop playing the game, yet within a unique logical context, that is the virtual reconstruction and with a unique leitmotif, that is ultimately getting to the end of the game. This way the main DEG represents an extendible container for a number of micro games. In fact it becomes very convenient to extend the game functionalities by just introducing other
micro games within the main virtual environment. Moreover the overall game can be easily adjusted to the skills or knowledge of the different users by providing access to micro games of different complexity. When the user meets the peasant she is required to accomplish a number of different tasks, going through three micro games, to help the peasant fix his carriage. The user first has to use the hammer to fix one of the wheels of the carriage. To do so she has to shake the iPhone as if she were holding a hammer, in order to nail down a minimum number of pegs within a given time frame (see Figure 7). Then she needs to use a sew, by rhythmically shaking the iPhone as if holding a sew in her hands (see Figure 8). Finally she has to fit the right piece of wood at the correct place within the carriage by tilting the phone until the piece of wood slides to its final location. After completing all the tasks she receives by the peasant, as a reward, the map of the city. This
Figure 7. (left) The interface suggests to hold the iPhone straight to play the micro game (right) where the user needs to hammer down a number of nails to fix the carriage
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Figure 8. (left) The interface suggests to rotate the iPhone to play the micro game (right) where the user needs to sew a piece of wood by tilting the iPhone as if holding a sew on her hands
approach follows a clear strategies consistently adopted across the DEG. In fact the more the user moves along the different stages of the games, the wider the map becomes and therefore the higher his awareness on the overall city layout becomes. Accordingly, whenever the user completes a new challenge, the overview map, which can be rendered in overlay to the scene, will show a wider region of the city. The map received by the peasant includes the “cardo” and “decumanus”, the two main axis of the city typical of the layout of roman towns. The peasant tells her that one of the pieces of the magic mosaic can be found along the “cardo”. Since the virtual character does not known what the “cardo” and “decumanus” are, she has to acquire more information on them. As she walks on she meets a little goat who tells her the story of the “cardo” and “decumanus”, telling her that at the roman times the city had a square plan with two
main streets, a grid of orthogonal minor streets and with surroundings walls. However all of a sudden the little goat stops taking, if she wants to know more she has to help the goat get back home once more by successfully going through a number of micro games. The first game is a puzzle (see Figure 9) representing one of the classical roman mosaics found within the site. The second game is meant to stimulate logical thinking: since dusk is approaching the user needs to turn on the lights of the town. To do so the player has to locate, within the map, the minimum number of lights necessary to lit the path to the little goat’s house. The third game has a mathematical twist since the user has to count how many footsteps are required for the little goat to walk home (see Figure 10). Finally the fourth and last micro games is again an ability game, in that it requires the user to tilt the phone
Figure 9. Two images of the gizmo which is being built throughout the game that lets the user access different portions of the city
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Figure 10. Two images of the micro-game that requires the user to count how many footsteps are required for the little goat to walk home
in order to help the goat walk across a maze of barrels to help her find her way home. After the user passes the second set of challenges she is finally told where the ”cardo” is located. At the end of it she can find one of the city towers at the top of which there is another piece of the mosaic. However she cannot get into the tower as a little devil is guarding the door and holds its key. Once the little devil sees the users he starts chasing her. At this stage the point of view of the game changes from first to third person (as seen from above); the user has to run away until, after a certain time, the devil drops the key. She then needs to walk back, grab the key, enter the tower, climb the stairs until she is at the top where she eventually finds a piece of the mosaic. From such an advantage viewpoint she can see the entire town of Tridentum. From there she also sees that in a nearby garden there is a further missing fragment of mosaic lying on top of a haystack. Once she walks down to the nearby garden she realizes that she needs a ladder to get hold of the key. Since there are no ladders in view she has to find it in the town. Next to the haystack there is a hole on the ground, when she enters it this proves to be a time gateway. As soon as she enters the hole she is transported to another age stepping into Tridentum during 400 AD. At that time the same garden is instead the building site of the church of S. Maria, one of the most important churches in
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town. She can grab a ladder and get back to 200 BC to get hold of the further fragment of mosaic. The game continues much further with a number of different challenges and micro games to be tackled by the user. As it should be clear from the previous description, the game becomes an effective tool to experience life at the roman age, instructing the user on the history at the different ages of the town and challenging the knowledge of the users with a number of tests and games. The game will soon will be available from the App Store.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS The approach presented so far however relies on a one-way process whereby a producer of information creates the content which is then used to deliver a learning experience within the DEG. However this scenario may well change in the near future as the increasing availability of digital content on cultural heritage, available through the internet can create new opportunities for people to experience and share information on cultural heritage. One of the main challenges is in fact to allow learners to create and structure the content of a DEG, changing radically the way teaching is traditionally conceived, by turning learners into teachers thus stimulating them to explore and
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organize the knowledge at their disposal. This approach follows one of the trends of contemporary pedagogy which predicates forms of learning based on creation of content and of experiences as a form of learning. The widespread diffusion of mobile devices and DEG lays the foundation for a second major shift: the development of Location Based DEG. Building on top of the emerging success enjoyed by the so-called Location Based Services (LBS), which are software capable to provide specific services according to the geographical location of the user as detected by the GPS receiver, Location Based DEG in the context of cultural heritage can be extremely powerful tools to let people interact with the surrounding cultural heritage in a playful manner. This allows relating the digital information available on the environment that surrounds the user, with the real world in a playful manner. Again this approach changes completely the traditional way of conceiving the process of teaching and learning. This new forms of learning, based on games, if applied in the context of cultural heritage can transform in fact the environment itself into an information-reach collaborative learning environment, by providing tailored information on heritage located in the real world, to which the community can contribute, as the user itself moves through the real world.
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Brody, H. (1993, November/December). Video Games that Teach? Technology Review, 51–57. Chan, T. S., & Ahern, T. C. (1999). Targeting motivation – adapting flow theory to instructional design. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 21(2), 152–163. Conati, C., & Zhou, X. (2002). Modeling students’ emotions from cognitive appraisal in educational games. In Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Proceedings of 6th International Conference, ITS 2002, Biarritz, France and San Sebastian, Spain, June 2-7. Berlin: Springer. Conti, G., De Amicis, R., Girardi, G., Andreolli, M., & Piffer, S. (2009). The role of interactive computer graphics to augment the learning experience of cultural heritage within museums and expositions. In Chang, M., & Kuo, C. W. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Learning Culture and Language via ICTs: Methods for Enhanced Instruction (pp. 153–169). Hershey, USA: Information Science Reference. Conti, G., Piffer, S., Girardi, G., De Amicis, R., & Ucelli, G. (2006). DentroTrento – A virtual walk across history. In A. Celentano and P. Mussio (Eds.), Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces AVI 2006, (pp. 318-321). New York: ACM Press. Csíkszentmihályi, M. (2005). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row. De Freitas, S., & Oliver, M. (2005). How can exploratory learning with games and simulations within the curriculum be most effectively evaluated? [Amsterdam: Elsevier.]. Computers & Education, 46(3), 249–264. doi:10.1016/j. compedu.2005.11.007 Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. Farné, R. (2005). Pedagogy of Play. [Berlin: Springer.]. Topoi, 24(2), 169–181. doi:10.1007/ s11245-005-5053-5 423
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Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. [CIE]. Computers in Entertainment, 1(1), 20. doi:10.1145/950566.950595 Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2006). Effect of action video games on the spatial distribution of visuospatial attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 32(6), 1465–1478. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.32.6.1465 Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Playing and making games for learning: Instructionist and constructionist perspectives for game studies. Games and Culture, 1(1), 34–40. doi:10.1177/1555412005281767 Klawe, M. (1998). When does the use of computer games and other interactive multimedia software help students learn mathematics? In Proceedings of NCTM Standards 2000 Technology Conference, Arlington, VA. Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lynch, B. (2002). Historical review of computerassisted cognitive retraining. The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 17(5), 446–457. doi:10.1097/00001199-200210000-00006 Malone, T. W. (1980). What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on small systems, Palo Alto, CA (pp. 162-169). New York: ACM Press. Malouf, D. B. (1988). The effect of instructional computer games on continuing student motivation. The Journal of Special Education, 21(4), 27–38. doi:10.1177/002246698802100406
Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books. Papert, S. (1991). Situating constructionism. In Harel, I., & Papert, S. (Eds.), Constructionism (pp. 1–12). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. Paras, B., & Bizzocchi, J. (2005). Game, motivation, and effective learning: An integrated model for educational game design. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Prensky, M. (2003). Digital game-based learning. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 1(1). Shultz Colby, R. & Colby, R. (2008). A pedagogy of play: Integrating computer games into the writing classroom. Computers and Composition [Special issue: Reading games: Composition, literacy, and video gaming], 25(3), 300-312. Smith, M. E., McEvoy, L. K., & Gevins, A. (1999). Neurophysiological indices of strategy development and skill acquisition. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research, 7, 389–404. doi:10.1016/ S0926-6410(98)00043-3 Stricker, D. (2001). Tracking with reference images: A real-time and markerless tracking solution for out-door augmented reality applications. In VAST ‘01: Proceedings of the 2001 conference on virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage (pp. 77-82). Virvou, M., Katsionis, G., & Manos, K. (2005). Combining software games with education: Evaluation of its educational effectiveness. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 8(2), 54–65.
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ADDITIONAL READING Banaszewski, T. (2002). Digital storytelling finds its place in the classroom. Information Today. Cheverst, K., Fitton, D., Taylor, N., & Kray, C. (2008). Experiences of supporting local and remote mobile phone interaction with touchscreen based situated displays. In CHI 2008 Workshop: Designing and Evaluating Mobile Phone-Based Interaction with Public Displays. Chittaro, L., & Burigat, S. (2004). 3D locationpointing as a navigation aid in virtual environments. In AVI ‘04 Proceedings. New York: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/989863.989910 Gee, J. P. (2008). What digital games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Göbel, S., Salvatore, L., Konrad, R. A., & Mehm, F. (2008). StoryTec: A digital storytelling platform for the authoring and experiencing of interactive and non-linear stories. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 325–328). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/9783-540-89454-4_40
Kakihara, M., & Sørensen, C. (2002). Mobility: An extended perspective. In Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. New York: IEEE. Kukulska-Hulme, A., Sharples, M., Milrad, M., Arnedillo-Sánchez, I., & Vavoula, G. (2009). Innovation in mobile learning: A European perspective. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1). Lambert, J. (2006). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community. Berkeley, CA: Digital Dinner Press. Lopez-Gulliver, R., Sommerer, C., & Mignonneau, L. (2001). IKI-IKI phone: A multi-user Alife art game for mobile phones. In IEEE Internation Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Tokyo. New York: IEEE. Mallon, B., & Webb, B. (2005). Stand up and take your place: Identifying narrative elements in narrative adventure and role-play games. Computers in Entertainment (CIE), 3(1). Marchionini, G. (2006). Exploratory search: From finding to understanding. Communications of the ACM, 49(4).
Gostner, R., Gellersen, H., Kray, C., & Sas, C. (2008). Reading with mobile phone and large display. In CHI Workshop: Designing and Evaluating Mobile Phone-Based Interaction with Public Displays.
Mateas, M., & Stern, A. (2005). Procedural authorship: A case-study of the interactive drama Façade. In Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture. DAC.
Güven, S., Feiner, S., & Oda, O. (2006). Mobile augmented reality interaction techniques for authoring situated media on-site. In Proceedings of IEEE and ACM ISMAR 2006, Santa Barbara. New York: IEEE.
Milam, D., Seif El-Nasr, M., & Wakkary, R. (2009). A study of interactive narrative from user’s perspective. In Furht, D. B. (Ed.), Handbook of Digital Media in Entertainment and Arts. Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-89024-1_30
Hayes-Roth, B., Sincoff, E., Brownston, L., Huard, R., & Lent, B. (1994). Directed improvisation [Technical Report KSL-94-61]. Stanford University, CA: Knowledge Systems Laboratory.
Nisi, V., & Haahr, M. (2004). Weirdview: Interactive multilinear narratives and real-life community stories. Crossings: eJournal of Art and Tech, 4(1).
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Nurminen, A. (2006). A platform for mobile 3D map navigation development. In MobileHCI ‘06: Proceedings of the 8th conference on humancomputer interaction with mobile devices and services. New York: ACM Press.
Schmalstieg, D., & Wagner, D. (2008) Mobile phones as a platform for augmented reality. In Proceedings of the IEEE VR 2008 Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems. New York: IEEE.
Ohler, J. (2008). Digital storytelling in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwinn Press.
Song, Y. (2009). Handheld educational application: A review of the research. In Ryu, H., & Parsons, D. (Eds.), Innovative mobile learning: Techniques and technologies. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Constructionism. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Perlin, K., & Goldberg, A. (1996). Improv: A system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds. In 23rd SIGGRAPH. New York: ACM Press. Prensky, M. (2006). Don’t bother me mom - I’m learning!St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers. Prensky, M. (2007). Digital game-based learning. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishing. Resnick, M. (2002). Rethinking learning in the digital age. In The global information technology report: Readiness for the networked world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, J. (2004). An analysis of the narrative features of computer games authored by children. In Proceedings of Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments, Edinburgh, Scotland. Roschelle, J. (2003). Unlocking the learning value of wireless mobile devices. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 19(3). doi:10.1046/j.02664909.2003.00028.x Ryu, H., & Parsons, D. (2008). A learner-centred design of a location-aware learning reminder. International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, 2(2). doi:10.1504/IJMLO.2008.019768
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Traxler, J. (2007). Defining, discussing, and evaluating mobile learning: The moving finger writes and having writ. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 8(2). Young, R. M., & Riedl, M. (2003). Towards an architecture for intelligent control of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. New York: ACM.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Digital Educational Games (DEG): Video games engineered to deliver a specific learning added value. Location Based Service: software Software capable to provide specific services according to the geographical location of the user in the real world. Mobile Learning: a A form of learning based on the use of mobile technologies. Serious Games: synonymous Synonymous of Digital Educational Games.
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Chapter 21
ARCO:
Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions with Flex-VR Krzysztof Walczak Poznan University of Economics, Poland
ABSTRACT In this chapter, a virtual museum exhibition system, called ARCO, is presented. ARCO enables museum staff to create, manage and display virtual exhibitions of museum artifacts in rich 3D and multimedia forms. Such exhibitions can be accessed both internally within the museums and remotely over the Internet. Due to the use of a novel approach to building configurable virtual reality applications, called Flex-VR, virtual exhibitions in ARCO can be easily and quickly built by museum staff, even if they do not have experience in 3D design and programming. The chapter provides an overview of the ARCO system, a description of the virtual exhibition design process and examples of virtual exhibitions built with ARCO.
INTRODUCTION Cultural heritage as an application domain can largely benefit from the use of interactive 3D and virtual reality technologies. Most museums do not have the space and resources required to exhibit their whole collections. In addition, the nature and fragility of some of the objects prevent museum curators from making them available to the public. Also, the interaction of museum visitors with the exhibited artifacts is usually very restricted, e.g. they cannot look at the artifacts from all angles, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch021
compare artifacts or study them in different contexts. In this respect, virtual reality technologies can offer great help. These technologies provide solutions that enable visualization of 3D digital models of museum artifacts in either purely virtual or digitally reconstructed environments. They also allow visitors to interact with the models in a variety of ways. Modern museums already exploit various multimedia technologies to attract visitors – both visitors coming to the museum in person and visitors on the Internet. For the first type of visitors museums prepare on-site interfaces, such as kiosks, permitting them to browse through museums’
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digital collections and access information related to the physical exhibitions. For the second type of visitors museums prepare extensive websites describing the collections, often connected with virtual exhibitions of objects. In most cases, these interfaces are based on either HTML or Flash technology and are mostly limited to 2D content. This form of presentation does not enable creation of fully-featured virtual exhibitions. Museums are keen on presenting their collections in a more appealing and exciting manner. Therefore, many museums have already started developments with some form of 3D presentation of objects. In most cases, these are only projects at an initial stage, but the number is rapidly growing and it is evident, that museums start to recognize the potential offered by these technologies. Two main difficulties that museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, encounter while trying to widely adopt virtual reality technologies into their standard way of operation are: (1) efficient creation of 3D models of artifacts and (2) building virtual exhibitions based on these models. Significant technical progress has been recently made in the area of 3D scanning. The technology becomes better, faster and more affordable. It can be expected that in the near future museums will be able to routinely create high-quality 3D models of their artifacts. The availability of 3D models of artifacts is a prerequisite, but it is only the first step. For wide adoption of the VR technology, museums need efficient, cost effective and simple methods of creating virtual exhibitions based on their collections of 3D models. The work on setting up an exhibition should be performed by museum staff (e.g., curators, historians, educationalists), who cannot be expected to be IT experts. At the same time, the system must provide museum visitors with an intuitive human-computer interface based on well-known metaphors. Users should be able to interact with digital content easily and naturally like they can interact with objects in the real world. Everything that does
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not meet these criteria will not be understood and – therefore – will not be generally accepted. In this chapter, a virtual museums system, called ARCO – Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects, is presented. ARCO enables museums to create, manage and display virtual exhibitions of cultural objects accessible both within the museums – on local computers or information kiosks – and remotely over the Internet. Virtual exhibitions created with the use of ARCO have a form of rich multimedia 2D or 3D web content. The design of the ARCO system is based on a novel approach to building 3D applications, called Flex-VR. The use of Flex-VR enables building configurable virtual exhibitions, i.e. exhibitions which can be easily assembled from independent reusable components, such as 3D models, templates and behavior scripts. The process of assembling an exhibition is quick and easy making it possible to create virtual exhibitions by museum staff, even if they do not have experience in 3D design and programming [Walczak, Cellary, White, 2006][Walczak, Cellary, Prinke, 2008][Walczak, 2008]. The Flex-VR approach consists of five interrelated elements: 1. Flex-VR content parameterization: a method of parameterization of content and interactive or automatic on-request instantiation of content based on parameterized presentation templates. 2. Flex-VR content structuralization: specific organization of VR content based on a novel Beh-VR model, which enables composition of interactive behavior-rich scenes from independent components, called VR-Beans. The appearance and behavior of VR-Beans in virtual scenes are controlled by scenario scripts encoded in a novel XML-based language, called VR-BML [Walczak, 2009a]. 3. Flex-VR content model: a high-level generic persistent VR data model, which enables efficient creation and manipulation of VR
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application content, allowing this task to be performed by domain experts using simple tools without advanced knowledge in 3D application design and programming. 4. Flex-VR design patterns: a set of generic patterns that solve common problems in the design of configurable behavior-rich VR applications. The use of Flex-VR design patterns imposes known semantic structure on the application content, thus helping users to understand, configure and maintain the applications. 5. Flex-VR content pipeline: specific organization of the content creation and consumption processes in three phases: the off-line phase, the pre-on-line phase and the on-line phase.
