museumsandtheweb.com - collection access

Exploring Affective Computing for Enhancing the Museum Experience with Online Collections

Gunho — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:52:35 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Exploring Affective Computing for Enhancing the Museum Experience with Online Collections

Keywords:

Online Museum

Keywords:

social tagging

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

image retrieval

Keywords:

Affective Embedded Agent

Keywords:

Collection Search

Abstract:

Introduction

Traditionally, the focus of online museum collections has been to facilitate access and discovery for subject category experts seeking information about objects in the collection (Rayward & Twidale, 1999). Today, museums observe an increasing number of ‘untrained eyes’ visiting their online collections to browse or search art collections for intrinsic enjoyment and leisure (Marty, Sayre, & Fantoni, 2011; Packer, 2010). Research by the Steve.museum social tagging project has demonstrated that the language used by novice visitors to describe works of art differs significantly from that descriptive metadata used by museums to describe the same collections (Trant, 2009). Many visitors to museums’ online collections seek experience-centered online experiences that can be fun and pleasurable, rather than a suite of advanced features.

However, most of today’s online collections do not fully support such an experience-centered environment. A quick survey could show that these systems lack not only functionality, but also the appropriate affective and hedonic aspects necessary to support such an experience (Blythe, Wright, McCarthy, & Bertelsen, 2006). It is necessary to take holistic approaches for online museum experiences, which go beyond accessibility and functionality, to address the aspects of emotional interaction (Johnson, Gardner, & Wiles, 2004).

Research Outline

Using the online collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), this study seeks to design and implement an affective online search and retrieval system for visitors who may have general interests in art, but may not know where to start. Techniques from the affective computing literature will be applied to develop an affective embedded agent that can recognize and respond to the users’ expressed emotions and preferences. Social tagging tools will be used to record the visitors’ subjective views and interests in arts. These social tags will inform the affective agent and allow it to interact with visitors based on this information.

Because the proposed agent uses interactive techniques to incorporate the users’ emotions and preferences during the image retrieval process, the untrained online visitors can easily refine their interests about art collections and map those interests to terminology and metadata maintained by the museum. As such, online visitors do not need to be subject matter experts with knowledge in art historical terminology to navigate art collections; an enjoyable browsing experience can be created to support visitors’ known and unknown preferences. This study can contribute to the field of museum technology by providing empirical guidelines on how an affective agent can be designed and influence the internal state of a person to improve overall museum experience in an online setting.

Conclusion

When combined with user-generated social tags, an embedded agent can be a powerful search method that provides ‘general-purpose question-answering capabilities’ in the context of online museums (Etzioni, 2011). We hope our research serves to broaden our understanding of the role that emotions play in use of search and retrieval systems by novices, and that it will provide useful guidelines for the online museum community in studying interactions with systems that are intelligent and sensitive to online visitors’ emotions and preferences.

References

Blythe, M., Wright, P., McCarthy, J., Bertelsen, O. W. (2006). Theory and Method for Experience Centered Design, CHI 2006, April 22-27, Montreal, Canada.

Etzioni, O. (2011). “Search needs a shake-up,” Nature, Macmillan Publishers Limited, 476, 25-26.

Johnson, D., Gardner, J., & Wiles, J. (2004). Experience as a moderator of the media equation: the impact of flattery and praise, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 61, 237-258.

Marty, P. F., Sayre, S., & Fantoni, S. (2011). Personal digital collections: Involving users in the co-creation of digital cultural heritage. In G. Styliaras, D. Koukopoulos, & F. Lazarinis (Eds.), Handbook of research on technologies and cultural heritage: Applications and environments (pp. 285–304). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Packer, J. (2010). Beyond Learning: Exploring Visitors’Perceptions of the Value and Benefits of Museum Experiences Curator, The Museum Journal, 51(1), 33-54.

Rayward, W. B. & Twidale, M. B. (1999). From Docent to Cyberdocent: Education and Guidancein the Virtual Museum, Archives and Museum Informatics, Volume 13, Number 1, 23-53.

Trant, J. (2009). Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Results of steve.museum’s research, Archives & Museum Informatics, http://conference.archimuse.com/files/trantSteveResearchReport2008.pdf

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Online finding

Authors:

Gunho Chae

S. Joon Park

Robert Stein

Jungwha Kim

Susan Wiedenbeck

Reprogramming The Museum

luke.dearnley — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:32:16 +0000

MW2011

Luke Dearnley, Powerhouse Museum, Australia

Abstract

This paper looks at how the Powerhouse Museum's collection data API launched in 2010 quantitatively and qualitatively improves upon the access provided by the download dataset previously offered, as well as how the tracking methods were built into the API to ensure that the project is best able to adapt to the user needs of API developers. It provides details on the lessons learned and suggests best practices for API development in the cultural sector.

Keywords: Web 2.0, API, collection access, Flickr, semantic web, Creative Commons

Program Item Reference:

Reprogamming the Museum

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

schun — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:52:43 +0000

MW2011

Judith Klavans, University of Maryland; Robert Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Susan Chun, Independent Consultant and Researcher; Raul David Guerra, University of Maryland, USA

Abstract

This paper presents work of the T3: Text, Tags, Trust project, an interdisciplinary collaboration of computational linguists, computer scientists, indexing and information retrieval experts, and museum professionals from the University of Maryland and Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. The authors define some key problems for managing large-scale datasets, share tools and resources developed for the project, and describe ways that these resources can be deployed by museums without expertise in language processing. In addition, the paper examines some of the ways in which analysis of data collected by the Steve project builds on our understanding of the ways in which users see and describe our collections. The specific challenges of applying batch-processing tools and methods to large, unstructured datasets are addressed, best practices for dealing with a number of sticky issues are shared, and promising applications for future research and promising application areas are considered.

