museumsandtheweb.com - cultural heritage

A “Do-It-Yourself” Approach to Heritage Education: Make Your Own Mobile Museum Game

Jolien Schroyen — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:09:22 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

do-it-yourself

Keywords:

mobile game

Keywords:

educational game

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

authoring tool

Keywords:

social learning

Abstract:

For small specialised museums it can be quite hard to engage new audiences, especially those that are often not really interested in cultural heritage. We report on a “Do-It-Yourself” approach, in which youngsters create their own mobile game for two small city museums in Flanders (Belgium): the National Museum of Cycling and the City Museums of Izegem - covering local industrial history. The goal was to develop an engaging educational programme for school groups (aged 15+), specifically focusing on technical and vocational education. We offer these students the necessary technological tools (authoring tools), content and storylines to allow them to create their own mobile museum game and share that game with their fellow students. Our approach adheres to four basic guidelines that contribute to an engaging educational experience:

1. Vivid narrative with matching creative environment

The life story of Odiel Defraeye, the first Belgian ever to win the “Tour de France” in 1912, is used as the main storyline. As a local legend in cycling history and a former worker in a brushes factory, Odiel Defraeye acts as a key figure to explore local history in the first half of the 20th Century. Each group of students gets acquainted with one (historical) character from the entourage of Odiel Defraeye. By means of personal profiles of these characters (presented like a social network profile such as Facebook), students quickly gain insight in the day to day life, occupations and social relations of their character.

2. Do-It-Yourself approach

We hand the students the information and the tools they need, and let them use their inspiration and creativity to make their own mobile museum game. Based on the overall narrative and using the provided content (including profile pages, museum objects and background information), students invent a particular story about their character and shape that story as a museum game. This includes thinking about the goal of the game, other characters involved, game tasks or puzzles and a score system. The authoring tool enables them to build the game, using a wide variety of templates to integrate all sorts of different media and come up with different types of tasks and challenges for their fellow students.

3. Shared learning experience

The Do-It-Yourself approach results in games that can be shared with fellow students. Students create a game in groups of two or three and play each other’s games later on in the museum. In that way students feel both responsible for the game they create and curious for the other games, which stimulates interaction and discussion among them.

4. Combination of different learning environments

During the educational programme, students explore three different learning environments: the classroom, the virtual creative environment and the museum. Students start out in the familiar setting of their classroom and then set to work in the virtual environment, consisting of all the digital information regarding the storyline and the museum objects, the profile pages of the characters and of course the web-based authoring tool itself. In the final phase of the programme, youngsters visit the museum, where they can play the mobile games their fellow students prepared.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Authors:

Kris Luyten

Jolien Schroyen

MEMA : using tags, posts, and tweets to help users build a personal narrative of the Teeny Harris Exhibition

yiling — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:23:44 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

narrative

Keywords:

social media

Keywords:

microblog

Abstract:

Museum visitors have different perspectives and interests based on how they relate their personal experiences and knowledge to the objects on display in the museum. Many museums and cultural institutions would like to collect these perspectives to complement and augment the content of the museum’s official interpretation. With the temporal and spatial constraints of a user’s visit to a museum exhibition, it has been difficult to collect as much information as the museum would like to obtain from visitors. The emergence of the Social Web has inspired a number of museums to extend the experience of their exhibits by using social features to engage users to contribute opinions and feedback about their museum experience. However, current usage of social technologies focus mostly on the information flow from museums to visitors by the use of blogs and other social media in order to increase the visitors’ awareness of museums’ events and collections.

Although a fraction of existing projects attempt to engage online users as contributors, most often the opportunities to contribute are limited to simple commenting, tagging and microblogging artifacts because of their appealing immediacy and portability. They allow users to publish small elements of content and instantaneously broadcast them to other users of the service. The content produced through those fast feedback mechanisms has been analyzed from many directions. Those studies clearly indicate that those short messages from commenting, tagging, and microbloging not only reflect individual and collective responses in real time but also can capture profound and personal meaning for the contributor. As a result, the short messages might be important components as base for composing personal narratives for a specific object or exhibition.

MEMA (Museum Exhibition MAnagement) is a personalized and interactive community-oriented system with mobile and Web features. MEMA supports a rich feature set that facilitates the sharing of users’ feeling/opinions of the exhibition experience through their mobile devices and further helps the creation of users’ personal narratives with tags, posts, tweets, and other microblogging artifacts. MEMA is built upon a collection with approximately 80,000 photographs by Charles "Teenie" Harris, a photographer for an influential local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier.