THE ARCO SYSTEM The ARCO system – Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects – is based on the Flex-VR approach and consist of a set of tools that help museums to create, manipulate, manage and present digitized cultural objects in virtual exhibitions accessible both inside and outside museums [White, Walczak, Mourkoussis, 2003][White et al., 2004]. The overall architecture of the ARCO system is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1. The overall architecture of the ARCO system
The dataflow in ARCO is based on the FlexVR content pipeline and is divided into three phases: off-line content production, pre-on-line content management and on-line content presentation.
Off-Line Content Production The content production phase encompasses all processes required for the creation of digital representations of museum artifacts. The method of modeling depends on the features of objects. Objects with simple geometry can be modeled with a state-of-the-art modeling package such as 3ds max – optionally equipped with a set of additional plug-ins. The plug-ins can simplify the process of creating 3D models of cultural objects by providing a designer with functionality tailored to perform particular modeling tasks. Objects with complex geometry can be modeled with any state-of-the-art 3D scanning system [Sitnik, Kujawińska, Załuski, 2005][Mansouri et al., 2007]. The 3D models obtained from the object modeling tools may require further refinement such as reconstruction of missing parts or repair of polygon meshes. Repair operations such as merging meshes, eliminating overlapping polygons, welding and capping holes are carried out using a modeling package. Digital representations of objects are then stored in the ARCO database and managed using ARCO Content Management Application (ACMA). Each digitized cultural object is represented as a set of media objects and associated metadata [Mourkoussis et al., 2003][Patel et al., 2005]. The ARCO data model is presented in Figure 2. The model is a specialization of the generic FlexVR content model [Walczak, 2008, 2009b]. The abstract class cultural object corresponds to the Flex-VR content object and represents physical artifacts in ARCO. The class provides metadata describing the artifacts. The cultural object class has two non-abstract subclasses: acquired object and refined object. An acquired object is a digitiza-
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Figure 2. ARCO data model: Classes of content objects
for curatorial, preservation, presentation and cataloguing purposes [Patel et al., 2003, 2004, 2005]. Cultural object metadata contains three kinds of information describing different aspects of the cultural objects: • •
•
tion of a physical artifact, while a refined object is a refinement of either an acquired or another refined object. Refined objects enable museum curators to create interpretations of artifacts without changing the original data. There may be more than one refined object created from a single acquired object or refined object [Patel, White, Walczak, Sayd, 2003]. Each cultural object may be associated with a set of media objects. Examples of media objects are 3D models, high-resolution images, lowresolution images, panoramic images, video and audio sequences, textual descriptions, and behavior scripts. The list of allowed media object types, together with their MIME types and parameters, is stored in the database. If a new data type is required, it can be added to the system without changing the database schema or application code. Refined objects inherit media objects from the cultural objects they refine, but they can also omit some of the inherited media objects, add new media objects or override the inherited objects with other objects. This concerns both the media objects such as 3D models and images, which are direct representations of cultural objects in virtual scenes, and the behavior scripts, which control the appearance and behavior of the cultural objects. Both the cultural objects and the media objects are described by metadata records, useful
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information about the original physical artifact is associated with the cultural object, information about the original digitized version of the artifact is associated with the acquired object, information about the refinement of a cultural object is associated with the refined object.
Media object metadata contains both generic elements, such as the size and the creation date and media-specific elements such as the image resolution or the audio sampling rate.
Pre-On-Line Content Management Virtual exhibitions are configured by the use the Presentation Manager, which is one of the tools available in ACMA. The use of presentation templates – content templates and behavior templates – enables separation of the process of designing and programming complex virtual scenes from the process of creating actual virtual exhibitions, allowing the latter to be easily performed by museum staff without extensive knowledge in computer programming and 3D technologies. All the visualization and interaction rules necessary to build virtual exhibitions and most of the graphical properties of the exhibitions are encoded in the presentation templates. A content designer can create a virtual exhibition simply by building a hierarchy of presentation spaces and assigning content objects and presentation templates to the spaces, according to the Flex-VR content model [Walczak, 2008, 2009b] (cf. Figure 3). The cultural objects can be then visually arranged in the exhibition spaces by the use of a simple 3D authoring interface.
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Figure 3. Designing virtual exhibitions in ARCO
Following the Flex-VR content model, the structure of ARCO virtual exhibitions is determined by the structure of the presentation spaces stored in the database. Each presentation space may represent an entire exhibition, a part of the exhibition (e.g., related to a particular subject), a museum room, etc. Subspaces may be used to represent connected rooms or to divide exhibitions into smaller parts, e.g., focused on particular topics. The presentation spaces are represented as folders, which may contain three types of elements: • • •
instances of content objects (i.e., cultural objects), instances of content templates, instances of behavior templates.
A template instance is a template supplied with actual values of some of its formal parameters. A content object instance is a content object assigned to a presentation space, optionally with a set of presentation properties. Presentation properties can describe presentation spaces, cultural objects within presentation spaces, or media
objects within cultural objects within particular presentation spaces. In addition to fixed lists of cultural objects, ARCO enables assignment of content object selection rules to presentation spaces, enabling creation of virtual galleries with content selected dynamically based on metadata records. The process of designing a virtual exhibition consists in creating a structure of presentation spaces, creating instances of content templates and behavior templates in these spaces, assigning cultural objects and cultural object selection rules, and setting presentation properties (Figure 4). When an end-user enters a virtual exhibition space, all cultural objects that are assigned to the particular presentation folder or selected by cultural object selection rules, are presented by the use of template instances assigned to this folder. Depending on the set of parameters that are set in the template instance, the end-user may be required (or not) to provide parameters for displaying the exhibition contents. Flexible assignment of parameter values to template instances makes it possible to easily combine search inter-
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Figure 4. Configurable Flex-VR presentations
faces, customizable browsing interfaces as well as fixed virtual exhibitions. Due to the Flex-VR template parameterization, different visualizations can be achieved by the creation of template instances derived from the same template but supplied with different sets of parameter values. For example, a difference between two instances of the same template used in two spaces may be the value of a parameter defining the wall or the floor texture, the method of presenting objects or the arrangement of objects (cf. Figure 5). In the ARCO system, the concept of presentation domains is used to enable differentiation of the content presentation method in different environments, on different platforms or for different groups of users. Multiple instances of presentation templates can be assigned to presentation spaces. This concerns both the content templates and behavior templates. The number of presentation domains used in a particular installation of the ARCO system depends on the specific requirements and constraints. Typically, one domain is used for local displays installed inside museum galleries and one for remote access to the collections over the Internet.
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Other domains may be used for specific purposes, e.g. to distinguish touch screen interfaces and standard keyboard/mouse interfaces or to use other forms of presentation such as augmented reality [Wojciechowski, Walczak, White, 2003] [Wojciechowski, Walczak, White, Cellary, 2004]. The list of presentation domains is extensible, allowing museums to further differentiate the method of visualization in different contexts when necessary. Each presentation template is associated with a list of allowed presentation domains, but each template instance is assigned to a concrete domain. In a presentation space, multiple instances of templates for different domains may be created, but at most one instance for each domain. While accessing
a presentation, a user browser specifies which domain should be used. Then, the appropriate template instance is used to produce the content. In order to speed-up the process of designing ARCO virtual exhibitions and to enable consistent presentation of objects in multiple exhibition spaces, the concept of inheritance of template instances has been used. Due to the inheritance, if a specific presentation space does not contain
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Figure 5. An example of a parameterized exhibition
its own template instance in a given domain, the instance contained in its parent space is used by default (recursively). This enables using one template instance for the whole tree of presentation spaces in the exhibition, saving the preparation time and ensuring visual consistency of presentations. During the on-line phase, selection of the appropriate template instance for presentation of content is performed automatically by a metamodel [Walczak, Wiza, 2004][Walczak, 2009b]. An example exhibition space hierarchy displayed in the Presentation Manager tool is shown in Figure 6. There are three presentation domains in this example: WEB_LOCAL, WEB_REMOTE and WEB_AR. Three independent exhibitions have been set up: MACE, Sussex Past and Victoria & Albert Museum. The MACE exhibition uses three template instances for visualization of the content in different domains. The AR 4.0 is used for the WEB_AR domain, Start Page for the WEB_LOCAL domain, and Web Remote 2.0 for the WEB_REMOTE domain. There are four sub-spaces in the MACE exhibition space. By default, the template instances used in the main exhibition space are inherited by the sub-spaces. However, in the Kitchen Utensils sub-space only one template instance is inherited (AR 4.0) and two new template instances are created. Web Local 4.0 is an instance of another template used for visualization in the WEB_LOCAL domain, while Web Remote 2.0 is another instance of the same
template as used in the main space, but created with different parameter values. In the Tudor Times sub-space, two of these template instances are inherited, while one new instance is used for the WEB_LOCAL presentation domain. The panel on the right shows values of template parameters set in the selected template instance.
On-Line Content Presentation Virtual exhibitions presented in the end-user interfaces are dynamically generated based on the parameterized templates and sets of cultural objects assigned to the presentation spaces. The use of different templates and template parameterization enables different presentation of the same content. Since the exhibitions are created on-request, they can be personalized for a particular user or even created in response to a user query. Presentation of the ARCO exhibitions is performed by virtual and augmented reality interfaces. The interfaces combine web-based form of presentation with either VR or AR virtual exhibitions. The web-based form of presentation allows users to search and browse the database content by the use of a well-known interface, whereas the VR and AR exhibitions let them examine reconstructions of selected objects in 3D environments [Walczak, Wojciechowski, 2005][Wojciechowski, Walczak, Cellary, 2005].
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Figure 6. Example hierarchy of presentation spaces
The architecture of the ARCO content presentation subsystem is shown in Figure 7. The ARCO database stores the Flex-VR content model of virtual exhibitions. The Exhibition Server generates on-request content representing the presentation
spaces in particular presentation domains. The metamodel is responsible for selection of the appropriate template instance and determining actual values of its parameters. The content may contain references to multimedia data provided through
Figure 7. Architecture of the ARCO content presentation subsystem
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the Multimedia Server. A web services interface is provided to enable content management. All servers are implemented as servlets connected to a standard HTTP server [Sun, 2010]. The content can be visualized using a standard web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox equipped with a VRML/X3D plug-in or a specifically designed AR browser [Wojciechowski, Walczak, White, 2003] based on the ARToolKit library [Kato et al., 2000][ARToolWorks, 2008]. In the web interface, a user can browse information presented in a form of 3D virtual galleries or 2D web pages with embedded or linked 3D objects and other multimedia objects. This kind of user interface can be used both on local displays inside a museum (WEB_LOCAL presentation domain) and remotely over the Internet (WEB_REMOTE presentation domain). The AR browser, in addition to the standard web browser functionality, enables presentation of selected objects in mixed reality environments (WEB_AR presentation domain).
In addition to presenting the virtual exhibitions to end-users, web-based 3D interfaces can be also used for content configuration. An example configuration interface is presented in Figure 8. Using this interface, a designer can refine a virtual exhibition created in the Presentation Manager by arranging objects in the exhibition area. The objects can be arranged by simply manipulating them in the virtual scene. The changes are automatically recorded in the database as presentation properties. When a visitor enters the exhibition by the end-user interface, the objects will be located exactly as arranged by the designer.
EXAMPLES OF VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS In the simplest case, an ARCO virtual exhibition can be a collection of web pages with embedded 3D and other multimedia objects. In such an ex-
Figure 8. 3D visual content configuration interface
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hibition, users can browse content using the well known web interface and examine selected objects in three dimensions. Remote access domains provide content for typical web presentations on computers with different hardware and software configurations connecting over the Internet. Such exhibitions can be integrated with existing websites of museums [Szreniawa, 2010b]. As opposed to the Internet presentation domain, the content for local displays is optimized for fullscreen use on fixed resolution touch-screens. The content must contain all navigation elements and the size of the elements must be appropriate for touch-screen operation. Since both the hardware and the network configuration are controlled by the museum, high-quality graphics can be employed within the local presentation domains. In Figure 9, a virtual exhibition presented using two different templates in two presentation domains is shown. The left template is designed for remote use on the web [Szreniawa, 2010b], while the right template is designed for use on touch-screen displays installed inside the museum [Szreniawa, 2010a]. By using a different presentation template (e.g., in another presentation domain) the same collection of objects can be presented as an interactive 3D virtual gallery. Examples of such galleries are depicted in Figures 10, 11 and 12. The first two examples (Figures 10 and 11) demonstrate generic 3D galleries designed for
presenting cultural objects in some imaginary virtual rooms. The first template (Figure 10) employs two specific Flex-VR design patterns: the Environment Template – Objects pattern and the Shared Behavior pattern [Walczak, 2009b]. Such design ensures that objects are automatically arranged and that they all share common behavior. To create such a virtual exhibition, a museum curator just needs to assign the template to a presentation space, set template parameters, add cultural objects, arrange the object in appropriate order and describe with metadata. Users can browse objects simply by walking along the gallery and can retrieve more detailed information using interaction elements integrated into object stands. The second example, shown in Figure 11, is based on another template. This template, in addition to the design patterns used in the previous template, employs two more Flex-VR design patterns: Complex Space and Complex Object. The Complex Space pattern enables creation of large open spaces consisting of several presentation spaces, e.g., corresponding to different thematic galleries. In such a space, a large number of 3D models can appear in the virtual scene at the same time. To reduce geometrical complexity of the virtual scene, the Complex Object pattern is used. The pattern enables use of lower quality models for representing distant objects and higher quality models for representing objects that are close to
Figure 9. Example exhibition in two presentation domains
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Figure 10. 3D virtual gallery: Example 1
Figure 11. 3D virtual gallery: Example 2
the observation point. The exhibition designer can decide, which versions of the objects should appear when observed from a short and a long distance. As opposed to the previous two examples, the next example (Figure 12) illustrates a virtual exhibition presenting museum artifacts in a 3D room being a reconstruction of a real space – an exhibition corridor in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London [VAM, 2010]. The presented objects are from the collection of Sussex Past – The Sussex Archaeological Society [Sussex Past, 2010]. The Flex-VR parameterization and logic built-in into the 3D templates enables versatile content visualization. In Figure 13 and Figure 14 two examples of virtual exhibitions based on the same template Granary are presented. In the first example, a virtual exhibition of cultural objects (courtesy of the Museum of Agriculture and Agricultural Food Industry in Szreniawa) is presented [Szreniawa, 2010a, 2010b]. The second example demonstrates an exhibition based on the same template (Granary) indented to explain how the granary itself was constructed. There are no objects in the scene and
Figure 13. 3D virtual exhibition based on the Granary template
Figure 12. 3D reconstruction of a real gallery
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Figure 14. 3D exhibition demonstrating construction of the granary
parts of the roof are taken off to show details of the complex construction. The Flex-VR structuralization model (BehVR) enables creation of more advanced interactive exhibitions. An example of a content model
hierarchy of a presentation based on the Beh-VR model is shown in Figure 15. The presentation space Material Quiz implements a simple interactive 3D game. There are two template instances – content template instance inherited from a super-space (shared by a number of games) and behavior template instance influencing the behavior of cultural objects. There are also four content objects (VR-Beans) in the space: three cultural objects and one technical object – Text Window. All cultural objects use behavior scripts generated by the behavior template instance VR-BML Scenario. The template retrieves object descriptions (e.g., the material) from metadata stored in the database. The Text Window object uses its own specific behavior script. In Figure 16, a 3D scene generated based on the game content model shown in Figure 15 is presented. In this game, each cultural object is represented by its 3D model and a label indicating the object’s material (retrieved from metadata). The user’s task is to associate each object with appropriate label and then to press the OK button.
Figure 15. Flex-VR content model of an interactive 3D game
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Figure 16. 3D game generated from the Flex-VR model
From the content designer perspective, creation of such a game requires only assigning a group of objects and a behavior template to a presentation space. No programming or 3D designing skills are necessary. In Figure 17, another example of an interactive virtual museum exhibition presenting a collection of cultural objects is shown. The exhibition is located in a 3D reconstruction of the famous Moorish Hall, styled after the Alhambra Palace, in the Kórnik Castle (3D model courtesy of Michał Waglowski and Piotr Barczyk) [BKPAN, 2010]. The hall contains cultural objects commemorating Polish-Swedish War in the XVII century. A user can use a slider, which is always visible on the right side of the window, to “travel in time”. When the slider is moved, objects in the collection appear and disappear reflecting their use in the past. In Figure 17 four objects – parts of armor are visible, while a number of objects are not visible.
