84 research outputs found

    Reanimating cultural heritage through digital technologies

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    Digital technologies are becoming extremely important for web-based cultural heritage applications. This thesis presents novel digital technology solutions to 'access and interact' with digital heritage objects and collections. These innovative solutions utilize service orientation (web services), workflows, and social networking and Web 2.0 mashup technologies to innovate the creation, interpretation and use of collections dispersed in a global museumscape, where community participation is achieved through social networking. These solutions are embedded in a novel concept called Digital Library Services for Playing with Shared Heritage (DISPLAYS). DISPLAYS is concerned with creating tools and services to implement a digital library system, which allows the heritage community and museum professionals alike to create, interpret and use digital heritage content in visualization and interaction environments using web technologies based on social networking. In particular, this thesis presents a specific implementation of DISPLAYS called the Reanimating Cultural Heritage system, which is modelled on the five main functionalities or services defined in the DISPLAYS architecture, content creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction, for handling digital heritage objects. The main focus of this thesis is the design of the Reanimating Cultural Heritage system's social networking functionality that provides an innovative solution for integrating community access and interaction with the Sierra Leone digital heritage repository composed of collections from the British Museum, Glasgow Museums and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The novel use of Web 2.0 mashups in this digital heritage repository also allows the seamless integration of these museum collections to be merged with user or community generated content, while preserving the quality of museum collections data. Finally, this thesis tests and evaluates the usability of the Reanimating Cultural Heritage social networking system, in particular the suitability of the digital technology solution deployed. Testing is performed with a user group composed of several users, and the results obtained are presented

    Adaptivity of 3D web content in web-based virtual museums : a quality of service and quality of experience perspective

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    The 3D Web emerged as an agglomeration of technologies that brought the third dimension to the World Wide Web. Its forms spanned from being systems with limited 3D capabilities to complete and complex Web-Based Virtual Worlds. The advent of the 3D Web provided great opportunities to museums by giving them an innovative medium to disseminate collections' information and associated interpretations in the form of digital artefacts, and virtual reconstructions thus leading to a new revolutionary way in cultural heritage curation, preservation and dissemination thereby reaching a wider audience. This audience consumes 3D Web material on a myriad of devices (mobile devices, tablets and personal computers) and network regimes (WiFi, 4G, 3G, etc.). Choreographing and presenting 3D Web components across all these heterogeneous platforms and network regimes present a significant challenge yet to overcome. The challenge is to achieve a good user Quality of Experience (QoE) across all these platforms. This means that different levels of fidelity of media may be appropriate. Therefore, servers hosting those media types need to adapt to the capabilities of a wide range of networks and devices. To achieve this, the research contributes the design and implementation of Hannibal, an adaptive QoS & QoE-aware engine that allows Web-Based Virtual Museums to deliver the best possible user experience across those platforms. In order to ensure effective adaptivity of 3D content, this research furthers the understanding of the 3D web in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) through empirical investigations studying how 3D Web components perform and what are their bottlenecks and in terms of QoE studying the subjective perception of fidelity of 3D Digital Heritage artefacts. Results of these experiments lead to the design and implementation of Hannibal

    A CAD-based modeling for dynamic visualization of urban environments in piecemeal (incremental) growth

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    Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, City and Regional Planning, Izmir, 2002Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 114-122)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxi, 122 leavesVisualization is inherent to the conduct of urban design as a direct connection between the designer and three dimensional reality of urban settlements. Visualization of urban environments and urban design projects is vital, since most designers prefer to understand place and context through visualization. The reasons for visualization in urban design can be classified under three headings: .visual thinking, design communication and testing mechanism. Digital revolution. has improved computer use in urban design, as in many other fields. Dynamic computer models can present an ideal environment to visualize the change in respect to time. Digital tools are much more efficient than conventional methods in explaining the growth and change of urban environments. Especially, incremental growth requires features not found in .static/analog. media. Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, in their book .A New Theory of Urban Design., tried to justify their ideas about piecemeal growth by an experiment. The analog methods, such as physical models, two-dimensional diagrams, have been used to conduct the experiment and to convey their ideas about the design process. This thesis tries to produce a .dynamic/digital. model that could be utilized in their experiment instead of static/analog methods. Spatial data should be considered as dynamic, or changing identities rather than as simple, static features. Time is an example of a dynamic component of a spatial data set. Recent technological developments are increasing computer hardware and software capabilities so that this dynamic aspect of data can be accounted for by today.s systems. Dynamic data have not been a great concern in digital technologies for many years, but today changing patterns and dimensions are becoming more important