This paper focuses on providing a convenient way for users to share information and to use short messages from potential microblogging technologies to increase the chances of getting users to contribute their own narratives. The paper explores a solution for achieving the goal of gathering users’ personal narratives and experiences by collecting their short messages from diverse social media including Twitter and Facebook through mobile devices In this study, we are conducting an empirical experiment starting on October 29th, coinciding with the opening of the exhibition “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story”. Actual visitors to the exhibition will be our subjects. All of their activities will be recorded in our session logs. We expect to see that the proposed solution could assist narrative creating in terms of convenience and efficiency.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations I

Site:

http://jade.exp.sis.pitt.edu/mema/

Authors:

Yi-Ling Lin

William Real

Xiaoning Bai

Yuanyuan Ye

chenxi zhao

Narrating Culture on the Web: Assisting Audience Participation through Reading Rhetoric and Innovating Online Forum Design

MaryPettice — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:11:58 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Narrating Culture on the Web: Assisting Audience Participation through Reading Rhetoric and Innovating Online Forum Design

Keywords:

co-creation

Keywords:

identity

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

forum design

Keywords:

Aotearoa/New Zealand

Keywords:

interactivity

Abstract:

New Zealand’s Puke Ariki Museum, Library and Visitor Center in New Plymouth recently used two different formats for collecting and displaying visitor comments in recent (2010-2011) exhibits. Both formats challenge online visitors to weigh multiple perspectives on history and the future of New Zealand. Read together, these comment areas offer insight into visitor interaction with exhibition material. In addition, the comment areas—one unconventionally designed but not interactive between users, one conventional and interactive between users—point toward new possibilities for designing and hosting audience-generated material that builds on and interrogates museum exhibits.

The first, “Te Ahi Kā Roa, Te Ahi Kātoro: Taranaki War 1860–2010,” which described the war between the indigenous Māori and European settlers, retains an online presence through a non-interactive online comment area created from a broad variety of visitor reactions to the exhibit. The comments are displayed with attractive graphics that refuse to privilege one point of view over others; the comments page gives voice to the current state of the cultural conflict over colonial and indigenous versions of history examined in the exhibit while it creates a new narrative, one that tells a multi-voiced story of New Zealanders’ interaction with the past and the museum itself. The online comment presentation reveals visitors’ desire to join, contest, and parallel the trajectories of the narrative presented by the exhibit and current New Zealand historical scholarship.

The second, “What If? The Future of Taranaki,” presented on-site exhibitions and events designed to stimulate conversations on regional identity and environmental sustainability as well as an online forum space to facilitate those conversations. Subject headings included “Sea Levels,” “Energy,” “Economy,” and “Communities,” and separate threads within them asked questions such as “What kind of Taranki do you want to see in the future?”, “How are the changing patterns of agriculture affecting our region?”, and “What do you think or feel about Taranaki continuing to lose its native plants and wildlife?” The forum, which is now closed but archived, was built using traditional message board software; comments were moderated by an outside organization.

In a paper presented at the International Digital Media and Arts Association Conference in Vancouver, 4 November, 2010 (and currently under review at the New Zealand Journal of Media Studies), I argued that a close rhetorical analysis of the curated comments reveals an audience-generated chronological narrative of engagement and identity with the exhibit. I plan to analyze the second exhibit’s interactive forum in much the same way; I also will suggest that the graphic design of the first comment area offers a much more appropriate foundation for an interactive discussion of cultural matters than the traditional linear message board forum used as part of the second exhibit. While the second exhibit’s forum allowed visitor interaction with other visitors, it isolated comments within particular threads. Inspired by the nonlinear “stage” design of the first comment area, I envision a hyperlinked, easily tagged and nonlinear experience that combines interactivity with a more aesthetically and culturally satisfying user experience.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

After Gutenberg

Site:

http://www.pukeariki.com/have_your_say/virtual_stage/index.html

Authors:

Mary Pettice

In the hands of the user: online engagement and user contributions to RCAHMS’ digital archive Canmore

michela clari — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:19:04 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

digital archives

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

Canmore

Keywords:

user generated material

Keywords:

Edinburgh University

Keywords:

RCAHMS

Abstract:

In the summer of 2009 the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS, www.rcahms.gov.uk) launched an upgraded version of its online archive, Canmore. The archive was completely redesigned and new interactive features were included which now allow users to personalize searches and, importantly, for the first time contribute original text and images.

RCAHMS was set up in Edinburgh over a century ago: the institution’s brief is to identify, survey and analyse the historic and built environment of Scotland, and to preserve, care for and add to the information and items in its national collection. RCAHMS seeks to promote understanding, education and enjoyment through interpretation of the information it collects and the items it looks after, and to inspire learning and intellectual curiosity in Scotland’s national culture and identity at home and worldwide. Access to RCAHMS’ material is through its search room, however these days most users access the record through the institution’s digital archive, Canmore. This brings together uniquely valuable survey information and collections material, including data as well as images, on more than 280,000 archaeological, architectural, maritime and industrial sites throughout Scotland.