A virtual tour guide system – Kórnik Castle virtual tour – based on the same Moorish Hall model is presented in Figure 18. The interface Figure 17. “Travel in time” 3D game
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Figure 18. Kórnik Castle virtual tour
consists of a high definition digital model of the hall and a number of additional audiovisual objects. A visitor may take a guided tour around the 3D environment – studying architectural details of the hall and listening to an audiovisual guide presenting historical background of the war. During the tour, navigation stops in several places to enable the visitor to watch short video clips taken from the “Potop” (“The Deluge”) movie – a feature film about the war (content courtesy of the Polish Public Television – TVP S.A.). The virtual tour content model consists of the 3D model of the Moorish Hall implemented as a content template, a camera performing the virtual tour, a camera-fixed screen with the audiovisual guide and four screens positioned within the hall presenting the movie clips. All objects, except the 3D hall environment embedded in the content template, are implemented as VR-Beans. These are the Camera object and four Screen objects (cf. Figure 19). The main scenario, which is assigned to the Camera object, describes movements of the camera around the hall. When the camera approaches a position of a movie screen, the screen appears in the user’s viewport and the user can watch the movie clip. After a scenario-defined period of time, the screen hides and a user is automatically transferred to the next position, in the meantime examining the hall and listening to the guide. When the last movie clip finishes, the user is conveyed back to the starting point and the scenario starts over. Using
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controls located under the video guide screen, the user may turn on or turn off the audiovisual guide. The scenario code of the Camera object in VR-BML is presented in Figure 20. The code is composed of the Initialize section and an Action statement. Within the Initialize section a 3D VRML model of the camera is loaded into the scene. The model contains a visual representation of the camera, a viewpoint bound to the camera object and a fixed screen with the audiovisual guide clip. The camera object is then activated. The initialization procedure finishes with the registration of the object in the category objects/ technical, which enables other VR-Beans to discover and communicate with this VR-Bean during the virtual scene lifetime. Movement of the user’s viewpoint is performed through the Camera object animated using the VR-BML commands contained in the Action section of the script. The Action statement is executed repeatedly (time=”-1”) and continuously (count=”-1”). The Camera object – together with the associated viewpoint – is animated by a number of RotateTo and MoveTo animation commands. When the Camera component is approaching a screen location, the script calls the method screen_on() defined in the Screen objects. The method animates the target screen object and starts playing the audiovisual clip. In Figure 21, another example of an interactive VR game based on the Flex-VR approach is presented. The content model is presented on
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Figure 19. ACMA displaying a VR-BML scenario script of a VR-Bean
Figure 20. VR-BML scenario assigned to the camera object
Figure 21. Armor puzzle game: Version 1
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Figure 22. Armor puzzle game: Version 2
the left, while the resulting VR application on the right. The game takes place in a virtual museum room. A user has to assemble a complete armor from parts located in different places in the 3D environment. A body skeleton is used to indicate which part of the armor the user needs to find at a specific time. The game is highly interactive, objects react to user interactions with animations, sounds and voice. While playing the game, a user learns about functions of particular objects by listening to a narration. The application consists of one presentation space (Armor Game) based on the Complex Content design pattern [Walczak, 2009a, 2009b]. In this pattern, a presentation space is associated with a content pattern, which defines a structure of categories of objects and communication channels between these categories. A content template (Moorish Hall) is assigned to the presentation space. The template contains the 3D model of the museum room and a set of commands to create VR-Beans corresponding to content objects. The content pattern (Puzzle Game) defines the following categories of content objects: Objects, Scenario, and User Interface. The User Interface category has two subcategories: In and Out. There are content objects assigned to each of the categories (see Figure 21 on the left). Another version of the game, created for the Polish History Museum [PHM, 2010], is presented in Figure 22.
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In this game, a user has to put all parts of the armor in correct places on the body skeleton. Each part follows a specific path, therefore the parts must be placed in a particular order. If a part is placed in its correct location, it cannot be moved anymore – any other part that should be placed further along the path is blocked and the game must be restarted. Such scenario imposes a higher level of difficulty. The game has been designed to be used on touch screen displays in a museum stand. In most cases touch screens are much more sensitive to touch (“click” or “double click”) than to drag gestures. Therefore, the game employs the point-and-touch paradigm, rather than point-and-drag paradigm for executing interactions. User navigation in the scene is disabled to avoid the “lost in space” problem.
CONCLUSION Two problems that contemporary museums typically face while creating their exhibitions is the large amount of cultural objects, which due to various reasons cannot be exhibited to the public in the traditional form, and the difficulty to organize their exhibitions in a way that would be interesting and appealing to the wide public – and especially young people – while at the same time keeping their informative and educational properties. ARCO
ARCO
solves these problems by enabling museums to build virtual exhibitions that can provide access to unlimited collections of cultural objects in an interactive and interesting way. ARCO has been successfully deployed and is currently used in several museums. The key technology, which enabled development of ARCO, is Flex-VR. Flex-VR enables involvement of museum staff in the content creation process, by providing simple to use tools, which allow them to build and manage virtual exhibitions. This enables including the virtual exhibition development process in the centre of museum activities, which is critical to avoid quick outdating and consequently marginalization of such projects. Application of the Flex-VR approach enables creation of a new class of systems, such as ARCO, which combine simplicity of content management known from collection management systems and content management systems, commonly used in museums, with rich forms of presentation and interaction enabled by virtual reality technology.
Mourkoussis, N., White, M., Patel, M., Chmielewski, J., & Walczak, K. (2003). AMS - Metadata for cultural exhibitions using virtual reality. In Proceedings of the Dublin Core International Conference (DC), Seattle, WA, pp. 193-201.
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PHM. (2010). Polish History Museum. Retrieved from http://muzhp.pl/
ARToolWorks. (2008). ARToolKit 4.3. Retrieved from http://www.artoolworks.com/ BKPAN. (2010). Biblioteka Kórnicka Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Muzeum-Zamek. Retrieved from http://www.bkpan.poznan.pl /muzeum/ Kato, H., Billinghurst, M., Popyrev, I., Imamoto, K., & Tachibana, K. (2000). Virtual object manipulation on a table-top AR environments. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR), Munich, Germany. Mansouri, A., Lathuiliere, A., Marzani, F. S., Voisin, Y., & Gouton, P. (2007). Toward a 3D multispectral scanner: An application to multimedia. IEEE MultiMedia, 14(1). doi:10.1109/ MMUL.2007.22
Patel, M., Walczak, K., Giorgini, F., & White, M. (2004). Cultural heritage repositories as sources for learning materials. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST), Brussels, Belgium, pp. 213-222. Patel, M., White, M., Mourkoussis, N., Walczak, K., Wojciechowski, R., & Chmielewski, J. (2005, May). Metadata requirements for digital museum environments. [Special Issue on Digital Museum]. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 5(3), 179–192. doi:10.1007/s00799-004-0104-x Patel, M., White, M., Walczak, K., & Sayd, P. (2003). Digitisation to presentation: Building virtual museum exhibitions. In Peter Hall, Phil Willis (Eds.). Proceedings of the International Conference on Vision, Video and Graphics, Bath, UK, pp. 189-196.
Sitnik, R., Kujawińska, M., & Załuski, W. (2005). 3DMADMAC system: Optical 3D shape, acquisition and processing path for VR applications. Proceedings of the Society for Photo-Instrumentation Engineers, 5857. Sun. (2010). Java Servlet Technology. Retrieved from http://java.sun.com/ products/servlet/ Sussex Past. (2010). Sussex Past – The Sussex Archaeological Society. Retrieved from http:// www.sussexpast.co.uk/ Szreniawa. (2010a). The National Museum of Agriculture and Agricultural-Food Industry in Szreniawa. Retrieved from http://www.muzeumszreniawa.pl/
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Szreniawa. (2010b). Szreniawa Virtual Museum. Retrieved from http://szreniawa. wirtulane-muzea. pl/ VAM. (2010). Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved from http://www.vam.ac.uk/ Walczak, K. (2008, August 9-10). Structured design of interactive VR applications. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on 3D Web Technology Web3D 2008, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 105-113. New York: ACM Press. Walczak, K. (2009a). Modelling behaviour of configurable VR applications. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 1(7), 77–103. doi:10.1260/147807709788549448 Walczak, K. (2009b). Configurable virtual reality applications. Poznań, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego w Poznaniu. Walczak, K., Cellary, W., & Prinke, A. (2008). Interactive presentation of archaeological objects using virtual and augmented reality. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Budapest, Hungary. Walczak, K., Cellary, W., & White, M. (2006). Virtual museum exhibitions. IEEE Computer, 39(3), 93–95. Walczak, K., & Wiza, W. (2004). Meta-VR: A dynamic approach to building interactive 3D Web applications. e-Minds. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 1(0), 11–20. Walczak, K., & Wojciechowski, R. (2005). Dynamic creation of interactive mixed reality presentations. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology – (VRST), Monterey, CA, pp. 167- 176.
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White, M., Mourkoussis, N., Darcy, J., Petridis, P., Liarokapis, F., & Lister, P. …Gaspard, F. (2004). ARCO - An Architecture for Digitization, Management and Presentation of Virtual Exhibitions. In Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International Conference, Greece, pp. 622-625. White, M., Walczak, K., & Mourkoussis, N. (2003, June). ARCO-Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects. Advanced Imaging Magazine. pp. 14-15, 46. Wojciechowski, R., Walczak, K., & Cellary, W. (2005). Mixed reality for interactive learning of cultural heritage. The First International VRLearning Seminar. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Virtual Reality (VRIC), Laval, France, pp. 95-99. Wojciechowski, R., Walczak, K., & White, M. (2003). Augmented reality interface for museum artifact visualization. In Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging and Image Processing (VIIP), Benalmadena, Spain, pp. 998-1004. Wojciechowski, R., Walczak, K., White, M., & Cellary, W. (2004). Building virtual and augmented reality museum exhibitions. In Proceedings of the Web3D 2004 Symposium - the 9th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (ACM SIGGRAPH), Monterey, CA, pp. 135-144.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Acquired Object: A subclass of the cultural object class used for representing original digitized museum artifacts. (ARCO data model) Behavior Script: A program encoded in the VR-BML language describing appearance and behavior of objects in virtual scenes. (Beh-VR model)
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Content Object: Basic element of Flex-VR presentations. Content objects may correspond to simple 3D objects, complex objects gathering several components – 3D models, images, movies and sounds, or VR-Bean objects with their own behavior specification. (Flex-VR content model) Cultural Object: An abstract class representing museum artifacts. Concrete representations of artifacts are instances of subclasses of the cultural object class. (ARCO data model) Media Object: A multimedia object used as a representation of a content object in virtual scenes. Examples of media objects are 3D models, images, video and audio sequences, and texts. (Flex-VR content model) Presentation Domain: A target environment, platform or usage scenario for Flex-VR presentations. Presentation domains enable differentiation of the method of content presentation in different environments, on different platforms and for different groups of users. (Flex-VR content model) Presentation Space: A container, which represents a virtual exhibition or its fragment. Design-
ers can assign content objects and presentation templates to presentation spaces to create virtual exhibitions. (Flex-VR content model) Presentation Template: A parameterized program used to generate representations of a presentation space. There are two types of presentation templates: content templates – generating virtual scene content and behavior templates – generating behavior scripts. (Flex-VR parameterization) Refined Object: A subclass of the cultural object class used for representing extended or modified versions museum artifacts. (ARCO data model) Virtual Reality Behavior Modeling Language (VR-BML): XML based language used for programming appearance and behavior of content objects in virtual scenes. (Beh-VR model) VR-Bean: A content object built according to specific rules, which enable flexible composition of behavior-rich virtual scenes from independent VR-Beans. (Beh-VR model)
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Chapter 22
Educational Personalized Contents in a Web Environment: The Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia Giuseppe Naccarato Università della Calabria, Italy Eleonora Pantano Università della Calabria, Italy Assunta Tavernise Università della Calabria, Italy
ABSTRACT This chapter presents a system called Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia, part of a Cultural Heritage project supported by the Regional Operational Programme 2000-2006 to promote archaeological patrimony of Calabria, a region of southern Italy. In particular, the Virtual Museum Net offers personalized learning paths though an intelligent match between a user’s preferences, needs, and requests and Calabrian Cultural Heritage data from museums, archaeological sites and libraries, including maps, images, movies, historical writings, and architectural reconstructions.The system provides educational contents and recommendations on the basis of a thematic search or a map, and the user can select both the contents to visualize and the level of detail. In this way, the educational quality, the users’ entertainment, and the learning process are improved by the virtual experience.
INTRODUCTION In recent years, several researches have emphasized a scarce interest of some targets of users in Cultural Heritage (CH). For instance both young people and the elderly have been classified as groups that are not attracted by museums and galleries (Botti, 2000; Mason & McCarthy, 2006). DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch022
Moreover, the Article 12 of the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of CH for Society highlights that a wide effort should be expended for the enhancement of participation in culture for particular societal groups. In particular, it states the necessity to «improve access to the heritage, especially among young people and the disadvantaged, in order to raise awareness about its value, the need to maintain and preserve it, and the benefits which may be derived from it».
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However, since younger generation feels comfortable using Information and Communication Technology (ICT), it has the opportunity to expand its own knowledge taking charge of the complete learning experience in the ways that best suit individual needs and interests (Berdichevsky, 2008). In fact, the current advances in ICT offer immersive tools which can be used to allow learners to explore both personalized environments and scenarios, harness their own skills and enhance their education. These new tools have important implications on lesson planning, didactic contents, and fruition (de Freitas & Neumann, 2009), as well on self-tuition.
BACKGROUND Over the last decade, several researches have demonstrated that learning through interactive technologies has a positive effect on students, supporting the diffusion of scientific knowledge and showing entertainment aspects that can facilitate the educational process (Pan et al., 2006; Cai et al., 2006; Bieliková et al., 2008; Dobson & Ha, 2008; Knipfer et al., 2009). In particular, web technology has been taken into account for the improving of education by providing texts, audios, videos and 3D virtual reconstructions of real objects, as well as new and engaging experiences (Alfano et al., 2008). Moreover, many researchers have developed new tools capable of accessing to highly personalized educational contents; a meaningful example is the personalized Knowledge Navigation Service (Wu et al., 2006), a navigation service which supports the process of self-learning and is based on the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), which consists of a computer-aided method which allows to organize a large amounts of information (Warfield, 1982). In particular, the Knowledge Navigation System allows the evaluation of the learning performance by figuring out what information are already learned and what are to review. Another meaning-
ful tool is the Questions Sharing and Interactive Assignments (QSIA), a web-based learning tool which allows the online development, collecting, managing and sharing of knowledge. It consists of an online platform which can facilitate the collaboration among users to create new knowledge. Furthermore, it facilitates the collaboration among teachers and learners by offering online recommendations. (Rafaeli et al., 2004). In the field of Cultural Heritage (CH), the most used technologies have been based on multimedia, 3D graphics and virtual reconstructions (Lepouras & Vassilakis, 2005). Their aim was the creation of virtual environments where users can play and discover the different elements of the cultural patrimony by using several modality of interaction. In fact, having real and virtual information combined, users have the possibility to experience the 3D Virtual Reality environments as a videogame using the mouse or keyboard, as well as a joystick and the Wii™ wireless controller based on the gestures of the user. This kind of “virtual tour” in an ancient faraway world incorporates information about the culture and the society of the period, and provides an advanced learning opportunity through the display of built-ad-hoc contents. Such navigable environments have a long technological tradition, based on the diffusion of multi-players games, virtual worlds and virtual communities. Moreover, the proposed learning path is both very attractive and stimulating and particularly successful because of its visually based “nature”, with the prevalent immediacy of images in relation to the sequential nature of the texts and the sounds. Given these characteristics, it is consequential that this motor - sensory manner acquisition and processing of knowledge is less tiring on account of the mental effort required (Antinucci, 1998). The described involvement can be also carried out thanks to the potentialities offered by GIS technologies, Internet and Google tools (Van Gool & Sablatnig, 2006; Cutrì et al., 2008; Pantano & Tavernise, 2009). Hence, the web is a powerful tool to be used for surfing
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in both virtual museum collections and virtual educational contents (Ghiani et al., 2009; Chen, 2009), meeting the demand of high quality education contents available via Internet (Chang et al., 2009). Therefore, the main consequence has been a wide effort in the digitalization of CH materials in order to overcome the traditional physical boundaries of museums, offering a global, realistic, and engaging experience for virtual users (Parry, 2005; Lin et al., 2006; Tonta, 2008; Styliadis et al., 2009). Moreover, thanks to an increasing amount of digital educational contents available in this field, one of the most important feature requested to an e-learning system has become the possibility to provide high customized information, based on learner’s requirements (Chen et al., 2005; Schiaffino et al., 2008; Özpolat & Akar, 2009; Biletskiy et al., 2009). In fact, systems for the personalized information retrieval are able to choose one on more alternatives from a set of possibilities by a filtering process (Iijima & Ho, 2007; Cao & Li, 2007). These recommendation systems support user’s decision process, focusing on profile (Schafer et al., 2000), preferences and past actions (Kwon, 2003; Cao & Li, 2007; Vallet et al., 2007; Hong et al., 2009; Romero et al., 2009), and the opportunity to visualize only the information that better satisfy user’s needs reduces the information overload (Gaugh et al., 2007). Furthermore, the prompt availability of the information fitting the request, without the mental effort of a wide screening of materials, improves user’s learning and satisfaction (Liang et al., 2007). Regarding CH contents, learners need a different level of information detail and are influenced by the method of content visualization: actually, the target of young people prefers interactive contents (Mussinelli, 2009), whereas adults prefer texts to study historical and artistic information in depth, especially if connected to a particular object. Regarding the specific access to educational contents for CH, the National Museum of Science and Industry (London, UK), has created a website (Ingenious, http://www.ingenious.org.