Keywords: computational linguistics, social tagging, steve.museum, collection access, text processing, metadata

Program Item Reference:

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

Automatic Heritage Metadata Enrichment with Historic Events

MvanErp — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:26:23 +0000

MW2011

Marieke van Erp, Department of Computer Science, VU University; Johan Oomen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision; Roxane Segers, Department of Computer Science, VU University; Chiel van den Akker, Department of History, VU University; Lora Aroyo, Department of Computer Science, VU University; Geertje Jacobs, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; Susan Legêne, Department of History, VU University; Lourens van der Meij, Jacco van Ossenbruggen; and Guus Schreiber, Department of Computer Science, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

http://agora.cs.vu.nl

Abstract

Metadata enrichment of cultural heritage collections by means of structured vocabularies has been shown to improve the work of professionals and to increase accessibility of the collections for end-users. Still, collection metadata lack rich context information, such as references to events, which can be valuable for a more effective navigation in cultural heritage collections. In this paper, we present an approach that extends existing metadata enrichment processes with a method to discover historical events. The events are structured in a historical event thesaurus to enrich object metadata. As such, the event thesaurus is used as a bridge between objects in different collections. The results of this work allow for topic-based and event-centered browsing, searching and navigating in integrated collections.

Keywords: collection metadata enrichment, collection access, historical events, thesauri, linking collections, liniking objects, search and browse

Program Item Reference:

Automatic Metadata Enrichment and Linking for Event-driven Access to Distributed Collections

MvanErp — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:15:32 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Automatic Heritage Metadata Enrichment with Historic Events

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

linking

Keywords:

enrichment

Keywords:

Interface

Keywords:

thesauri

Keywords:

historical events

Abstract:

Most digitised and online available objects from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) can be browsed through a predefined set of formal metadata, such as its creator, year of creation, and type of material. Standards for metadata management and exchange have matured and are being adopted widely. They enable intra-collection search and exploration, and are also main drivers behind supporting domain and cross-boundary access to collections.

However, these formal metadata often do not give access to information pertaining to the content of the object, such as its topic, or what is depicted. This information is often given through textual descriptions which are mostly only accessible through keyword search. Keyword search is limited in the sense that it does not facilitate sorting, or retrieving objects whose descriptions contain terms that are synonymous to the search term.

This paper provides results of an interdisciplinary research project, Agora, that is taking collection access one step further by enabling users to search and browse museum collections through the content descriptions of objects in a structured way. The three-year Agora project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and brings together computer scientists, cultural heritage experts, and humanities researchers.

We present advances in collection access through automatic data enrichment and linking to thesauri and external resources using a combination of state of the art information extraction and semantic web technology. In this work, we show results on enrichment, linking and integration of two collections, namely those of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (RMA). Our first contribution to the state of the art in collection access enables users to browse and search descriptive metadata elements in a structured manner; our focus here is on automatically linking objects to historical events, thus providing users of the collection with objects in context. The figure shows a screenshot of an object from the NISV collection, along with its automatically enriched description field. The entities and events that are identified in the description field, are linked to instances in the event thesaurus. The instances in the event thesaurus are multifaceted objects that are modelled through an event model, providing the historical context to an object.

This new dimension that is added to the collection information has profound implications regarding visualisation; a list or facet view does not do justice to the richness events provide. Our second contribution is a presentation method of enriched collection objects through an interface that is based on the same event model that also underlies the event thesaurus. This interface explicitly shows the event links that connect collection objects and support user interactions that are subsequently used to enrich the knowledge of the collections.

The first evaluations of our approach indicate that event-driven collection access offers users a more meaningful and richer experience. As information extraction and semantic web technologies are advancing at a rapid pace, we foresee that event-driven access as proposed by Agora will be adopted widely in the cultural heritage domain in the near future.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Linked Data

Authors:

Marieke van Erp

Johan Oomen

Roxane Segers

chiel van den akker

Lora Aroyo

Geertje Jacobs

Susan Legêne

Lourens van der Meij

Jacco van Ossenbruggen

Guus Schreiber

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

rjstein — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:18:31 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

steve.museum

Keywords:

tagging

Keywords:

computational linguistics

Keywords:

text processing

Keywords:

cultural data

Abstract:

As museums continue to develop more sophisticated techniques for managing and analyzing cultural data, many are beginning to encounter challenges when trying to deal with the nuances of language and automated processing tools. How might user-generated comments be harvested and processed to determine the nature of the comment? Is it possible to use existing collection documentation to derive relations between similar objects? How can we train systems to automatically recognize (disambiguate) different meanings of the same word? Can automated language processing lead to more compelling browsing interfaces for online collections?

Luckily, a good deal of expertise and tools exist within the field of computational linguistics that can be applied to these problems to achieve meaningful results. Informed by previous work in computational linguistics and relevant project experience, the authors will address a number of these questions providing insight about how answers to impact museum practice might be found. Authors will share tools and resources that museum software developers can use to prototype and experiment with these techniques - without being experts in language processing themselves. In addition, the authors will describe the work of the T3: Text, Tags, Trust research project and how they have applied these tools to a large shared dataset of object metadata and social tags collected by the Steve.museum project.

Specific challenges regarding batch-processing tools and large datasets will be addressed. Best practices and algorithms will be shared for dealing with a number of sticky issues. Directions for future research and promising application areas will be also be discussed.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Tagging

Authors:

Judith Klavans

Robert Stein

Susan Chun

Raul Guerra

Think Globally, Digitize Locally: charting an institution's course toward the digital social good

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:57 +0000

Dawson, B. (2010). Think Globally, Digitize Locally: charting an institution's course toward the digital social good. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.