    A study of portable computers and interactive multimedia as a new tool for interpreting museum collections

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    Over the last two decades the introduction of interactive multimedia applications complimenting existinginterpretative techniques in museum displays has become a widely accepted practice. Indeed fixedinteractive multimedia applications can communicate large amounts of often complex information in auser friendly and accessible way. A drawback is their fixed position. This research project identified thepotential of using a portable computer with an interactive multimedia application manipulated through atouch screen interface. This thesis describe& the results of a series of empirical studies to design and testthe effectiveness of a portable computer as a new tool for interpretation in a museum gallery.The central aim of the research, funded by the GEMISIS 2000 initiative, was to examine potentialinnovative applications of new interactive technologies for heritage attractions and museums. Exploratoryresearch progressed from discovery and gaining insights into the diversity of interactive multimediaapplications in heritage attractions to the dynamics of interactive multimedia as a powerfulcommunication medium. The main study fell into three distinct yet complimentary research pathwaysnamely 1) to design an interactive multimedia application for a portable computer, 2) to examine the useand effectiveness of the portable computer with museum visitors, 3) to assess the application as a newtool for interpretation in a museum setting. The conclusions of this research project are based upon theresults of a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation study, which combined a questionnaire survey,structured unobtrusive observation and interaction logging.As the research project was initiated there were few other projects in this field of study, and no formalevaluation had been published. At the completion, four research projects were identified and are detailedin the conclusion.The results of this research project have confirmed the hypothesis that a portable computer with aninteractive multimedia application has the potential to enhance interpretation and to become a new toolfor interpreting museum collections. As the number of homes with multimedia capable computersequipped with CD-ROM drives and connected to the Internet grows and exposure to computers at workand at school increases, visitors are well prepared to handle the new technology. The projects resultsshow ease of use and an increased recall of exhibits by visitors. Visitors experienced discovery basedlearning at their own pace facilitated by a portable touch screen computer.Limitations of the project are discussed and future research topics identified. These included expandingthe interactive multimedia application to cover the whole gallery, exploring alternative interactionmodels, evaluating the impact of age and gender, evaluating the portable computer within other categoriesof museums, to evaluating location aware positioning systems and to investigating Personal DigitalAssistants as a potential hardware platform

    Content rendering and interaction technologies for digital heritage systems

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    Existing digital heritage systems accommodate a huge amount of digital repository information; however their content rendering and interaction components generally lack the more interesting functionality that allows better interaction with heritage contents. Many digital heritage libraries are simply collections of 2D images with associated metadata and textual content, i.e. little more than museum catalogues presented online. However, over the last few years, largely as a result of EU framework projects, some 3D representation of digital heritage objects are beginning to appear in a digital library context. In the cultural heritage domain, where researchers and museum visitors like to observe cultural objects as closely as possible and to feel their existence and use in the past, giving the user only 2D images along with textual descriptions significantly limits interaction and hence understanding of their heritage. The availability of powerful content rendering technologies, such as 3D authoring tools to create 3D objects and heritage scenes, grid tools for rendering complex 3D scenes, gaming engines to display 3D interactively, and recent advances in motion capture technologies for embodied immersion, allow the development of unique solutions for enhancing user experience and interaction with digital heritage resources and objects giving a higher level of understanding and greater benefit to the community. This thesis describes DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Shared Heritage Resources), which is a novel conceptual framework where five unique services are proposed for digital content: creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction services. These services or tools are designed to allow the heritage community to create, interpret, use and explore digital heritage resources organised as an online exhibition (or virtual museum). This thesis presents innovative solutions for two of these services or tools: content creation where a cost effective render grid is proposed; and an interaction service, where a heritage scenario is presented online using a real-time motion capture and digital puppeteer solution for the user to explore through embodied immersive interaction their digital heritage