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uk/) aiming at supporting the knowledge sharing. In fact, the system collects images and texts of cultural significance and allows users to create their web galleries, which can be shared with other users or a larger audience (Knipfer et al., 2009).
MAIN FOCUS OF THE CHAPTER The aim of this work is to introduce the website “Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia”, by which the fruition of personalized educational contents related to CH is allowed. It has been realized in the homonymous project, financed by the Regional Operational Programme 2000-2006. In past years a number of large-scale projects dedicated to archaeological site modelling or museum collection digitization have emerged as an important driving force in the field of educational CH. In these projects ICT have been used to “enhance preservation and scholarship, providing tools for large collections to be preserved, catalogued and searched effectively, or producing high-quality digital representations of cultural artefacts that can be accessed and investigated worldwide” (European Commission, 2007). However, the problem of the realization of new tools able to access to highly personalized CH educational contents is still in its infancy, and systems able to guarantee a customized e-learning in this field are not so common. Therefore, the Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia is a new opportunity for an educational self tuition based on individual needs and requests, in order to improve the quality of CH learning and the educational experience in general.
The Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia Project The Virtual Museum Net aimed at a global presentation of the archaeological patrimony of Magna Graecia territory in Calabria (a region of Southern Italy), that offers a very rich heritage of not exploit-
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ed ruins which dates back to the Ancient period of Greek colonial expansionism in the Mediterranean area. Furthermore, the archaeological parks and the artefacts housed at the main Southern Italian museums (such as that of Locri or Crotone) were unknown to the wide public. In fact, most of these finds were not exhibited and accessible to visitors, but stored in museum warehouses (sometimes without any cataloguing process), even if from a cultural perspective they constitute a unitary set (Bertacchini et al., 2006a; Pantano &Tavernise, 2009). Afterwards, the virtual museum foresaw the Web organization of a net of museums for the insertion and the updating of the data through the access to a remote site (Bertacchini et al., 2006a; 2006b; 2007). The main aim of the system was to put on-line Magna Graecia information, images, movies, history, and architectural reconstructions to promote the learning of a specific period in a global scenario. In particular, the Virtual Museum is capable of providing educational personalized paths for the learning of CH contents; in fact, it is based on web 2.0 technologies (Thomas, 2006; Wilson, 2006; Tapscott, & Williams, 2007), which allows end-users to actively participate in the promotion and diffusion of the digital heritage. Indeed, users can access to the virtual reconstructions of ancient
scenarios and create connective paths among them, in order to satisfy their requests oriented to the improving of CH knowledge. The system consists of four main levels: Real, Virtual, SMVG 1.0, and Labs. In “Real” level, users can access information using a thematic search or a map. Regarding the first one, they can access to the following CH locations (Figure 1): Museums, Archaeological Parks, Libraries, Religious Buildings, Other Buildings, Architectural Goods, Landscapes, Cultural Districts. Concerning museums, we inserted all the Calabrian permanent institutions devoted to the acquisition, conservation, communication and exhibition of tangible (and intangible) witnesses of human society development and environment. By the website it is also possible to visit archaeological parks, the areas characterized by important archaeological evidences and didactic paths, as well as to know the location of libraries. These latter have been inserted in order to indicate the places of consultation of texts, that can be papers or multimedia, regarding the chosen educational content. Museums, archaeological parks and libraries have a common feature, which conists of opening days and hours. This characteristic is very important for the search to carry out in the website, because the system can support user in
Figure 1. The menu “real” in the website
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the finding of areas that are closer to a particular place, at a distance defined by the user himself/ herself, or open in a specific hour of the day. Regarding buildings, we inserted all the churches, convents, and monasteries present in Calabria, as well as all the interesting historical buildings. In this way, the user can look for historical contents on one of this places, even if these buildings are not connected to Magna Graecia. Architectural Goods are castles and towers, whereas in “Landscape” the user can find all the estates that are the historical, cultural, or natural expression of a territory, as for example natural parks. The user can also access “Cultural Districts”: these terms indicate the areas that are the centre of an economic exploitation. In fact, they refers to a model of economical development, especially at a local level, centered not only on the exploitation of cultural goods, but on a complete productive process of a specific territory. The other levels of the website (Virtual, SMVG 1.0, and Labs) offer further solutions adaptable to every kind of user, providing the means of scientific communication at different degrees of complexity. In particular, the level “Virtual” provides information on two items: Finds and Buildings; in “Finds” the user can access to some
three-dimensional objects present in the museums (Figure 2), and in “Buildings” to the virtual reconstruction of the archaeological parks. An important educational characteristic is the possibility to manipulate the reconstructed objects, taking into account the great influence of manipulation (also virtual one) in the construction of knowledge and on the educational process (Bilotta et al., 2008). Regarding “Buildings”, this level provides information on the cultural patrimony in its “original” state (an example is in Figure 3), allowing the interchangeable view of the goods and their 3D reconstructions. This opportunity is of great interest for educational aims, by offering different possible levels of understanding, also with regard to the urban space: this can help to indicate different hypotheses of use, which are linked to a wider concept of conservation. Short hypertexts, databases, dynamic pages, images, film clips and sounds contribute to construct a global virtual context. Thus the remote user is enabled to search and therefore identify, learn about and evaluate a cultural artifact on the basis of its spatial, temporal and cultural relations, its interaction with the city and its surrounding territory, specific dimensions, typological characteristics and general urban scenarios, rather than
Figure 2. A three-dimensional object present in the virtual museum
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Figure 3. The reconstruction of Greek walls (Vibo Valentia, Italy)
the simple reading of a text. In fact, the user is able to learn a particular context for each cultural artifact that interests him/her. Finally, in the level “SMVG 1.0” the user can access documents about history, archaeology, and the used technologies for the realization of the three-dimensional reconstructions. In “Labs” some information about the project are given, and in “ESG” the group of research that realized the virtual museum is presented. Users can also access to a personalized information using the map: this allows the visualization of the places and of the contents related to the different locations. The system foresees two different searches: simple and advanced. In the simple search user individuate a cultural good directly in the map (Figure 4). If the user does not know the complete name of the good, an automatic prompt will suggest the right choice. The system also provides a list of results: the first one is the CH selected by the user, then the system shows similar results. By two icons present in the list it is possible to have links to an internal or external databases. Regarding the “Advanced Search”, this functionality can also be used for the personalization of a “real”learning path. In fact, the user can visualize:
•
•
•
•
the places and objects of cultural interest present in a selected perimeter according his/her position (Figure 5); museums, archaeological parks, and libraries at a certain time (and in a determined perimeter) (Figure 6); the road map (as text or image) from the user’s position to the selected cultural good (Figure 7); the learning itinerary (as text or image) according to the cost of the CH fruition, in the case of a ticket purchase or time constraints (Figure 8).
This system offers solutions adaptable to every kind of user, by providing the means of scientific communication at different levels of complexity. At the first level, in the virtual museum, the user can “manipulate” the archaeological and historical documents, from the maps of the ancient buildings and historiography, or from literary pieces (poems, prose or plays), in order to obtain a “full immersion” in the historical, cultural and economic reconstruction of the ancient cities. Afterwards, the user can “build his/her knowledge experience” thanks to the manipulation of 3D objects, the superimposed and interchangeable
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Figure 4. The localization of a cultural good in a map using the modality “simple search”
Figure 5. The position of the user in the “advanced search”
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Figure 6. Timetable in the map of “advanced search”
Figure 7. The road map from the user’s position to the selected cultural good in “advanced search”
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Figure 8. An example of learning itinerary realized according to the cost of the fruition
view of 3D reconstructions and real objects, and the global vision of finds of which exist only fragmentary remains. Moreover, the user can have a unitary vision of the patrimony of a museum, or of more museums, and increase the complexity of the visit from a linear path, using different points of views and choosing several places to visit. In this way the virtual museum net not only supplies information but, if compared to a traditional learning, it arises interest and curiosity.
The Access to the Virtual Museum Net The users can access the personalized educational contents from three different levels:
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1. by a direct access: the system asks for a content selection by proper windows; 2. by a registration: the system suggests the contents to the user on the basis of his/her profile; 3. by a combined modality of the direct access and registration: even if this modality requests an high computational effort, the result is more effective than the separate possibilities. In fact, the combined access uses both the user’s selection and profile. An important feature of the website is the possibility to “self-feed”, that is the opportunity given to particular users of the insertion of new contents. These particular users are Cultural Public Offices,
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Universities, Foundations, Cultural Associations, that contacted the development team asking for this possibility. They can insert, modify, or delete the cultural goods present in the database (each user can insert a cultural find that is not present in the website by the compilation of a form). The administrator can access all the functionalities foreseen by the back-end of the platform. In particular, he/she can validate the insertion/ modification/deletion of the cultural goods, modify both the multimedia and textual contents, manage all the different modules of the system (including the template).
Technical Characteristics The interface of the Virtual Museum Net portal is user-friendly and can be easily explored also by non-experts users. Regarding the adopted technology for the system, the part of the application for the data retrieval from the database has been developed with Java technology, whereas Enterprise Java Beans - standard 3 (EJB 3) has been used for the server. Moreover, the personalization of a learning itinerary is allowed by Google API thanks to the simple interaction with a map. Furthermore, the integration with recommendation systems can help the user in the selection of the different learning paths, that are present in the website. The real learning path consists of a set of steps, which includes the place of interest and their possible connections. Hence, it is possible to represent them by using the graph-based formalization, where G represents the graph, V the vertices (the steps) and E the connection between pairs of vertices. Regarding Google API, the integrated algorithm derives from the use of an optimization constraint model. In particular, a grade of importance or “value” (called “V”) has been associated to each cultural good (called “i”), that could be a leg of the virtual journey. From a mathematical point of view, V is a function of different variables x1, …, xp, that is:
V = f (x1, …, xp) con x ∈ X,
where X is the set of the indicators describing the characteristics of a cultural good. In particular, V depends on the building age, state of conservation, accessibility of the site, artistic value. Other parameters important for the definition are the duration “tfi” (value estimated on a users’ sample) associated to the fruition of the good “i”, and the time “tij” necessary to reach the find “j” starting from the good “i”. The purpose of the mathematical model is to find the best path for users, that is the path which maximizes the travel performance according to the importance given to each good and to the time constraints. This problem can be solved by using the Knapsack model, that allows to find the sets of objects which maximizes the profit according to the constraints (the capacity of the knapsack). Defining the starting point S for the problem and the last leg of the journey P, the mathematical problem can be formulated as follows: max z (y ) =
∑
∑ Vy
{(i , j )∈E }
i ij
+Vp
s.v.
(t fi +tij )yij + t fp ≤ T
{(i , j )∈E }
∑
yij
{j :(i , j )∈E }
1if i = s − ∑ y ji = −1if i = p {j :( j ,i )∈E } 0otherwise
yij ∈{0,1} ∀(i,j)∈E
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia is based on the user’s profile, and can provide solutions which perfectly fit the learner’s preferences. However, an ad hoc tool integrated with GIS/GPS
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will be developed in order to allow a mobile based learning. Furthermore, the tourism implications for the exploitation of the territory, as well as the attraction of users’ attention have to be carefully considered. In fact, both places and contents are geo-referenced: hence, the integration of GIS open source technologies (Google Maps) in the system will allow tourists the creation of customized touristic tours, and the access to the territory on the basis of personal needs (as for example the working hours of a museum). Moreover, the educational results of the system have to be tested with subjects from different orders of school. Finally, the current version is still in progress, thus some changes have to be foreseen, as for instance a multilingual version.
CONCLUSION The development of Web portals devoted to the divulgation and promotion of cultural patrimony has the potentiality to be engaging for a wide target of users, especially young people. In order to offer a global vision of Magno-Greek archaeological scenario regarding Calabria (a region in Southern Italy), we realized a system able to provide personalized learning paths by which the user can localize the archaeological parks and museums on the territory visualizing them on a map, or on the basis of other criteria (thematic search). Since the displayed information could overcome the user’s needs, he/she can choose the visualization of specific objects related to defined topics or the information related to churches, libraries, castles, and so on. However, the main advantages of the website are the promotion of Magno-Greek Cultural Heritage, the improving of the educational quality related to the virtual experience, the users’ entertainment, and the facilitation of learning process. In fact, although this application can improve the diffusion and dissemination of Cultural Heritage, above all it has its part in the comprehension and learning of
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the past: a user can study and enjoy all aspects of a complex historical and archaeological heritage and, by the enhancement of his/her experience in the present, the understanding and knowledge of the ancient civilizations is increased. Moreover, the possibility to carefully select both the contents to visualize and their level of detail, provides an intelligent match between the offer’s and the user’s needs/requests (Kanellopoulos, 2008).
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Cultural Districts: The areas that are the centre of an economic exploitation. In fact, they refers to a model of economical development especially at a local level, centered not only on the exploitation of cultural goods, but on a complete productive process of a specific territory. Knowledge Navigation Service: It is a personalized navigation service which supports the process of self-learning and is based on the Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM). In particular, this system allows to evaluate the learning performance, by figuring out of the already learned information and those that is to learn or review again. Personalized Learning Paths: These are paths which can be created directly by users, according to their own educational requests. In fact, users can localize the most interesting archaeological parks and museums on the territory and visualize them on a map. Recommendation Systems: These are particular systems which support user’s decision process, focusing on profile, preferences and past actions. The opportunity to visualize only the information that better satisfy user’s needs reduces the information overload. Furthermore, the prompt availability of the information fitting the request, without the mental effort of a wide
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screening of materials, improves user’s learning and satisfaction. Virtual Reconstructions: These consist of the reconstruction via 3D graphics tools of real objects and scenario, realized in order to engage users’ experiences and facilitate the learning process. They are particularly efficient in archaeological and historical contexts. Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia: It is a project promoted by the Regional Operational Programme 2000-2006, which provides an unitary vision of archaeological patrimony of Magna Graecia in Calabria (a region of Southern Italy).
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The system offers an intelligent match between the offer’s and the user’s needs/requests, providing educational contents on the basis of a thematic search or a map, and the user can select both the contents to visualize and their level of detail. Web 2.0 Technologies: These technologies allow end-users to participate actively in the promotion ad diffusion of a digital contents globally. In particular, they offer virtual spaces and tools in order to share knowledge among users and create communities oriented to a specific topic. Meaningful examples are MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.
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Chapter 23
A Strategy Framework for Digital Heritage Steven W.P. Wu National Heritage Board, Singapore
ABSTRACT As digital heritage covers a very broad spectrum of human knowledge and expression, this chapter focuses primarily on the cultural heritage space. A three-box, three-layer strategy framework is proposed for managing innovation in digital heritage. The concept for this framework is derived from the Govindarajan Three-Box strategy framework. The three layers identify the major sets of challenges that a digital heritage ecosystem has to address. These are challenges directly relevant to a large museum, challenges in connecting with the broader ecosystem, and synergies with other ecosystems. Each layer is further divided into five components – technology, infrastructure, capabilities, content, services - for a clearer perception of the key drivers of innovation. A strategy framework for digital heritage should necessarily be open and adaptive yet cognizant of the drivers of innovation. These drivers ultimately determine the type of content and services that may be delivered to visitors and users. In the absence of a national digital heritage strategy, a surrogate framework may be used. A detailed Singapore case study of a surrogate framework, iGOV2010, is included for reference and learning.
INTRODUCTION In recent years, information technology has permeated the administration of museums and the broader ambit of cultural heritage. Without doubt the irresistible adoption of IT solutions has reached a threshold of synergy with the physical DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch023
collection and real world cultural activities. Museum collections are being re-incarnated as digital assets through the use of software and digital tools. Curators are being recast as digital asset managers working to re-purpose these assets for educational or commercial use. Cultural content both structured and unstructured grows exponentially, giving rise to unforeseen opportunities and new challenges to museum professionals and
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private collectors alike. While traditional museum IT aimed to support daily administration, a newer generation of digital solutions is paving the way for borderless public sharing and engagement. Information ecology in small museums, as Spinazze (2007) notes, is “characterized by locality...reflects the relationships between technology, people and practice...must evolve organically based on the needs of those inside” (p. 123). However, a large museum today is more likely to be connected beyond its local community and indeed may have a national, if not global, agenda. No longer is their audience limited to physical visitors. Furthermore, the pervasive worldwide web has ushered in the era of virtual participation and round-the-clock access to collections. Innovative digital content production tools and methods also enable the creation of a new generation of born-digital assets that can be shared around the world. Hence, for larger cultural organizations, information ecology has to embrace a digital inclusion where cultural capital can be “prosumed” by virtual visitors drawn together by continuously evolving Webx.0 services. A heritage information ecosystem today must necessarily encompass information, internet and wireless ecosystems. For museum administrators and IT planners, identifying an optimal combination of content, applications and infrastructure can be a daunting challenge in the face of limited budgets and organizational resources. Richness of, and access to, content is being redefined by technology innovations developed elsewhere for other purposes. Applications are being rapidly obsolesced by changes and upgrades to the delivery infrastructure that are often motivated by broader government or business competitiveness agendas. Museum IT strategies are, hence, shaped as much by internal management objectives as by government agenda and independent development in other industries. Just as a museum’s strategy document requires the inputs of diverse stakeholders within and beyond its brick-and-mortar boundaries, a digital heritage
strategy has to transcend in-house capabilities and resources.