RCAHMS’ experience of digitization and networking practices is the focus of my PhD, a collaborative doctoral award now in its 3rd and final year, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and part of the Beyond text programme (http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/). The research project, which is entitled ‘In the hands of the user’, is being conducted through a partnership between the University of Edinburgh’s School Of Education and RCAHMS and looks at patterns of online participation and learning through museums’ and archives’ digital collections in the light of web 2.0 developments.

A virtual ethnography of RCAHMS’ online archive Canmore in the first year since opening up to user contributions is an important component of the doctoral study. This demonstration will focus on findings from this work: the archive’s functionalities will be illustrated and, more importantly, examples of users’ contributions will be examined and discussed in terms of the model of user engagement they reflect, and its significance in the wider context of digitization and online networking practices for cultural heritage institutions.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstration V

Site:

http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/

Authors:

michela clari

Taking the Museum to the Streets

Jakob Ingemann Parby — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:49:14 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Taking the Museum to the Streets

Keywords:

User-involvement

Keywords:

urban identity

Keywords:

multi-touch

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

democracy

Keywords:

dialogue

Keywords:

interactive

Abstract:

In a digitalised and globalised world, what are the challenges the museum faces when users increasingly experience knowledge as something created through blogs, wikis and other social platforms? In which the museum collections no longer hold the absolute truth, but rather layers of collected knowledge to be interpreted and augmented through interpretation and adaptation by guests and other voices? This workshop will look at some of the practical, epistemological and technical approaches to the challenges based on specific case material.

In April 2010 the Museum of Copenhagen, in cooperation with Gibson Group Ltd and Spild af Tid/Waste of Time, launched a giant multi-touch multimedia installation in one of the central squares in Copenhagen. In the first half year of its 14 hour a day functioning, The WALL, as it is called, has attracted more than 400,000 users, who have viewed more than 2,000,000 images, sent more than 60,000 personal postcards, and maybe most importantly, uploaded 2,500 new contributions of their own. Semi-mobile, The WALL will be moved around Copenhagen over the coming four years. It gives Copenhageners street access to a poetic cityscape of images and knowledge about their city, and offers a platform for all citizens and guests of the city to interact with and discuss the past, present and future of the city. In parallel to the multi-touch installation experienced in the streets, a website connects The WALL, its multimedia database and the museum. Both the website and The WALL support the museum's new profile of having the city as its prime object and being fully embedded in the city.

See a 5 minute documentary on the project: http://tinyurl.com/24h65ya

The workshop will allow participants to get inside the project and discuss the challenges and lessons of this pioneering work, while exploring hands-on the unique user interface on a cut-down version of The WALL – including a year’s worth of user contributions.

In this way the workshop will investigate:

practical and technical challenges concerning the development of a mobile, multi-touch, user-involving installation, outdoors in the city space
hands-on use of the “2D/3D cityscape editor” software that creates the cultural topographies of The WALL
the conceptual and epistemological considerations and choices underlying these topographies
achievements and lessons from the first year of operation – how do reception, use and interaction correspond with the original intentions we had in the development phase, what are the differences and how can they be explained? Are there things we would have done differently?
Does the Wall create a new agenda for future museum practices and for the relationship between cities, citizens and their museums?

Participants are invited to present examples of their own experiences with multi-user and user-generated content installations, and to reflect on their experiences with operating these in a non-regulated milieu.

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Mini-Workshop on Outdoor, Museum Interactions

Site:

http://www.vaeggen.copenhagen.dk

Authors:

Jette Sandahl

Jakob Parby

Allan Smith

Jakob Thorbek

Lotte Kryger Broe

Annotators and Agents in a Web-based Collaboratory around Cartographical Collections in Cultural Heritage Institutions

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:38 +0000

Breure, L., Spruit S., Voorbij H., & van den Heuvel C. (2010). Annotators and Agents in a Web-based Collaboratory around Cartographical Collections in Cultural Heritage Institutions. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

Accessing information through a 3D interactive environment

jtrant — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:18:12 +0000

Pecchioli, L., Mohamed F., Carrozzino M., & Leitner,(d. 2007) H. (2007). Accessing information through a 3D interactive environment. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting - ICHIM07: Proceedings.

All the World is a Museum: Access to Cultural Heritage Information Anytime, Anywhere

jtrant — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:34:28 +0000

Nickerson, M. (2005). All the World is a Museum: Access to Cultural Heritage Information Anytime, Anywhere. Digital Culture and Heritage. Proceedings of ICHIM05.Paris.

1-800-FOR-TOUR: Delivering Automated Audio Information through Patron's Cell Phones

jtrant — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:57:39 +0000

Nickerson, M. (2005). 1-800-FOR-TOUR: Delivering Automated Audio Information through Patron's Cell Phones. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings.

Media Stories: An Integrative Storytelling In Physical And Virtual Spaces

jtrant — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:57:39 +0000

Moritsch, O. (2005). Media Stories: An Integrative Storytelling In Physical And Virtual Spaces. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings.