Analysis of Transaction Logs from National Museums Liverpool

The websites of Cultural Heritage institutions attract the full range of users, from professionals to novices, for a variety of tasks. However, many institutions are reporting high bounce rates and therefore seeking ways to better engage users. The analysis of transaction logs can provide insights into users’ searching and navigational behaviours and support engagement strategies. In this paper we present the results from a transaction log analysis of web server logs representing user-system interactions from the seven websites of National Museums Liverpool (NML). In addition, we undertake an exploratory cluster analysis of users to identify potential user groups that emerge from the data. We compare this with previous studies of NML website users

Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

Museums are increasing access to their collections and providing richer user experiences via web-based interfaces. However, they are seeing high numbers of users looking at only one or two pages within 10 s and then leaving. To reduce this rate, a better understanding of the type of user who visits a museum website is required. Existing models for museum website users tend to focus on groups that are readily accessible for study or provide little detail in their definitions of the groups. This paper presents the results of a large-scale user survey for the National Museums Liverpool museum website in which data on a wide range of user characteristics were collected regarding their current visit to provide a better understanding of their motivations, tasks, engagement and domain knowledge. Results show that the frequently understudied general public and non-professional users make up the majority (approximately 77%) of the respondents

Bulk commodities and the Liverpool and London markets of the mid-19th century

We study British prices and the degree of commodity market integration between Liverpool, the bulk commodity port of mid-19th century, and London. A new wholesale commodity price index is presented for Liverpool and this is compared with the Klovland-Sauerbeck index. Next, we examine the relationship between Liverpool and London markets in specific bulk commodities. Our data consist of price indices for identically described goods in both Liverpool and London: three commodity groups (metal products, wood products, and processed foods), and the specific commodities of wheat and flour. Tests for cointegration reveal convergence among the six price pairs. We also find that the markets were highly integrated in the short-run because three of the commodity group pairs (processed foods, wheat, and flour) shared common features or cycles. A common cycle implies that transitory price shocks in Liverpool had the same impact on prices in London and vice versa. The importance of the London and Liverpool common cycle to a shock is brief. Its shock explains less than 20 percent of the variation in the relevant price levels after twelve months, on average.

Data Analytics Application in Fashion Retail SMEs (A Case Study in Caracas Fashion Store)

Data analytics plays a paramount role in maximizing productivity and profitability for businesses by deriving insights from pre-existing data to predict market trends and client habits to make better business decisions. In accordance with Industrial Revolution 4.0, most SMEs have begun to implement an e-commerce business model, thus, customer data is generated at an exponential rate, allowing SMEs to further develop their services for greater user satisfaction. However, the abundance of unsorted and ambiguous data leads to issues such as server overload and inefficient customer sales cycle tracking. This paper will explain the application of data analytics techniques and architectures to overcome these issues in a fashion retail SME, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of these solutions

Understanding user behavior in digital libraries using the MAGUS session visualization tool

Manual inspection of individual user sessions provides valuable information on how users search within a collection. To support this inspection we present a session visualization tool, Metadata Augmented Graphs for User Sessions (MAGUS), representing sessions in a digital library. We evaluate MAGUS by comparing it with the more widely used table visualization in three representative tasks of increasing complexity performed by 12 professional participants. The perceived workload was a little higher for MAGUS than for the table. However, the answers provided during the tasks using MAGUS were generally more detailed using different types of arguments. These answers focused more on specific search behaviors and the parts of the collection users are interested in, using MAGUS’s visualization of the (bibliographic) metadata of clicked documents and selected facets. MAGUS allows professionals to extract more, valuable information on how users search within a collection

Comparing methods for finding search sessions on a specified topic: A double case study

Users searching for different topics in a collection may show distinct search patterns. To analyze search behavior of users searching for a specific topic, we need to retrieve the sessions containing this topic. In this paper, we compare different topic representations and approaches to find topic-specific sessions. We conduct our research in a double case study of two topics, World War II and feminism, using search logs of a historical newspaper collection. We evaluate the results using manually created ground truths of over 600 sessions per topic. The two case studies show similar results: The query-based methods yield high precision, at the expense of recall. The document-based methods find more sessions, at the expense of precision. In both approaches, precision improves significantly by manually curating the topic representations. This study demonstrates how different methods to find sessions containing specific topics can be applied by digital humanities scholars and practitioners

User versus institutional perspectives of metadata and searching : an investigation of online access to cultural heritage content during the COVID-19 pandemic

Findings from log analyses of user interactions with the digital content of two large national cultural heritage institutions (National Museums of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland) during the COVID-19 lockdown highlighted limited engagement compared to pre-pandemic levels. Just 8% of users returned to these sites, whilst the average time spent, and number of pages accessed, were generally low. This prompted a user study to investigate the potential mismatch between the way content was indexed by the curators and searched for by users. A controlled experiment with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, explored: (a) how does the metadata assigned by cultural heritage organisations meet or differ from the search needs of users? and (b) how can the search strategies of users inform the search pathways employed by cultural heritage organisations? Findings reveal that collection management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different characteristics to be considered when developing metadata, yet much of the content is left to the interpretations of curators. Rather, user- and context-specific guidelines could be beneficial in ensuring the aspects considered most important by consumers are indexed, thereby producing more relevant search results. A user-centred approach to designing cultural heritage websites would help to improve an individual’s experience when searching for information. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understanding of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests

Public Policy and Private Interest in the Lumber Industry of the Eastern Townships: the Case of C.S. Clark and Company, 1854-1881

During the early 1850s the American C.S. Clark joined forces with Compton County politician-cum-entrepreneur, John Henry Pope to acquire nearly all the crown timber berths in the Upper St. Francis drainage basin. The result was years of conflict with the local French Canadians whose livelihood depended upon ready access to the forest resources. While government on the one hand actively promoted the colonization movement, on the other it failed to restrain the C.S. Clark Company even though it provided only minimal revenues to the public treasury. The explanation lies in the 19th century perception of the forest as a temporary obstacle to agricultural expansion, and in the political influence of Pope and his fellow timber monopolists. Au début des années 1850, l’Américain C.S. Clark unit ses forces avec celles de John Henry Pope, politicien-entrepreneur du comté de Compton, pour acquérir la plupart du bois de la couronne du bassin de drainage supérieur du St-François. Il en résulta des années de conflits avec les Canadiens français des environs dont le gagne-pain dépendait de l’accès aux ressources de la forêt. Tandis que le gouvernement d’une main, encourageait le mouvement de colonisation, de l’autre, il négligeait de restreindre la compagnie C.S. Clark bien que celle-ci fournît de faibles revenus au trésor public. Les explications : la perception de la forêt au XIXe siècle comme étant temporairement un obstacle à l’expansion de l’agriculture, et l’influence politique de Pope et de ses collaborateurs monopolisateurs du bois

Searching for yield in real assets

Three empirical chapters addressing investments in real, alternative assets are presented in this thesis. Chapter 2 focuses on fine art as an investment. In recent years, the art market has been characterized by final auction prices greatly exceeding the exante estimates published by international auction houses. We define this difference as a rarity premium and build a ‘Rarity Index’ by aggregating the premia relative to the mean. We also investigate the benefits, outside financial performance, associated with art ownership and introduce the term of ‘ownership yield’, meant to encapsulate both aesthetic yield and features of conspicuous consumption. This ownership yield may account for the large differences between the values of rarity indexes we construct for three famous families of paintings over the period 2003 to 2013. In Chapter 3, we turn our attention to residential real estate in alpha cities. We argue that relative price changes in prime property markets have greatly deviated from non-prime markets on a national level, while similarities across prime markets in different countries have increased. In order to illustrate the extent of these changes, we introduce a novel ‘luxury ratio’ and perform several statistical analyses on repeat-sales price indexes over the period 2003 to 2014. Taking the case of London, we show how the luxury ratio has evolved over the past two decades with respect to other UK cities. Results support the existence of an ownership yield in a world where high (and ultra-high) net worth individuals are growing in number and search for exclusiveness through the possession of distinctive residential property. Chapter 4 targets two types of commercial real estate: data centers and shopping complexes (companies specializing in malls, shopping centers, and outlets). First, with price indexes based on US REITs, we analyze short-term and long-term relationships between the S&P 500 and several commercial real estate categories using Engle-Granger cointegration over the period 2009 to mid-2016. We find no cointegration between data centers and the S&P 500, or retail (representing shopping complexes) and the S&P 500, indicating that both sectors are not merely an attractive investment in their own right, but also portfolio diversifiers. Second, turning to individual firms, we perform a CAPM analysis of 41 international companies. Results show that, on average, price returns from data centers surpass those of shopping complexes; moreover, US companies specializing in malls, shopping centers, and outlets outperform those of similar firms abroad. Finally, we indicate a further avenue for data centers in relation to electricity storage, and explain implications for investors

The use of 3D laser scanning technology in buildings archaeology: the case of Måketorpsboden in Kulturen museum, Lund

This thesis is a project developed with Kulturen Museum in Lund for the documentation of a wooden building from the end of the 18th century. The technology applied is 3D laser scanning. The project wanted to answer several theoretical questions through the study and to conduct a practical case analysis, which lead to the production of a 3D textured model of part of the building. The work has been developed discussing in the beginning the state of the art of building archaeology, describing the different stages of study of buildings through history, from Renaissance to the seventeenth century and with an overlook of the approach of this discipline in the Nordic countries. Subsequently it has analysed the different kind of surveys for a proper archaeological building investigation: the direct survey and the indirect survey, explaining the differences and the technological innovation applied to this field especially during the last 20 years. A detailed paragraph about method of building investigation with the most recent laser scanning technologies illustrates the “pros and cons” of the utilization of 3D laser scanning for archaeological purposes; specific case studies are described. A final comment about the rising problem of handling and storing of data coming from the utilization of those new technologies has been taken in consideration. The last part of the paper is focused on the explanation of the background history of the typology of wooden building I have been studying and the detailed explanation of all the steps done for the actual project, from the acquisition campaign to the post processing of the data. An analysis of the data I got from the creation of the model of a single room has been performed with the examination of the possibility of future developments of the same project