BACKGROUND UNESCO’s Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage states that “digital heritage consists of unique resources of human knowledge and expression. It embraces cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources. Where resources are ‘born digital’, there is no other format but the digital object. Digital materials include texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages, among a wide and growing range of formats. They are frequently ephemeral, and require purposeful production, maintenance and management to be retained” (UNESCO, 2003). Article 2 of the Charter goes on to explain the need for accessibility and provision for privacy. The purpose of preserving the digital heritage, it notes, is to ensure that it remains accessible to the public. Accordingly, access to digital heritage materials, especially those in the public domain, should be free of unreasonable restrictions. At the same time, sensitive and personal information should be protected from any form of intrusion. The UNESCO Charter recognizes that digital heritage is eclectic and multi-format. While much effort has already being put into digitization of existing museum and archival records, increasingly it will be the born-digital heritage assets that draw away museum’s resources to manage, preserve and make accessible. The sheer diversity and volume of cultural heritage information being produced and exposed daily over the web poses long-term technological and administrative challenges in terms of storage, preservation, retrieval and data quality.
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Digital heritage is more than the digital manifestation of the museum’s information ecology. It includes digital production which means content creators and providers can use digital networks to reformat, package, disseminate and commercialize their works beyond national boundaries and market directly to consumers. Supporting digital heritage also makes possible the creation of innovative content, such as ‘born-digital’ arts. Beyond the local ecosystem, digital heritage also needs the support of internet and mobile ecosystems and associated connectivity infrastructure to encourage participation and foster collaborative relationships. Digital heritage is particularly vulnerable to the onslaught of the new media revolution wherein images and records are finding their way to the public eye faster and easier. Digital assets need to be protected against loss, theft, corruption or obsolescence. Powerful search engines are able to find content from anywhere in the world and share them with anyone with access to a browser. To maintain relevance, curators will have to engage with visitors via new media enabled by online technologies. Beyond these issues, digital heritage has to be protected from technology misuse and wanton destruction. Under these circumstances, innovative solutions that enable better protection without unduly restricting access are likely to prevail; so are innovative forms of outreach that are low-cost yet ubiquitous. Moreover, the rubber-band of cultural heritage development is often stretched by political and government agenda to cultivate a raft of social engagements. Public sector agenda is necessarily proactive and, in many countries, drives innovation and change through judicious funding support. Thus public sector participation adds impetus to digital heritage development through various funding schemes and stretches the boundaries of inclusion.
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PROPOSED DIGITAL HERITAGE STRATEGY FRAMEWORK (DHSF) Few countries today have articulated their digital heritage strategy let alone actively implemented one. Lacking a comprehensive framework, the initiatives are often piecemeal and directed at specific issues. In this chapter, a strategy framework is proposed that may be used to define and chart the development of a digital heritage ecosystem with the goal of managing innovation. This framework has to address an array of internal and external requirements. Internal applications and services are focused on productivity, efficiency and data quality imperatives. On the other hand, external services are intended to engage the public and extend the museum’s outreach beyond the traditional boundaries. Realizing inclusive digital heritage requires a long-term vision with a supporting scaffolding of mission statement, key objectives and strategies. The stakeholders include museum curators, management, researchers, educators, governing boards, volunteer groups, private sector suppliers and relevant public agencies. Given the potentially conflicting nature of their requirements, it is a challenge to develop a comprehensive strategy framework. A digital heritage strategy framework (DHSF) has to encapsulate operational as well as strategic challenges. It has to be open in order to benefit from development in other associated initiatives. Tuck School of Business Prof. Vijay Govindarajan has proposed a three-box strategy framework (refer to Appendix), which is adapted here for the DHSF. The three-box framework is essentially applicable to managing innovation (Govindarajan, 2009). By structuring the framework into three layers (rows) in addition to the three stages (columns) of innovation management, it is hoped that the challenges of applying the DHSF could be better understood. Each layer is further divided into five components – technology, infrastructure,
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capabilities, content, services - for a clearer perception of the key drivers of innovation. The proposed DHSF comprises three layers. The basic model of this three-layer structure is derived from the NHB IMAS framework explained in the following case study. In Layer 1, core technology, infrastructure, capabilities, content and services relevant to the realization of digital heritage goals at the organizational level are identified. The middle layer (Layer 2) identifies connective, collaborative and co-operative components that not only impact the organization but also the broader cultural heritage ecosystem. The content and services in Layers 1 and 2 are potentially commercializable. The outermost layer (Layer 3) identifies contributions from external sources such as public agencies and national strategic initiatives that may create synergies. This layer focuses on the compliance and regulatory issues; it also links up with other frameworks for partnerships and alliances. The overall structure of the framework is shown in Table 1. During the past two decades, the internet coupled with mobile technologies has opened up new vistas for public engagement. Digital heritage can tap into opportunities for the application of technologies that originate in other sectors. For digital heritage, technology is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, new technologies provide the vehicle to create new content and services leading to the formation of new enterprises. On the other hand, these technologies are potentially
disruptive, precipitating content and service obsolescence. Thus the diffusion of new technology products and tools adds to the risks in digital heritage. For example, new file formats associated with new tools necessitate digital preservation strategies. New systems development and integration frameworks such as service-orientated architecture may help to prolong the lifespan of services and applications. Infrastructure covers the gamut of information, network and mobile hardware, middleware and software and their convergence. Besides the hard infrastructure, attention must be paid to the development of soft infrastructure. Soft infrastructure components include intellectual property laws, tax regimes, policies, innovation systems, funding schemes, availability of private financing and venture capital etc. Hard and soft infrastructures co-exist to form an “infocomm” ecosystem. Capabilities span expertise in valuation, cataloguing, digital asset management, and operation needed for digital heritage. Capabilities development is a critical hurdle that can only be successfully tackled with a national agenda. Cross-disciplinary knowledge and competencies need to be built up from secondary through to tertiary levels. Today, digital education infrastructure can provide almost universal access to good quality education for virtually any connected community. However, to succeed, a spectrum of disciplines – linguistics, history, arts, cultural and social sciences, information science & technology,
Table 1. DHSF structure Digital Heritage Strategy Framework Layer 1 Core organizational components Layer 2 Collaborative components Layer 3 Synergies and contributions from other ecosystems
Box 1 Managing for the present
Box 2 Selectively abandoning the past
Box 3 Creating the future
Manage or outsource the component: Technology, Capabilities, Infrastructure, Content, Services
Identify specific elements of each component to abandon: Technology, Capabilities, Infrastructure, Content, Services
Decide on development, collaboration or outsourcing: Technology, Capabilities, Infrastructure, Content, Services
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environment - need to be developed in unison. There must be open, inclusive initiatives to galvanize scattered resources and talented groups to contribute to the development of digital heritage clusters. A virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing, selfpropelling activities driven by innovative content and services hopefully may result. Capabilities in research and development, and collaborative partnerships within a well-developed national innovation system are also prerequisites for successful innovations. Content may be born digital or digitized from physical forms. Novel ways of digitization have been developed from high-resolution photography to 3D imaging that allows for zooming and rotational viewing of iconic artefacts. Content should be appropriately catalogued with correct metadata description to be of value. Content also has to be digitally preserved to save its original form for future reference. Digital assets may be created and distributed for cultural reasons. Hence, what may initially start life as local content for community enjoyment may well morph into globally tradable assets. The key challenges of commercialization are the development of sellable, innovative content and the development of complementary services that ensure that wealth or credit accrues back to the owners. The “middleman” role may be undertaken by a third party elsewhere in the world with the reputation and infrastructural resources to complete the value chain. This global value chain today is by no means complete and the private sector is likely to play significant roles. Riskier applications or those with longer-term return on investment timelines are likely to need public initiative or co-funding to take off. Competitive services result from the effective integration of technology, infrastructure, capabilities and content. Web and mobile services allow users to become prosumers, a situation that is already a reality today as found in social computing and wikis. Increasingly, globalization will force competition to be built on national competencies. Transnational organizations can tap into local ca-
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pabilities and talents to deliver service components that are integrated through cross-border project management and commercialization expertise.
Uses for a Digital Heritage Strategy Framework A DHSF may be developed in order to: a. Define a baseline model for perception and planning A DHSF should be a starting point in a neverending journey to embrace innovation to create the future. Beyond providing an overview of the present status and goals, it lays a foundation for future development. b. Position for Innovation A DHSF should be positioned to assimilate and benefit from technological and environmental changes. Technology extends outreach and gives rise to new forms of engagement. The external infrastructure is constantly evolving to adapt to demographic, competitive and global developments. Hence, a DHSF has to be open and adaptive. c. Promote transparency and communication A DHSF can highlight the respective contribution of various stakeholders from the participating cultural organizations, audience, asset contributors, sponsors and relevant public agencies. Linkages and interdepencies are identified and clarified. Besides promoting inclusion, the framework may also be used to communicate alignment between organizational and national agenda. d. Integrate accountability and compliance A DHSF can help integrate elements of accountability to all stakeholders particularly sponsors. Where national or international standards impose guidelines for effective sharing and protec-
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tion, the DHSF should have provision for the adoption of these policies or regulatory frameworks. e. Support fund-raising activities A DHSF can present a “big picture” scenario that funding agencies and sponsors can refer to for proposal evaluation and for tracking the progress in achieving forward-looking agendas.
A DHSF Instance Tables 2, 3 and 4 illustrate an instance of the framework populated with ideas, suggestions, technology innovations from the IT industry, and actual experience. The tables’ content is not intended to be exhaustive or prescriptive. Above all it should not be interpreted as futurist predictions. The “Competition” word in the headers serves to highlight that cultural heritage content and services are exposed to the dynamics of globalization. These content and services have to compete for
Table 2. Layer 1 of proposed DHSF Competition for the Present BOX 1
Competition for the Future BOX 2
BOX 3
Layer 1: Technology, infrastructure, capabilities content and services directly relevant and applicable to the heritage organization Technology • Web 2.0 • 2D / 3D imaging • Enterprise and web search using universal search engines, e.g, Google • Museum mobile guides with bluetooth and infrared connectivity • Museum interactives such as touch screens for easy access to linked information
Technology • PDA/smartphone with GPS and other 3G wireless connectivity • Near-field communication & RFID for artefact tracking • 3D virtual world • Augmented reality to relate an artefact to its real world context
Infrastructure • Hard • LAN, WAN, Web • Limited mobile access to web and enterprise services • Soft • IP protection – copyright, patents • Archival best practices • Metadata standard
Infrastructure • Hard • Web and mobile integration • Soft • Digital asset management • Digital preservation
Capabilities • Standards-based cataloguing • New media content development
Capabilities • Data quality management • Public-private partnerships • Process re-engineering • R&D management and commercialisation • Governance framework and performance scorecard
Content • Digitalized museum and archive artefacts • Online exhibition • 3D exhibition archival
Content • Co-creation of digital assets (e..g, imaging, research, documentation, quality assurance undertaken by separate parties)
Services • Museum collection management including cataloguing, archival, exhibition management, donor management and visitor relationship management
Services • Nation-wide or regionally integrated collection management system delivered via the software-as-a-service model
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Table 3. Layer 2 of proposed DHSF Competition for the Present
Competition for the Future
BOX 1
BOX 2
BOX 3
Layer 2: Connective, collaborative and co-operative components that impact digital heritage beyond the immediate needs of the organization Technology • Metadata exchange • Multi-vendor best-of-breed security solutions for components of the infrastructure and applications
Technology • Federated search engine and portal • Cloud computing • Semantic web & databases • End-to-end security • Digital rights management • Location-based information & image retrieval through smart phone • Augmented reality on mobile devices
Infrastructure • Jointly (public-private) managed server and storage farm
Infrastructure • Hard • Cloud computing • Soft • Digital marketplace on cloud • Digital preservation on cloud
Capabilities • Digital assets creation and management • Games development
Capabilities • Networks of cross-border players contributing specialised expertise • Cross-border public-public partnership
Content • Social content such as blogs, wikis, images and videos
Content • 3D virtual world artefacts • Virtual world history reconstruction
Services • Social networking portal • Genealogy portal • e-Commerce for digital assets • e-ticketing for events • Virtual museum • E-Learning on history and culture
Services • Genealogy integrated with DNA data, birth, marriage records etc • Borderless content production and processing • Collaborative virtual exhibition • Federated search on repositories, local and overseas • Online booking for museum events and facilities • Google-style map with history and culture layers • Multiplayer online games on history and culture
mindshare and “heartshare” with similar services delivered through overseas portals as well as local non-heritage sources.
A Singapore Case Study A case study is presented here to illustrate how a national digital strategy may be developed synergistically by a number of agencies. The players are the National Heritage Board (NHB, 2010), Infocomm Development Authority (IDA, 2010), and Media Development Authority (MDA, 2010). These agencies develop their respective strategy that contributes in their own ways to realising the over-arching goals of a whole-of-government
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initiative known as iGOV2010. iGOV2010 vision statement reads “To be an integrated Government that delights customers and connects citizens through infocomm” (iGOV2010, 2010). Performance of each agency toward meeting the vision’s objectives is monitored by a centrally administered set of metrics known as iGROW which will be discussed in another section. Arguably, iGOV2010’s encouragement of continuous development and deployment of innovative solutions to attain citizen service excellence is congruent with the objectives of the Govindarajan framework goals to manage the present, selectively abandon the past and create the future. Although iGOV2010’s footprint extends beyond
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Table 4. Layer 3, proposed DHSF Competition for the Present
Competition for the Future
BOX 1
BOX 2
BOX 3
Layer 3: Synergy through industry best practices, partnerships & alliances and national initiatives (continuously enhanced on what has been achieved in Box 1) Technology
Technology • Grant schemes for technology development • Private sector financing or venture capital • National initiatives or competitions for development of innovative products and services
Infrastructure
Infrastructure • Legislation on content sharing and distribution • Policies and guidelines for certification and censorship • Intellectual property rights arrangement for content distribution • Tax regime to spur digital marketplace development • Infrastructure security
Capabilities
Capabilities • Public-private partnership management • Certification for various skillsets and competencies • Adoption of best curatorial practices for digital assets • Quality assessment on digisation • Digital education
Content
Content • Nation-wide data reference model • International metadata standards • Digital rights management • Digitalization standards
Services
Services • Service management best practices • Data centre management best practices • Project/programme management best practices • Governance framework to align with other public agencies’ strategies
digital heritage, it may nonetheless serve as a surrogate in the absence of an explicitly articulated national digital heritage strategy. As the goals of the agencies’ initiatives impact on digital heritage, the DHSF can be used to focus achievements and plans that are relevant to digital heritage. Thus the DHSF may be set up as a roadmap for managing digital heritage innovations that emerge in the course of service delivery to citizens. IDA plays a central role in shaping digital strategy for Singapore. Besides being the main driver for infocomm infrastructure, IDA also publishes various reference models (data, technical, etc) for government agencies. IDA has promulgated its ten-year Inforcomm Masterplan in a paper known as Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015, 2006).
One key proposal is to develop Singapore into a DME (Digital Media and Entertainment) capital by taking a pro-active stance to infrastructure and capabilities development. For this to happen, it proposes to develop Singapore as: a) a centre of creation and commercialization; and b) as a global node to provide core services and infrastructure to the DME sector. The strategy calls for the development of technology centres and taking initiatives on technology development to create the next generation of content and services. To become a global node, the plan envisions the creation of a digital assets marketplace by transforming the processing and distribution of content. The centrepiece of the ecosystem is the Digital Vault for major content owners to store, trade and account
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for their digital assets and resources. The second component is the Digital Key to address content owners’ needs for safeguarding and trading their content as well as managing licensing and rights. The third component is the Digital Courier for end-to-end delivery, payment management and sales fulfilment of digital assets. The three key processes are production (“world as your factory”), processing (“physical to digital convergence”) and distribution (“digital assets monetization”). For the present, IDA has set up a cloud computing service in partnership with several IT vendors. MDA champions the development of a vibrant media sector in Singapore with an emphasis on nurturing home-grown media enterprises and attracting direct foreign investment for economic growth, new jobs and greater economic dynamism. MDA plays a vital role in transforming Singapore into a Trusted Global Capital for New Asia Media, spearheading initiatives that promote industry growth in film, television, publishing, music, games, animation, interactive digital media (IDM). The key strategies are devising schemes that encourage and nurture content creation; marketing campaigns which promote Singapore media at key trade markets; launching programmes to upgrade business capabilities and talents; and encouraging the test-bedding and deployment of innovative IDM solutions and services. NHB is the primary agency focused on cultural heritage activities and managing the national museums in Singapore. As such NHB’s digital strategy will be discussed in some detail here. In 2003, the newly formed Strategic Technology Office (STO, renamed Heritage Technology Services or HTS in 2009) developed a digital heritage strategy framework, IMAS (Integrated Museum and Archival System), as a roadmap to drive NHB museums toward more effective use of IT resources and digital assets. Prior to IMAS, NHB museums each maintained their own databases of images and metadata. These siloed information repositories impeded search and resource discovery. The independent databases were
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also costly to support and maintain partly due to the fact that NHB museums / institutions have separate management and are dispersed across several locations. iMAS comprised an umbrella of evolving services developed to support NHB operation and address nation-wide digital heritage activities. Through the implementation of IMAS, NHB has realized significant savings in operational and software licensing costs.
