Recent Developments in Cultural Heritage Image Databases: Directions for User-Centered Design

published or submitted for publicatio

Community Reclamation: the Hybrid Building

Reclamation of a city involves reusing abandoned buildings in conjunction with new construction. These negative spaces of disuse generated by a changing infrastructure are often overlooked or destroyed. If they are instead viewed as positive spaces for reuse, a city’s infrastructure and its residents can adapt and grow. Recognizing these newly positive spaces produces a chance to examine what social needs of the community are not being met. Pushing the modern concept of the hybrid building creates a unique opportunity; flexibility of use derived from flexibility of space. A community building can best serve the social needs of its residents by having the ability to adapt to changes in those needs

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

A comparative study of graph structures, traversability movement and exhibition strategy in museums during Covid-19

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has posed challenges in relation to how buildings re-open to use, particularly buildings attracting large numbers of visitors, such as museums and galleries. As these institutions started to reopen across the UK and internationally, a number of social distance measures were adopted in order to safely bring people into their premises and access their collections. Building on Bill Hillier’s theorical model of spatial types and spatial structures (2019), we explore the spatial-curatorial changes implicated in the re-opening of five British museums (The National Gallery, The Tate Britain, Tate Modern, British Museum and The Wallace Collection in London) and one American museum (The MoMA, New York). Our purpose is not to provide practical solutions, but to set the search for spatial approaches to the reopening of museums within a theory of spatial structure in space syntax and inform the design future of public buildings. We present a model of a three-layered spatial system, interfacing the global and local structure of these buildings. We argue that the presence of intersecting cycles of movement in spatial layouts determines their capability for adapting to the one-way routes imposed by the pandemic. The spatial organisation of the display is a second factor influencing the reopening strategies, either limiting or optimising available spatial sequences to meet curatorial criteria

Judge George W Paul's Japanese house: a case study

In the late 1880s a pre-fabricated Japanese house was shipped from Kobe, Japan, to Brisbane, Australia, and erected in the up-market suburb of New Farm by Japanese tradesmen. This paper is developed from a broader project researching the life of G W Paul, the man who had the house built and subsequently lived in it for the remainder of his life. Paul’s motivation in importing the house represented a unique, but unfulfilled effort to develop a future, hybrid culture for Queensland. This effort took the form of a commercial venture to construct Japanese houses as desirable and climatically suitable dwellings. Against the backdrop of this ambition, this paper presents new research to elucidate and extend previous knowledge, assesses the reception of the house by its nineteenth century Brisbane audience, and considers possible reasons for the limited response which signalled the cancellation of the commercial venture

De/construction sites: Romans and the digital playground

The Roman world as attested to archaeologically and as interacted with today has its expression in a great many computational and other media. The place of visualisation within this has been paramount. This paper argues that the process of digitally constructing the Roman world and the exploration of the resultant models are useful methods for interpretation and influential factors in the creation of a popular Roman aesthetic. Furthermore, it suggests ways in which novel computational techniques enable the systematic deconstruction of such models, in turn re-purposing the many extant representations of Roman architecture and material culture

Into the open : blurring building fences

When an urban college campus is open to the surrounding community, students benefit from a closer engagement with the resources of the city: entertainment, markets, living arrangements, more cultural and professional experience. At the same time, local residents enjoy a stronger regional economy from all of the people attracted to study or work on campus, allowing closer contact for locals with the world beyond the boundaries of their own city. Though it is clear how valuable communal engagement is to urban life, we live in a society obsessed with separation. The near-universal practice of extruding backyard parcel lines has created architectural division, namely the fence, closing off the yard from the block and the block from the neighborhood. This thesis proposes an alternative scenario, in which the line between public and campus community will be blurred. This blurred line will be investigated in the relationship between the Rhode Island School of Design and downtown Providence, which is currently a mix of urban campus environments. Students neither have sufficient place to socialize within the campus, nor enough contact the with local community. Near the center of the RISD campus, the one block radius of the RISD Museum is surrounded by the city of Providence, but enclosed by College Hill and a concentration of RISD buildings. For this reason, the public areas nestled in the dense block are mostly used by RISD students. These spaces should be used by both RISD students and residents of Providence. It is necessary to explore how spaces in an urban campus that is open to the public can have an important role for students and local residents. By blurring RISD’s “enclosed backyard” and adding attractive recreational and cultural events open to the public in these spaces, the spirit and identity of the campus is promoted to create an urban connection between campus and city, students and residents. The main intervention will explore an “inside-out” relationship, by developing a new grid system based on the existing various levels of the RISD Museum block and a refined plan arrangement revealing implied connections between buildings. The system is partially exposed to draw in residents of Providence, while the rest grows within the building resulting in a closer relationship between interior and exterior, bringing both user groups into closer contact without fences

Deep learning and Internet of Things for tourist attraction recommendations in smart cities

The version of record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-06872-0We propose a tourist attraction IoT-enabled deep learning-based recommendation system to enhance tourist experience in a smart city. Travelers will enter details about their travels (traveling alone or with a companion, type of companion such as partner or family with kids, traveling for business or leisure, etc.) as well as user side information (age of the traveler/s, hobbies, etc.) into the smart city app/website. Our proposed deep learning-based recommendation system will process this personal set of input features to recommend the tourist activities/attractions that best fit his/her profile. Furthermore, when the tourists are in the smart city, content-based information (already visited attractions) and context-related information (location, weather, time of day, etc.) are obtained in real time using IoT devices; this information will allow our proposed deep learning-based tourist attraction recommendation system to suggest additional activities and/or attractions in real time. Our proposed multi-label deep learning classifier outperforms other models (decision tree, extra tree, k-nearest neighbor and random forest) and can successfully recommend tourist attractions for the first case [(a) searching for and planning activities before traveling] with the loss, accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score of 0.5%, 99.7%, 99.9%, 99.9% and 99.8%, respectively. It can also successfully recommend tourist attractions for the second case [(b) looking for activities within the smart city] with the loss, accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score of 3.7%, 99.5%, 99.8%, 99.7% and 99.8%, respectively.This work has been supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Spain under project PID2019-108713RB-C51/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Visions of the global: the classical and the eclectic in colonial East African architecture

This article discusses the use of the classical language of architecture in the early colonial urban landscape in East Africa and assesses the stylistic choices by British colonial architects in Zanzibar and Nairobi. It focuses upon the buildings of John Sinclair, administrator-architect in Zanzibar from the early 1900s to 1923 and his later work in Nairobi. It highlights the various competing factors which informed decisions made by architects in the colonial world