A Cultural Heritage Forum Celebrating Technological Innovation at Station X

We aim to encourage and support public participation in heritage through the development of Cultural Heritage Forums, a kind of cultural web portal that enables active participation of communities of interest in a way that complements rather than replaces visits to physical cultural institutions. The cultural heritage forum described here (Station X) is concerned with promoting an understanding of technology innovation in the areas of computing and cryptography. We propose a number of scenarios concerning how the forum can be designed, drawing on our earlier work in using knowledge modelling and text analysis to support the exploration of digital resources

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

Dynamic urban projection mapping

“Dynamic projection mapping” is a variation of the best-known “projection mapping”. It considers the perceptual analysis of the urban landscape in which the video projection and the observer’s displacement speed are hypothesized. This latter, in particular, is variable and may depend on factors not directly controllable by the driver (slowdowns due to accidents, rallies, etc.). This speed can be supported and controlled by a number of traffic flow measurement systems. These data are available on the internet, like Google Maps APIs and/or speed sensors located close to the point of interest. The content of projection becomes dynamic and varies according to how the observer perceives the vehicle: slow, medium, fast

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Encouraging persons to visit cultural sites through mini-games

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application and a Web interface for curators, allowing the definition, and subsequent fruition by users, of different minigames suitable for open-air assets

Conservation architecture and the narrative imperative: Birmingham back to backs

The paper uses a case study to explore how the opposing logics of conservation architecture and interpretive exhibition design were played out in the shaping of a narrative museum space. The former concerns itself with an archaeological conception of physical space, which is defined through the decipherability of traces and their layering over time. The latter concerns itself with a theatrical notion of event space defined through the mapping and programming of performances and information flows. The contingencies of the Birmingham Back to Backs project – its incep¬tion, the in¬volvement of the National Trust, the foregrounding of community interests and the interpretive design process – gave rise to a novel resolution of contrasting interests. A particular idea of narrative was able to frame the use of, on the one hand, physical evidence to interpret what may have existed and, on the other, a combination of lived and documentary evidence to reconstruct the patterns of daily life. This can be understood as a process of recovering ordinary lives. The research addresses the following conference themes: sites overlaid with narrative, the role of visitor-centred design in the production of museum space, and the emergence of new approaches that cut across disciplines. Analysis of interpretive design and heritage management documentation is informed by Samuel’s theorization of the shaping power of memory (1994). However, overall, the approach is pragmatic, in that it engages in critical conversations, resists reductionism, and tries to point up what may be useful in helping us cope together in the world. The principal conclusions concern the role that a focus on narrative (re)construction can play in framing cross-disciplinary collaboration and the potential of embracing radically different conceptions of space in museum design