NHB Digital Strategy STO’s Mission: 1. Build NHB into Centre of Excellence for museum IT / heritage industry 2. Develop museum IT application systems 3. Support NHB museums: Helpdesk & IT applications support 4. Participate in cross-agency iGov initiatives 5. Maintain accountability & compliance to government-wide IT policies & initiatives First conceived in 2003, iMAS’ mission was focused on building an integrated, common IT platform for all museums in Singapore. In addition, IMAS was intended to be the blueprint to guide applications and services development over a five-year period. Details of implementation and technology architectures were excluded as the application and service development were outsourced. This made it possible to benefit from prevalent technology platforms and ready infrastructure. The framework is composed of three layers. The innermost layer consists of the core applications and services that NHB museums need for daily operation. The middle layer links the museums to the broader cultural heritage sector. Finally, the outermost layer identifies governance issues such as accountability, compliance as well as cross-agency development. IMAS objectives :
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Figure 1. IMAS strategy framework
one centralised managed repository and setting up of a common delivery platform through an information lifecycle approach. Data quality issues can now be tackled by dispersed teams of staff working on the unified repository. Besides serving the NHB museums, IMCMS is available to other heritage organizations through a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model.
Metadata Standard
• •
•
•
Provide a common, integrated IT platform for all museums Promulgate a common IT metadata & taxonomy standards to facilitate exchange of cultural heritage content Partnership with ICT & creative industries to develop innovative content and services based on NHB’s cultural & heritage resources Build NHB into the centre of IT excellence for the museum and digital heritage industry
At the heart of iMAS strategy framework are the core museum IT applications and services. The core set of services is called Integrated Museum Collection and Management System which includes collection management, exhibition and event management, donor management, user access management as well as a web frontend known as SGCOOL (Singapore Collections Online). SGCOOL features category browsing and 2D image search using metadata fields. It also supports e-commerce for images. The implementation of IMCMS necessitated the re-engineering of 22 NHB museum processes. The key outcomes were the consolidation of all museum databases into
One of the fundamental consideration was that the core applications should support Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). By complying with this standard, it was hoped that metadata could be searched, shared and exchanged between local and international organizations. The standard would also support the development of an enterprise search portal. The adoption of the standard required the development of an application profile for all NHB’s repositories. Besides the museum databases, the application profile also mapped onto several archival repositories including posters, oral history, maps, audio-video clips, and others. The application profile was developed through a methodological approach and underpinned the implementation of NHB’s information lifecycle management.
Accountability and Compliance Besides the metadata standard, iMAS applications generally comply with Singapore governmentwide technical architecture and data reference models. Security policy and provisions are closely complied. To align with corporate strategy, iMAS’ key performance indicators formed a subset of NHB’s Balanced Scorecard key performance indicators.
iGov Initiatives A shared event calendar named EventsHub has been developed for all public agencies and private
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sector companies in the cultural, recreational and sports sectors. Another cross-agency e-citizen experiment is CRS (Culture, Recreation and Sports) eTown, a portal that provides comprehensive CRS news and information services of which Eventshub is a component. Eventshub provides an e-ticketing gateway for online booking as well as mobile access. More recent additions include an integrated booking facility and virtual galleries for the CRS organizations. Other iMAS services include a genealogy portal (Singapore Family Tree), a social networking portal (H-Portal), an enterprise search portal (SCROL), a mobile e-guide (IMDS) and a visitor counting system (PCATS). In 2008, IMAS entered into a new phase called IMAS2010. Under IMAS2010, innovative applications/services such as a mobile tour guide with location-sensitive information retrieval, virtual museum (Cybermuseum) and World of Temasek are being developed. Refresh and up-scaling of infrastructure are being planned to meet longer-term information lifecycle management objectives. To support and grow a burgeoning heritage IT subcluster, NHB has awarded a number of projects and service operation contracts based on the 3PI (Public-Private-People Initiative) Model whereby private sector partners develop solution and services with the assistance of government funding. The services are then jointly operated. In 2009, STO split off from the main IT division to create a service unit called Heritage Technology Services (HTS) Division. HTS’ revised mission is “to focus on ICT business development, iGov initiatives and projects”. Emphasizing e-engagement, business partnership and building up the digital heritage sector, HTS’ goals are to: •
•
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Engage the public actively in digital heritage through innovative services and applications Participate in iGov initiatives: CRS eTown, e-services and mobile services
• •
Partner ICT & creative industries to develop innovative content and services Build NHB into the centre of IT excellence for the museum and digital heritage sector
Synergy and Alignment iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts are a set of broad agendas. iGROW is a set of self-assessment metrics used by IDA to monitor public agencies’ progress in realizing the iGOV2010 goals. The four strategic thrusts with samples of iGROW self-assessment metrics are tabulated in Table 5: Collected regularly, these metrics provide the impetus for continuous incremental improvement and introduction of innovative solutions in the public sector. Table 6 shows how the DHSF layers could be mapped onto the iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts. These thrusts provide the bases for initiatives that are likely to pull together private sector companies to engage in joint development and operation of infrastructure, technologies, content and services. The next section discusses some examples of innovations that have emerged from the initiatives. The case study illustrates how national or cross-agency strategies may be co-developed to achieve synergy in the creation of innovative content and services, value-add to the content and deliver the services. No single agency has the mandate or resources to address the spectrum of services, technology development and infrastructure to support digital heritage. Collectively, the execution of their respective strategies with private sector participation results in new technologies, infrastructure and capabilities that enable service innovations to succeed. To ensure synergy and minimal overlap, these agencies regularly hold joint meetings to share their plans and work out ways to value-add to each other’s initiatives. By acting as demand drivers for innovative solutions, public agencies help create new markets and serve as reference customers for local start-ups in their early stage of growth.
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Table 5. iGOV2010 strategic thrusts and iGROW self-assessment Strategic Thrust
Modified sample of iGROW Self-assessment questions and guidelines
Increasing Reach and Richness of Service
• Review opportunities to integrate public-facing services with other relevant agencies or private entities so as to offer a seamless experience to common customers • Review opportunities to deliver public-facing services via channels (e.g. 3G, mobile) other than the Internet so as to reach out to all segments of customers • Gather and analyse customer inputs so as to identify ways to improve our public-facing electronic services • Total number of fresh ideas conceived that started feasibility studies in this financial year • Total number of integrated public-facing electronic services led and participated
Increasing Citizen’s Mindshare and e-Engagement
• Gather and analyse customer inputs so as to identify ways to improve our public-facing websites such that our customers find the content relevant, useful, up-to-date (e.g. timely, no broken links), easy-to-search and easy-to understand
Enhancing Capacity and Synergy in Government
• Review if there is potential to leverage on existing or contribute to new shared data, processes, systems, services or infrastructure so as to achieve more cost effective operations and improve service to the public • Review opportunities to improve the way we work through adopting innovative infocomm solutions and best practices • Total number of projects which the agency has led to-date, which contributed to shared data, processes, systems, services or infrastructure • Total number of technology experimentation projects embarked upon
Enhancing National Competitive Advantage
• Total number of intellectual properties from government-owned infocomm system released to industry for commercialization • Total number of international e-Government awards that the agency has submitted nominations on infocomm projects or initiatives
Other assessment:
• Infocomm management and governance, public sector infocomm competency development, and infocomm security and infrastructure
Table 6. Mapping DHSF to iGOV2010 strategic thrusts DHSF Layers
Main Drivers
iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts Supported*
Technology
MDA
Increasing Reach and Richness of Service Enhancing Capacity and Synergy in Government Enhancing National Competitive Advantage
Infrastructure
IDA, MDA
Enhancing Capacity and Synergy in Government Enhancing National Competitive Advantage
Capabilities
IDA, MDA
Increasing Reach and Richness of Service Enhancing National Competitive Advantage
Content
NHB, MDA
Increasing Reach and Richness of Service Increasing Citizen’s Mindshare and e-Engagement
Services
NHB, IDA, MDA
Increasing Reach and Richness of Service Increasing Citizen’s Mindshare and e-Engagement
*Note: All agencies and ministries are required to complete the iGROW self-assessment. A respondent is allowed to opt out of sections that may not be applicable. This table shows the strategic thrusts for which MDA, IDA & NHB could assume the key driver role with respect to digital heritage.
Managing Innovation To succeed, a DHSF should be based on a well articulated model and tested methods of managing innovation. DHSF should also leverage on other
strategic initiatives beyond the cultural heritage sector. In the Govindarajan framework, the three main steps in managing innovation are to: (Box 1) manage the present ; (Box 2) selectively abandon the past ; and (Box 3) create the future. This strategy 473
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framework highlights the need for management to balance managing the present with creating the future. Beyond operational details of cost cutting and making incremental improvements to products and services, the framework is about sustaining leadership for the next ten years through strategic innovation. Applying the Three-Box framework, a DHSF should demarcate a baseline for the present (Box 1). A cultural heritage organization has to have a good grasp of its current digital capital as well as services and their positioning in order to be able to manage them effectively. The cultural heritage sector may not have a reputation as early adopters of technology. Nonetheless, cutting-edge solutions have found their way into museums. Many challenges faced by museums can be addressed by an effective integration of information tools and infrastructure. However, today’s museum programmes and portals have to compete for mindshare and eye-balls with the likes of online games and virtual shopping malls. Innovative content and services are needed to stay ahead. Obsolete or unattractive services have to be retired (Box 2). One of the harder challenges is to decide what and when to abandon services. Tipping points and trigger issues are brought into play such as shift in business mission, technology obsolescence, emergence of disruptive technologies or services, decreasing usage, falling membership or visitorship, substitution of lower-cost infrastructure, loss of capability making the service untenable, diminishing returns on investment, new industry standards, termination of partnerships or alliances, organizational policy change, change in regulatory framework and policy, planned endof-life for products and services, end of project funding, and so on. Transiting from Box 1 to Box 3 is rarely problem-free and often risk-laden. Frequently, the transition is marked by a period of uncertainty during which skilled application of change management best practices would be required. Disruptive changes due to technology discontinuity, while
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potentially costly, may be possible to phase in over several months. Changes in regulatory requirement and business strategies tend to need more urgent execution. Box 3 is intended for creating the future in the longer term and therefore should help prepare the cultural organization in advance. To create the future, the cultural heritage organization has to re-vision its goals (Box 3). Virtual experience is an elusive catch-up game wherein each new generation of mobile gadgets, user interfaces and collaborative applications redefines the envelope of user expectations. Local technological innovations should also be encouraged for longerterm economic dynamism. Infrastructure innovations such as digital assets marketplace need to be guided by a strategic vision. Capabilities need to be continuously enhanced by collaborating with world-class leaders. In addition to managing locally produced content, global sourcing of digital assets for value augmentation such as preservation, storage and distribution, can help create new industries for the local economy. Services that are initially developed for local clientele may be scaled up to address the international market. In the case study, iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts focus on driving service improvements and adopting innovative solutions to deliver excellent citizen service. Innovations that emerge in the course of providing the services may subsequently be re-packaged for overseas markets. iGOV2010 therefore has a key role in driving innovations in technology, infrastructure, capabilities and services through whole-of-government initiatives that have the potential to increase national competitiveness particularly where the private sector also has a major stake. Thus iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts are congruent with the DHSF insofar as they galvanise government agenda to push for service innovations. Table 7 shows how mapping the iGOV2010 Strategic Thrusts onto the DHSF can be useful in creating the future as defined in Box 3 of the Govindarajan framework. In general, technologies and solutions are developed by private sector companies for com-
MDA
IDA, MDA
IDA, MDA
NHB, MDA
NHB, IDA, MDA and others (e.g., National Library Board, CRS eTown agencies, etc)
Infrastructure
Capabilities
Content
Services
Champion or Demand Driver
Technology
DHSF Layers
Phases I & II of e-Government Action Plan services
Siloed repositories Analogy / 2D content production 2D images in Web1.0 portals Enterprise search facility Social Networking with content (images & video) sharing Blogging community events and past Story sharing by students Digital Heritage Trails with location-sensitive information
3PI partnership model, joint R&D programmes with leading organizations and universities (e.g., GAMBIT, a partnership with MIT on games development)
First-generation National broadband network – SingaporeOne
API /libraries for 3D application development, IDM (interactive digital media) software applications and tools
Box 1
Table 7. Applying the proposed DHSF to the Singapore case study
iGOV2010 whole-of-government integrated services, e.g., OneMap, integrated Facilities Booking System Mobile services (e.g., Digital Concierge) Location-based services Cloud computing Digital preservation
Information lifecycle management Federated search with support for metadata exchange with public and private repositories 3D images in virtual galleries, (e.g., Cybermuseum) Digital Heritage Trails integrated with mobile tour guides and augmented reality Digitisation of 3D artefacts Virtual world projects to re-construct ancient history integrated with augmented reality (e.g., World of Temasek) Next generation games, animations and publications Global sourcing of digital assets for processing, storage and distribution
Innovation funding schemes (e.g., Future TV, Future Games, Future Mobile, Future Books, Future of Media) Public-private partnerships for content development and distribution Expansion in scope and depth of international collaborations Nurturing technology innovators in digital entertainment and IDM through seed funding and funnelling of venture capital (e.g., i.Jam)
Wireless broadband infrastructure Next-generation broadband network with capacity of 100Mbps and beyond Technical, data and business reference models Government-wide security infrastructure Standard operating environment for all networks and desktops/notebooks used by civil servants Testbeds for virtual worlds, location-based services, display & broadcast, street cameras, maps & directories, etc Digital assets marketplace (digital vault, digital key and digital courier)
Software components and hardware gadgets for future TV, games, mobile applications & services, ebooks and media.
Box 2 & Box 3
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mercial reasons as well as to address markets within and beyond the home country. By providing funding support, test-bedding facilities, early demand for solutions and joint business promotion, the public sector can help to seed local innovations and help entrepreneurial start-ups to succeed. Although NHB creates much of its content in-house, a significant amount is contributed by the public or outsourced to the private sector. This ensures there is demand for private sector services and provides opportunities for applying innovative tools and solutions. On the MDA front, strategic partnerships are struck with overseas media-related government ministries, agencies and companies to create greater international recognition for Singapore media capabilities and talents, and enable home-grown media companies to create more high-quality content for the international markets. Singapore public agencies have actively embarked on various forms of public-private partnerships to develop and operate services that might otherwise be unprofitable or unsustainable for private sector companies to deliver by themselves. Such partnerships may call for strategic innovation in business models and service delivery. For example, NHB has struck a public-private partnership with a start-up company to develop and operate Cybermuseum (Wu & Lui, 2009). The partnership aims to share intellectual property rights as well as development and operating costs. For NHB, there will be savings in development and running costs. Market risk is considerably reduced for the private sector partner as there are demand drivers and early adopters for their products and solutions. In the same vein, to kick-start cloud computing IDA has worked with vendors to set up consortia to create competitively priced service models that benefit both public and private sector customers. In sum, digital heritage innovations arising out of the agencies’ initiatives in iGOV2010 may be managed through the use of the DHSF. Presently, no agency is tasked with the role of managing
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innovation in digital heritage on behalf of the Singapore public sector.
Implementation and Other Issues Digital heritage is not a priority in many countries’ infocomm development agenda. One issue to consider is whether a DHSF is needed at all if it can be surrogated or subsumed by other, perhaps more generic, frameworks already in use. For national competitiveness, a country might want to develop its heritage sector spanning both traditional and digital services. For this to happen, it should define a digital heritage strategy based on a framework such as the proposed DHSF. To use a surrogate framework would hide the critical and specific challenges of digital heritage. At the museum level, a digital heritage strategy is also useful even if certain components of the framework such as technology or communication infrastructure are outsourced. Museum or state planners should work on the optimal combination of technology, infrastructure and capabilities to achieve their strategic objectives for digital assets and services. The DHSF may well serve as a tool for perception and planning. Articulation of strategic thrusts in digital heritage may well spur action in priority areas. For example, a strategic thrust could be “Reach and Richness of digital heritage services”. This thrust may focus on developing engagement with virtual visitors and linkages with other institutions. “Richness” may point to the quality of digitisation, for example, image resolution and quality of information about an artefact. The DHSF should be driven by a number of strategic thrusts that evolve as digital heritage goals mature. Another crucial step is to decide on a set of key performance metrics for measuring the progress in achieving the strategic objectives associated with the DHSF. For example, number of new or improved services, number of digitised assets, and number of personnel trained in digital heritage could be included. At the national level, the num-
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ber of innovative start-ups primarily engaged in digital heritage could be an indicator of progress in nurturing the sub-sector. If a surrogate framework is used, it is just as important to develop metrics to track the achievements and innovations that pertain to digital heritage.
CONCLUSION In the internet age, digital heritage has assumed a broader footprint far beyond the traditional museum information ecosystem. Digital heritage services are being redefined by the relentless diffusion of innovations that originate both within and outside the museum ecosystem. Generally, museums and heritage organizations are not in the position to develop or manage technology and infrastructure by themselves. It is therefore beneficial for these organizations to align with national programmes or cross-border initiatives to benefit from the rapidly changing technology, infrastructure and market forces. The proposed three-box, three-layer digital heritage strategy framework provides a comprehensive tool for perceiving the current situation and identifying innovations that may impact the museum and its broader ecosystem. In the absence of a national digital heritage strategy, a surrogate may be used provided the visions are congruent to a large extent. The case study has also suggested ways to operationalize the DHSF. These include defining strategic thrusts and performance metrics. If a surrogate framework is used, the proposed framework can serve as a lens on the strategic programmes and initiatives that impact digital heritage. The use of the proposed strategy framework for digital heritage is shown to be feasible at the national level where public agencies collaborate through a set of shared strategic thrusts. The framework may also be applicable in heritage or-
ganizations that invest time to develop longer-term strategies for themselves and their ecosystems.