    Telepresence and Transgenic Art

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    The application of workflows to digital heritage systems

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    Digital heritage systems usually handle a rich and varied mix of digital objects, accompanied by complex and intersecting workflows and processes. However, they usually lack effective workflow management within their components as evident in the lack of integrated solutions that include workflow components. There are a number of reasons for this limitation in workflow management utilization including some technical challenges, the unique nature of each digital resource and the challenges imposed by the environments and infrastructure in which such systems operate. This thesis investigates the concept of utilizing Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) within Digital Library Systems, and more specifically in online Digital Heritage Resources. The research work conducted involved the design and development of a novel experimental WfMS to test the viability of effective workflow management on the complex processes that exist in digital library and heritage resources. This rarely studied area of interest is covered by analyzing evolving workflow management technologies and paradigms. The different operational and technological aspects of these systems are evaluated while focusing on the areas that traditional systems often fail to address. A digital heritage resource was created to test a novel concept called DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Antiquity and Shared Heritage), which provides digital heritage content: creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction services for digital heritage collections. Based on DISPLAYS, a specific digital heritage resource was created to validate its concept and, more importantly, to act as a test bed to validate workflow management for digital heritage resources. This DISPLAYS type system implementation was called the Reanimating Cultural Heritage resource, for which three core components are the archival, retrieval and presentation components. To validate workflow management and its concepts, another limited version of these reanimating cultural heritage components was implemented within a workflow management host to test if the workflow technology is a viable choice for managing control and dataflow within a digital heritage system: this was successfully proved

    Museums as part of the network of digital culture: A comparative study between the Republic of Korea and the UK

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    This thesis explores the networks of digital culture surrounding six national museums in the Republic of Korea and the UK. Via qualitative research methods, it answers the following research questions: 1) How do the dynamics between the key actors in the museum sector affect the use of digital technology as a foundation of visitor experience? 2) How have museum practices evolved to accommodate digital technology? This study also draws comparisons and contrasts between the two countries’ different approaches to digital culture in museums. Based on Actor-Network theory (ANT) and activity theory (AT), this research identifies actors who have influenced the digital projects of the case museums, for example, government, the museum itself, museum practitioners, digital industry, the public, and so on. The ways they have interconnected with each other are analysed also, as is tracing the actors. The research also highlights the importance of communities of practice (CoP) for museum practitioners’ professional development because of the rapid evolution of technology and the nature of museum digital projects that are situated between the digital and museum sectors. A comparative analysis between the two countries’ national museums is also presented through different actors, their roles and their relationship with the museums. The research also identifies how communication and learning theories adopted in digital projects are dependent on the museums’ overall missions, working processes, and the actors involved in the development of the digital projects. Most digital projects seem to adopt one-way communication and focus on knowledge delivery. However, game-like digital exhibits, maker spaces and online crowdsourcing projects that further consider learner-centred and sociocultural learning approaches are also found, although the museums in the two countries have different approaches. Based on the research findings, this research provides a holistic context for understanding the digital phenomenon in museums and the degree to which the museums have shaped/been impacted by digital culture. I also suggest that museums develop digital projects through a collaborative process and harness digital technology to empower the public

    Modern Information Systems

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    The development of modern information systems is a demanding task. New technologies and tools are designed, implemented and presented in the market on a daily bases. User needs change dramatically fast and the IT industry copes to reach the level of efficiency and adaptability for its systems in order to be competitive and up-to-date. Thus, the realization of modern information systems with great characteristics and functionalities implemented for specific areas of interest is a fact of our modern and demanding digital society and this is the main scope of this book. Therefore, this book aims to present a number of innovative and recently developed information systems. It is titled "Modern Information Systems" and includes 8 chapters. This book may assist researchers on studying the innovative functions of modern systems in various areas like health, telematics, knowledge management, etc. It can also assist young students in capturing the new research tendencies of the information systems' development
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