REFERENCES Govindarajan, V. (2009). Innovation in a reset world. Vijay Govindarajan’s Blog. Retrieved Aug 31, 2009, from http://www.vijaygov indarajan. com/2009/08/ iN2015 Digital Media and Entertainment Subcommittee. (2006). Digital marketplace for global media and entertainment. Singapore: Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. iN2015 Steering Committee. (2006). Innovation. Integration. Internationalisation. iN2015 Report, 68-71. Singapore: Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. IDA, Infocomm Development Authority. (2010). [Web site]. Retrieved from http://www.ida.gov.sg iGOV2010. (2010). iGOV 2010 masterplan Strategic thrusts. Retrieved from http://www. igov.gov.sg/iGov MDA, Media Development Authority. (2010). [Web site]. Retrieved from http://www.mda.gov.sg NHB, National Heritage Board. (2010). [Web site]. Retrieved from http://www.nhb.gov.sg Spinazze, A. T. (2007). Technology’s no tea party for small museums. In H. Din & P. Hecht (Eds.), The digital museum: A think guide, 121-131. Washington DC: American Association of Museums. UNESCO. (2003). UNESCO Charter on the preservation of digital heritage. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://portal.unesco.org Wu, S., & Lui, G. (2009). A public-private partnership for cybermuseum development and operation. [Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing.]. International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2(2), 111–122.
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ADDITIONAL READING Geser, G., Kanter, N., van Kasteren, J., Moon, M., Ross, S., & Steemson, M. (2002). Digital asset management systems for cultural and scientific sectors [Thematic issue]. DigiCULT, 2. Retrieved from http://www.digicult.info/ downloads/thematic_ issue_2_021204_ low_resolution.pdf Geser, G., & Pereira, J. (2004). Virtual communities and collaboration in the heritage sector [Thematic issue]. DigiCULT, 5. Retrieved from http://www.digicult.info/ downloads/digicult_ thematicissue5_ january_2004.pdf Jones, C., & Wu, S. (2010). Re-constructing history in World of Temasek. In Proceedings of 3rd Annual International Conference on Computer Games, Multimedia and Allied Technology (CGAT) 2010. Singapore: Asia Pacific Technology Forum CRS eTown. (2010). Retrieved from http://livelife. ecitizen. gov.sg/crs/ about-us/about-us/ Kao, J. (2009). Defining large scale innovation [Video webcast]. BusinessWeek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/ mediacenter/ podcasts/ innovation/innovation_ 10_13_09.htm MDA Interactive Digital Media Project Office. (2008). Co-Space Call for Proposal. Retrieved from http://www.idm.sg/ cfp/cfp08/ co-space/ Ross, A. (2009). Can government spark innovation? [Video Webcast]. BusinessWeek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/ mediacenter/podcasts/ innovation/innovation_ 11_09_09. htm Wu, S., & Chua, W. M. (2008). Museum collection management on-demand. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV 2008) (pp.310-315). New York: ACM Press
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Wu, S., Reed, B., & Loke, P. (2007). SCROL application profile. In International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC2007). Singapore: National Library Board.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Digital Asset: A digital asset is any form of binary-format content (text, images or multimedia) protected by right-to-use provisions. A digital asset may have been transformed from an existing artefact by a digitization process that involves hardware, software or a combination; alternatively, it may have been created or born digitally so no physical artefact of it pre-exists. Digital Heritage: Digital heritage consists of unique resources of human knowledge and expression. It embraces cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources. Digital Preservation: Digital preservation is the management of digital assets over time through the set of processes and activities that ensure continued access to the assets as well as track modifications (format, re-digitisation of the original artefact, etc), provenance and other timestamped changes over their lifecycle. The goal is to produce authentic and stable digital assets. Infocomm: Short-form for “Information and communication”. It may be applied to computer/ communication hardware, software, web, wireless, mobile and fixed-line infrastructure, technologies, content, services, policies and regulatory frameworks. Performance Metrics: Performance metrics are used to measure and monitor the progress of action plans and activities for meeting an organization’s strategic thrusts. Metrics may also be defined for national strategic thrusts.
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Public-Private-People Initiative (3PI): Public-private-people Initiative (3PI) is a service delivery approach where services offered by the public, private, and people sectors are integrated to create benefits (e.g., cost savings and specialised expertise), convenience and effective delivery to citizens and businesses. Strategic Thrusts (or Objectives): Strategic thrusts are high-level initiatives arising from the
strategic vision and serve to guide the action plans towards some over-arching goals. Strategy Framework: Framework implies a structure as yet incomplete but is reusable for many recurring problems so an instance of the framework is a solution set for a specific problem. A strategy framework supports an architecture for a strategy (solution) to be defined.
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APPENDIX Three Box Strategy Framework Figure 2. Three box strategy framework © 2009, Vijay Govindarajan. Used with permission
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Chapter 24
Web 2.0 and Idiosyncrasy of Cultural Heritage: A Perspective from Indonesia Ruly Darmawan Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia
ABSTRACT Information and communication technology (ICT) plays a significant role in making cultural heritage preservation activities find acceptance and appreciation from society. By using Web 2.0 developments, preservationists may strengthen the idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage. For Indonesia, highlighting a unique cultural heritage is important since Indonesia has cultural similarities with other countries. An intensive dialogue among historians, anthropologists, artists, activists, and other participants can facilitate the meta-reflection which is needed in formulating cultural heritage. Such a dialogue space can conveniently be constructed using Web 2.0 technologies. Instead of presenting a technically-focused applications of Web 2.0 technology for cultural heritage, this paper highlights the inquiry, dialogue, and collaboration behind culture and cultural heritage activities. It also discusses technocultural issues, including Web 2.0, globalization 3.0, and the rise of a new technocultural class, in order to create a framework for culture and cultural heritage approaches before implementing technological solutions to cultural heritage problems.
INTRODUCTION The existence of cultural heritage artifact, either material or immaterial artifact, has become a major concern for several countries. It is because the cultural heritage stores the fundamental world-view of a particular society or, in a larger scale, a parDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch024
ticular nation. The importance of cultural heritage also attracts particular attention from some major multinational organizations such as UNESCO and ASEAN. These two organizations are then drawn up some strategic plans of actions for cultural heritage preservation, including the consideration to incorporating the support from technological means such as ICT. The implementation of ICT on cultural heritage information management has
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been of particular concerns in several years now. Read-only digital collection on the website, digital library, and online interactive virtual heritage are some examples of the projects that are dedicated to the cultural heritage information management and dissemination. For developing country, such effort might be an invaluable contribution, especially in promoting the local identities within a global world. For Indonesia, for instance, implementing ICT in cultural heritage information management and dissemination can be a solution to promote the various kinds of cultural potentials and, at the same time, to determine the position of Indonesian culture among the other cultures in the world. However, such attempt in cultural heritage online promotion is not quite enough. Some occurrences have shown that the physical manifestations of Indonesian cultural heritage are still in danger. Natural disaster, artifacts stealing, and claims are some of many threats that produce a terrible loss for material culture inventory and could make the dissemination of cultural heritage information become irrelevant and lose its context. The remaining chance to remedy such situation is by preserving the immaterial manifestation of cultural heritage as keen as possible. Furthermore, such preservation of immaterial manifestation should also be supported by the attempt in pursuing an in-depth inquiry on the ideas behind immaterial manifestation or, in other words, seeking “the immateriality beyond immaterial manifestation”. Of seeking deeper layers of such immateriality issue, it is important to consider the tacit knowledge that is located in people’s mind. In this sense, the understanding about immateriality is gathered from experience and knowledge as well. To bring out this tacit knowledge, a dialogue which allows people to tell everything they know and understand might be the suitable alternative. The only remaining problem now is on the availability of space where the exchange of ideas can be facilitated in. The rapid development of digital technology leads the contemporary people into a paradigm
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shift which ramifies the worldview and the way of living. Further, New technology must be developed with an understanding of the needs and concerns of our target user population (Heilpern, Reid, Boardmen, & Annam, 2009, p. 821). This notion seems already obtain an answer by the development of Web 2.0 which offers the possibility for user to participate in the creation of online content, including the possibility in the way in conditioning the information. Nowadays, users are not in position as the consumer of information anymore, yet it allows them to produce information based on what they know or on what they intended the other people to know. Such situation makes the Web 2.0 becomes suitable for a construction an alternative dialogue space within which people can do some reflections in order to produce a comprehensive understanding about some issues. In the issue of cultural heritage, such dialogue space may facilitate the needs in searching the aforementioned immateriality beyond manifestations. Due to the critical situation of Indonesian cultural heritage assets, this dialogue space is relevant with the intention in finding and preserving the fundamental conception of cultural heritage. Having such perspective, the availability of a framework that maps the roles and activities concerning the meta-reflection in a dialogue space is needed. It will help in determining the roles and activities that would be necessary in achieving the expected results. The primary objective of this paper is to draw up a framework that is suitable for pursuing a meta-reflection activity that is inline with the behavior of Web 2.0 and the worldview of contemporary people, and can be considered as an adequate reference before implementing a technology for cultural heritage preservation and dissemination. In supporting this objective, this paper elaborates the issues on culture and cultural heritage as well as the ideas behind technocultural society, especially in its relevance with paradigm shift driven by the digital technology.
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BACKGROUND Revisiting Culture and Cultural Heritage People and culture are inseparable. In fact, culture can be considered as a “recording machine” in which all stories of human, including experiences, knowledge, and thoughts; are stored, reflected, and manifested. Culture is ensemble of social processes by which meanings are produced, circulated and exchanged (Thwaites, Davis, & Mules, 1994, p. 1). In this sense, culture is a “final” object resulted from the relationship between people and the world. Meanwhile, in “The Black Hole of Culture”, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (1996) sometimes put the word like ‘manufactured’ and ‘fabricated’ when discussing about culture (p. 193-194). This implies that culture is the construction process by which value and meaning are created in an identifiable and translatable way. At this point, culture is being considered as an “accomplished task” and becomes a final object. As a final object, culture then crystallizes as identity that differentiates between one individual and/or social group with the others. Identity is in fact a transitory product of ongoing critical and dialogical exchanges with others (Sugiharto, 2007, p. 8). According to this situation, culture then exists not as a “final” object, but also as “object-in-process” which would always be needed and constructed by the people as long as the relationship with the world persists. Edward T. Hall (1977) noted that one of the functions of culture is to provide a high selective screen between man and the outside world (p. 85). This puts the culture as a kind of negotiation process and helps people to preserve a harmonious relationship with the world. It is a mutual constellation that a change in one element will eventually affect the others. Culture is like an unfinished story, which should be continued (van Peursen, 1988, p. 12). What has been recorded in a form of culture is a story that should be preserved to make people able to continue the remaining time
of their life. In time, this “recorded documents” will be passed to the next generation and becomes a cultural heritage. There are several definitions of cultural heritage that have been delivered by some organizations. Asian Development Bank (ADB) considers the cultural heritage as a record of humanity’s relationship to the world, past achievements, and discoveries. Cultural heritage, also termed cultural property, cultural patrimony or cultural resources, can be defined as the present manifestation of the human past (ADB, n.d., para 1). Beside, as referred by ICCROM from UNESCO’s Draft Medium Term Plan 1990-1995, cultural heritage is defined as the entire corpus of material signs - either artistic or symbolic - handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind (Jokilehto, 2005, p. 4). Furthermore, it adds that the cultural heritage gives each particular place its recognizable features and is the storehouse of human experience (Jokilehto, 2005, p. 5). These two definitions clarify that the cultural heritage is, still, the form of culture which has already been passed to the next generations. And referring to the Hall’s previous explanation that culture functions as screen that mediates the human and the world, it is obvious that the cultural heritage contains the value as well as moral story of how such screen has been constructed while the negotiation between people and the world took place. Then, the function of cultural heritage preservation is to provide the field of interpretation of the past in the modern time. In accordance to this notion, Bambang Sugiharto (2007), an Indonesian philosopher, concerned that history, tradition and heritage are not always appearing as objective representations of the past, but rather, a possible interpretation and re-interpretation of it that will enable us to transform ourselves, to keep us on the move and to enable us to evolve to higher level (see p. 8). In this case, preservation should not only be seen as keeping the cultural heritage artifacts in a good condition so it becomes accessible. Preservation can then also be understood as
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conversation and reflection. And the truly preservation effort is when the people can reflect the value and meaning beyond the cultural heritage artifacts or manifestations and contextualize them into the present time. In this sense, the cultural heritage is preserved not in the context that it is well-maintained physically in particular facilities, but in the context that it lives in the mind of the people; in the everyday life. One thing that must be noted here is that this should not be considered as degeneration, nor does encourage everyone to live back-dated in the Stone Age. Instead, this should be understood as raising awareness that we live in a certain condition of environment which will eventually produce a specific worldview. It is all about continuing conversation and reflection.
Technocultural Discourse: Globalization 3.0 and Web 2.0 According to the aforementioned discussion on culture, it can then be understood that living without tools is an impossible condition to be happened in the everyday living. Human needs tools in order to establish a mutual relationship with the world. The intensive interaction between people and their tools produces a dimension of culture that is very best known as technoculture. Technoculture can be interpreted as the discourse of relationship between technology and culture (Shaw, 2008, p. 4), human and object (Sterling, 2005, p. 8), man and machine (Løvlie, 2006, p. 4), and, in more specific context, human and information technology (Green, 2001, p. xxviixxviii). For the contemporary people, it is the relationship with the information technology, as an apparatus of digital technology, which allows them to experience different paradigm of reality. The capacity of digital technology in making a convergence becomes the starting point of the paradigm shift in everyday life, particularly, according to Green’s notion, the change of perception of space and time. Such paradigm shift leads the contemporary people to the situation where
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they can possibly make an alternative definition of the self and the world. Such definition also affects to some issues including a discourse on globalization. Thomas L. Friedman (2006) notes that the people have experiencing the three phases of globalization: globalization 1.0, globalization 2.0, and globalization 3.0 (p. 223). Friedman notes that globalization 1.0 was motorized and marked by the expansion of the states; globalization 2.0 was motorized and marked by the expansion of companies or corporations; and the globalization 3.0 was motorized and marked by the expansion of individuals (p. 10). What can be interpreted here is that this evolution of globalization also means the reduction process of the number of actors that will necessarily be involved in globalization itself. The globalization is not merely concentrated on how the existing corporeal body can possibly expand and recognize world widely. On the contrary, the accessibility of mental dimension could be the primary keyword in revealing the alternative understanding or question about what the “real” globalization is. For better understanding about this situation, the globalization and reality, in accordance with the Friedman’s conception, can be illustrated in Figure 1. The evolution of globalization, in the interpretation to Friedman’s context, produces dialectic of real and virtual dimensions; dialectic of physical and mental paradigm. In this perspective, real and virtual dimension is to mention the definition of body in real (physical or corporeal) reality and virtual (mental) reality. The dialectic of these real and virtual dimensions is on the Figure 1. Globalization and reality
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availability of alternative reality; a virtual reality. Here, virtual reality can be described as a digitized transmission of body data into a machine where they are converted into sensorial perceptions (Bronswijk, 1997, p. 66). In this case, the evolution of globalization is based on the availability of technologically-constructed reality that can purposively be selected by people. Consequently, as the digitalization of self and the world become highly possible, the globalization 3.0 (the globalization of self or individual) can be done by maximizing the existence of digital body in the digital world. Hence, it is the virtual dimension (or virtuality) of self that plays a significant role, rather than the mere presence of virtual reality itself. Richard Coyne (1998) notices that information technology is a technology of the mind and allows the transmission of aspects of the essential self (p. 365). As the mental and virtual dimension become the everyday topic in the contemporary discourse, the presence of virtual reality then leads to a paradigm shift which are known as deterritorialization (in Deleuze & Guattari’s term) (Cranny-Francis, 2005, pp. 127-128), delocalization (in Anthony Gidden’s identification)(Mitchell, 2003, p. 31), dematerialization and demobilization (Mitchell, 1999, pp. 148-150), and disappearance (in Paul Virilio’s term)(see Ruby, 1998, pp. 186-187). These issues of technoculture and globalization 3.0 inspire the raise of the new way of every day’s living. As can be identified from the previous section that there is paradigm shift of people, of the way people work, and of the everyday space. Practically, this new constellation is negotiated with the existing one. An illustration of such negotiation can be reviewed as follow: Figure 2 depicts the reality in which the negotiation of technocultural people with their body, work, and space in the everyday situation. The constellation of people-work-field (space), as related in the previous discussion, can be the existing and old one. By the intervention of digital technology, it seems that the new constellation of
people-work-field (space) is being created. Actually, the ‘newness’ here is lying on the paradigm; on how the people define the reality itself. New people can have mean new mentality, worldview, and definition of body. So do the working process and the field which will be subjected to the “newness”, such as in the conceptions, characters, and forms. According to this situation, Richard Barbrook (2006) identifies that the new class is about to emerge. From the early-1990s onwards, as media, telecommunications and computing converged into the Net, the charismatic leaders of hi-tech businesses were praised as the makers of the future: the Symbolic Analysts, the Virtual Class, the Digerati, the Digital Citizen, the Swarm Capitalists, the New Barbarians, the Bobos, the Netocracy and the Creative Class (Barbrook, 2006, p. 23). He also adds that others have celebrated the subversive potential of the networked proletariat: the Cyborgs, the Netizens, the Immaterial Labourers, the Digital Artisans, the Multitude, the Cognitariat, the Cybertariat and the Precariat (Barbrook, 2006, p. 24). In a specific concern to the cognitariat, Franco Berardi gives note on subtraction, disobedience, and refusal of work (Scotini, n.d., section 11); in order to describe the ‘freedom’ of people in obtaining the life’s expectations. The ‘freedom’ meant here is in positive interpretation where the mechanism of
Figure 2. Negotiation in technocultural reality
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activities or works in the contemporary world is flexible and different due to the availability of digital technology which modifies the relationship between conception and execution, then the relationship between the intellectual content of work and its manual execution (Berardi, 2005, section 2). At the same time, the current Web 2.0 development seems to be a remarkable support by providing a feature for user participation and can be considered as space where the exchange of ideas might conveniently be conducted. Web 2.0, as a medium for human communication (Raffl, Hofkirchner, Fuchs, & Schafranek, n.d., section 6, para. 1), is the second evolution of World Wide Web by which interaction of users can conveniently be facilitated. Accordingly, much of recent media attention concerning the rise of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has focused on what’s been given the rather ugly moniker of user generated content (UGC) (Anderson, 2007, p. 15). This evolution of Web 2.0 is then not only describing the development of software infrastructure but also to the paradigm of, in Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s term, ‘prosumer’ where the consumers of information has the opportunity to generate a specific information which will eventually make them to become the producers of information as well. In the previous phase of web development, or web 1.0, the user’s cognition is the important domain in order to learning and understanding the content displayed in the website. In the Web 2.0 environment, the cognitive aspect will also significant in the user’s participation in creating information as well as knowledge. In this sense, the participation that can be conducted through Web 2.0 feature means the exchange of thoughts, insights, and ideas that can then be used in enriching the knowledge. This implies a change in power structures and a shift in organizational thinking towards models based on equal partnership rather than elite dominance (Jackson & Lilleker, 2009) (as cited in Kes-Erkul & Erkul, 2009, p. 5). Beside, the number of participants in such space facili-
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tated by Web 2.0 is also important. It is in the sense that the number of participant in the space provided by Web 2.0 application may represent the activities in which the information and knowledge sharing is intensified. It is an environment characterized by its time-friendliness: time adds value and Web 2.0 application get better-by-use, that is, they improve with age, not least because the number of people involved is constantly increasing (Floridi, n.d., section 5, para. 3). In other word, the Web 2.0 grows with the dynamic of users in accordance with the intensification of activity in sharing ideas, thoughts, information, and knowledge. Concerning the cognitariat and the rise of new class issue, such Web 2.0 application makes the opportunity in realizing the expectation of life through the ‘freedom’. The ability in modifying the mechanism of work by using Web 2.0 application will help them find a convenient way in participating and living in the world.
ISSUE IN DIGITAL (-IZED) HERITAGE In accordance to cultural heritage issues, there are some efforts that have been doing in the interest in preserving the national heritage by digital means. Theses efforts are of important concerning the abundance of cultural heritage assets. According to inventory issued by the Directorate General of History and Archeology of Indonesia in 2007, there are 8232 objects or sites that can be identified from thirty-three provinces. From this number of cultural heritage, only 2802 persons that have been taken part as preserver, and they have successfully preserved 1814 objects or sites. The imbalance proportion of the number of cultural heritage in comparison with the number of preserver indicates that such preservation activities require more efforts from society, whether it is from a non-governmental institution or an individual. Nowadays, such efforts seem to come out with a satisfactory result. By using the
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ICT as a supporting medium, some preservation projects find its success through the digitization (or digitalization) process and the establishment of some digital repositories. Furthermore, this trend in involving the digital technology in the preservation activities will benefit more than a mere effort in codification of cultural heritage information. Noriko Kando and Jun Adachi (2009, section 1.1) notes that the digitization of cultural heritage information will be of opportunities for educational purpose use and benefit for enhance the mutual understanding between different cultures in the world. This means that ICT-supported makes the accessibility to cultural heritage information possible. Meanwhile, the existing mining process of cultural heritage artifacts seems to have a limited access for everyone. This is a national problem and is true both for the interested public in terms of obtaining access to historical materials and for institutions in providing access to its collections for potential users (Darmawan with McGlynn, 2003, March: ix-9). In general, interactive multimedia and website are still the prominent mediums in providing access to some cultural heritage information. For example, PADI artground in 2003-2004, a non-governmental cultural institution, produced the interactive multimedia containing information of illumination manuscripts in 2003-2004, and the department of communication and information of Indonesia has also produced some interactive multimedia (release in 2007) which contain culturally-related information such as wayang golek (wooden puppet) and keris (a traditional weapon). Meanwhile, some example of efforts in providing access to cultural heritage information through the website can be seen at http://www.senitradisiindonesia.org and http://www.budayaindonesia.org. What these examples are trying to offer is the showcase of Indonesian cultural heritage assets. Such efforts help the Indonesian people to get closer to their own cultural legacy so they will have a better knowledge about their own cultural heritage.
However, the digitization of cultural heritage, still, owns its potentiality of endangering the value of cultural heritage itself. The existence of digital technology will produce a new problematic issue on authenticity and puts some cultural manifestations in danger situation. Ziauddian Sardar writes that cyberspace is particularly geared towards the erasure of all non-western histories (Shaw, 2008, p. 115). This circumstance can basically be understood in the context that the digital technology has the capacity in establishing a paradigm of artificiality. Here, artificiality issue rises as cultural heritage artifact can be represented by digital bytes through digital means. The artifacts that are being represented on the screen are only an image of representation or simulation and it does not exist but as information only. However, appreciating cultural heritage requires a total contemplation, including the incorporation of all human senses. Besides the thorough reading on text, the attempt in approaching the artifacts through physical observation can create an experience and may produce a comprehensive understanding about a particular cultural heritage artifact. Acquiring these qualities seems to be hard when appreciating the representation that is generated digital technology. It is because the digital technology creates a different way in approaching the artifacts. A historical temple, for example, can be explored through some features by which people can go beyond the physical logics and limitations such as rotating and magnifying the object. Even how much emphasis we put to discussed the importance of tangible cultural heritage entities, generally ends up implying that they are important with the whole supposition that they are just mere artifacts for us to display (Idid, 2003, p. I-3). Eventually, the presentation of digital artifact will not accommodate the spiritual value and gives the banal experience to the viewers. According to this situation, it is understandable when Ziauddian Sardar asks: “who needs the arcane and esoteric real thing anyway?” (Shaw, 2008, p. 115). This question is then im-
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plying the problem of authenticity of digitalized cultural heritage information, especially when the presented digital artifacts then become the sign in which manipulation as well as simulation might become the background of representation. In short, the effort in displaying the cultural heritage information will, however, be insufficient yet. With the fact that some Indonesian cultural heritages have the similarity with the some artifacts from other countries; it is hard to find and obtain a further explanation about the difference among those artifacts through the displayed information on the websites or on interactive multimedia. In short, the current effort in providing accessibility to cultural heritage information cannot provide a comprehensive explanation and understanding about the idiosyncrasy of Indonesian cultural heritage and, in a broader context, of Indonesian’s distinctive culturally-rooted world-view. As discussed in previous section, culture is a result of human’s interpretation and conversation with the world by which the harmonious relationship is being built. If conversation becomes important in cultural production and becomes the screen of human-world relationship, then the digital technology for cultural heritage should also be functioned as the medium which able to make such contemplative conversation possible. In this case, the Web 2.0 application could be a promising alternative in fulfilling this need.
WEB 2.0 AND META-REFLECTION The previous discussion shows that Web 2.0 application offers an opportunity for a dialogue space for, in the Barbrook’s term, the class of new through the internet connection to be possibly constructed. This dialogue space appreciates the individual experience and knowledge in which it can facilitate the activities in knowledge enrichment. In this context of cultural heritage, such dialogue space can help the attempts towards in-depth investigation of value and meaning of
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cultural heritage. Moreover, this dialogue space has a strong relationship with culture in the context of conversation that gives priority to the negotiation between human and the world. In such conversation and negotiation, a reflection becomes important since it helps in making up a comprehensive understanding about the self, the world, and the interrelation in between. According to this, tracing such idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage will then require, in this paper’s term, a meta-reflection. This meta-reflection is a reflection beyond reflection. It is an effort in order to go beyond the manifestation of cultural heritage and reveal the very basic understanding or conception of the veiled thought within. This metareflection is similar to what Michel Foucault’s concern as ‘discursive formations’ or ‘orders of discourse’. Danaher, Schirato, and Webb (2000) notes that discursive formations are the organizing principles of an episteme. They work to make speech possible, organize ideas or concepts, and produce ‘objects of knowledge’ (p. 21-22). On the other hand, this meta-reflection is also kind of process of, borrowing a Foucault’s concept, genealogy which looking for the root of object, or, in this specific context, the idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage. The following framework is an attempt towards the construction of dialogue space in which a meta-reflection can be put into practice. The framework of meta-reflection, as depicted in Figure 3, describes on how the incorporation of Web 2.0 in the finding and formulating an idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage. Here, Web 2.0 will not be positioned in the “first layer” of technology which means that it is only a subsequent or supporting web application as one of several infrastructures that reinforce a “whole-body” of technology for cultural heritage. The function of Web 2.0 is then being focused on the effort in finding and formulating the fundamental conception before publishing or disseminating the documentation through a chosen technological implementation.
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Figure 3. Framework of meta-reflection
Practically, the meta-reflection takes place when critical arguments are needed to be discussed such as controversies of a cultural heritage ownership issue arises and several contributors (such as experts, historians, archeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, or cultural researchers) begin to initiate a comprehensive discussion. Each contributor is then encouraged to do review and think the issue that is being discussed as objectively as possible based on their own experiences as well as references. Beside, one contributor should also consider the thought delivered by another contributor as inputs for reference and may become the basis for the next level of reflection and interpretation. Once the issue reaches the concluding thought, then this could be recorded as documentation that is ready for online publishing and dissemination, such as web-based digital libraries. In order to enable such digital library in disseminating a documentation that is resulted from meta-reflection process, there should be infrastructure that is prepared to support and allow the user in establishing such meta-reflection activity. In this case the concept of ‘Network of Networks’ initiated by IndonesiaDLN could be an alternative effort in conditioning the community, especially the cultural heritage community, towards a formulation of idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage.
META-REFLECTION IN ‘NETWORK OF NETWORKS’ In 2000, IndonesiaDLN was established along with the launching of Ganesha Digital Library (GDL) software. This project was undertaken by Knowledge Management Research Group (KMRG) which is based as central library of Bandung Institute of Technology, and has successfully releases three versions of GDL software which are GDL 3.1, GDL 4.1, and GDL 4.2. The IndonesiaDLN network model was designed to motivate and enforce communities to join the knowledge sharing initiative (Fahmi, 2009, p. 4). The current nodes of member of IndonesiaDLN come from individual and various institutions, such as universities and NGOs. Beside of these nodes, IndonesiaDLN also facilitates the member who wants to establish its own network due to the fact that some members are community in which the members usually share the same interest. This network is then connected to the central hub through which knowledge is being exchanged. This is called ‘Network of Networks’. In this network, there are nine clusters of networks including children, human rights, heritage, Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD), school, religion, environment, health, and agriculture (Fahmi, 2009, p. 4). In the heritage network, individual and organization can manage and disseminate any content that related to the cultural heritage issue. In this case, registered users in the heritage network can share their content to the network which is important in display the abundance of collection of national cultural assets. The standard environment provided by Ganesha Digital Library software enables the registered users (individual and/or institution) to take a part in the mission of managing intellectual capital by sharing their own content. However, the potential of this network is not only on the possibility towards the knowledge sharing. In accordance with the attempt to pursue a meta-reflection, the effort in sharing content
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that is related to cultural heritage through digital library application cannot help in conditioning the dialogue space towards idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage formulation. Currently, this digital library application, similar with another digital library projects, cannot support the attempt to pursue a discussion among users in order to produce a comprehensive idea about an issue of cultural heritage. On the other hand, the users who are registered in IndonesiaDLN and held a responsibility as admin and/or Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) do not have a privilege in conducting a discussion among users either. In short, the behavior of users’ participation in this Ganesha Digital Library is currently on the possibility for users in sharing content, and not in exchanging ideas behind the content. Regarding to this limitation of digital library application, a supportive environment, altogether with its behavior, where users can participate in knowledge sharing towards the idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage formulation would obviously be needed. As an alternative could be the environment offered by Wikipedia (www. wikipedia.org). Through this website, people can obtain information which is possibly constructed from different ideas, references, as well as argumentation that will make the information become richer in context. Although the process of discussion in wikipedia is not shown explicitly in the interface, but the presentation of information along with the provided hyperlink for editing document makes clear that the information is provided and constructed socially as well. The adoption of this application behavior to the ‘Network of Networks’ can help the members in exchanging the ideas before the content is being disseminated to a wider audience through a digital library. Referring to the meta-reflection framework shown in Figure 3, the behavior in such environment may produce contents that enriched with more interpretation and contemplation. This condition will lead to the improvement of digital library which will be able to provide and deliver contents with better quality. Meanwhile, in the
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context of formulating idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage, such adoption of application will help in more ideas to be discussed and be exchanged in order to re-read the narration of cultural heritage. As a result, the comprehensive reading of such cultural heritage issues may help in grasping the fundamental conception of the hereditary wisdom and, eventually, may help a nation in determining its idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTION Web 2.0 application helps the effort in making tacit knowledge become explicit. The possibility of using this web 2.0 application towards metareflection is of important and essential thing for the technocultural people. For Indonesian, the need in developing such meta-reflection is relevant with the current educational situation which needs effort in enriching the knowledge content that adequate with the condition of ‘Indonesian technosociety’. On the other hand, Bambang Sugiharto (2008) gives note on several important focuses that should be concerned for the future of education and the role of humanity therein; self as agent of change, the needs of other as starting point of reflectivity and responsibility, flexibility and capability in seeing new alternative, capability in using cultural root as ‘antenna of receptivity’, reading-writing practice as key of critical attitude (p. 375-380). In the context of cultural heritage preservation, this note has a relevancy, particularly with the meta-reflection as well as contemplative conversation which starts from the rising cultural awareness of the self, conversation with others, and opening the mind from alternative thoughts and ideas towards the (re-) formulation of idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage. In fact, this meta-reflection can also be initiated among nations in order to determine the unique distinction between cultures. In this sense, the future research in implementing technology for cultural heritage could be directed to the effort in establishing a
Web 2.0 and Idiosyncrasy of Cultural Heritage
global connection of cultural heritage collection from which a global dialogue might also be facilitated and be conducted. Such global discussion may help, especially, the third world countries in determining the national identities within the conversation of global culture. Furthermore, the discussion will also help in finding the missing link of the cultural heritage narration (or, in the other word, tracing the genealogy of cultural heritage) and determines the civilization that has been achieved by a nation in a world historical timeline. On the other hand, the meta-reflection framework can also be employed in developing a knowledge network, such as digital library, in order to improve the quality of disseminated content. The future research project on technology for cultural heritage should be focused on developing technological infrastructure that concerns to the possibility of users in pursuing a meta-reflection in which a comprehensive and in-depth knowledge on cultural heritage can be formulated, rather than on a mere consideration in developing a repository device for cultural heritage information which is accessible to all users.
CONCLUSION The idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage issues contains the importance in finding the hidden value and meaning beyond the manifestation of cultural heritage itself. However, the discussion on culture and/or cultural heritage, materially or immaterially, is only a beginning of further conversation on the next layer of immateriality which will provide some fundamental argumentations of both material and immaterial artifacts. It is, therefore, important to pursue, in this paper’s term, a metareflection. Through this meta-reflection, people can think, interpret, and share more thoughts beyond the existence of cultural heritage artifacts. The current development of web application, a Web 2.0, facilitates the activity in pursuing such essential conversation on culture and/or cultural
heritage. The Web 2.0 as the manifestation of sphere (like Luciano Floridi’s infosphere) can provide an appropriate dialogue space towards meta-reflection in the digitally networked world, and can obviously help, especially for people from culturally-rich countries like Indonesia, in finding and understanding the idiosyncrasy of cultural heritage. As the final thought, the idea on framework modeling on meta-reflection should be taken into consideration as the supporting effort before disseminating cultural heritage information through digital technology. This meta-reflection framework will, anyway, help in preserving the value of cultural heritage in the digital world which is susceptible to artificiality.
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Toffler, A. (1989). The third wave. New York: Bantam Books. Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. (1997). The reality of virtual communities. In Groebel, J. (Ed.), New Media Development: Trends in Communication (Vol. 1, pp. 39–63). Amsterdam: Boom Publishers.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITION Artificiality: Unnatural sense of objects which can potentially distract the people from the very essential meaning. Conversation: The attempt in sharing and exchanging thought in order to obtain an acceptable conceptual understanding. Cultural Heritage: Manifestation of thought and wisdom in the past that can be found and be learnt in the present time.
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Culture: The everyday system, mechanism, or pattern, which is established or constructed by people in the term of the existence of the self in the world. Dialogue Space: The space where the occupants can conveniently share ideas and do some reflections about themit therein. Immateriality: A fundamental thought and concept beyond the existence of artifacts, either in material or immaterial form. Meta-Reflection: A reflection beyond reflection. A deeper journey of thought in order to obtain comprehensive and in-depth understanding about certain issues. Negotiation: A process towards a compromise deeds in everyday practice. Technoculture: A dimension of culture as well as cultural discourse which focus on the experience, consciousness, and meaning that is derived from mutual interaction between people and tools and/or technology.
