Cultural dissemination and interactive audiovisual commucation

Interactive electronic systems are generating specific ways of knowledge transmission. As always, when a new medium appears some of these ways come from pre-existing ones, whilw others are original. In this article we will sum up our view of this process and apply it to several examples of interactive audiovisual communication in general and web connectivity in particular, can add to knowledge transission procesess

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Information technology in humanities scholarship: British achievements, prospects and barriers

Der vorliegende Beitrag resümiert die Ergebnisse eines gemeinsamen Projekts der Britischen Akademie und der Forschungsabteilung der Britischen Bibliothek zur Anwendung von Informationstechnologien in den Humanwissenschaften. Diskutiert werden Probleme der Informationssammlung, -aufbereitung, - speicherung und -wiedergewinnung im Zusammenhang mit den neuesten Möglichkeiten der elektronischen Datenverarbeitung und der Telekommunikation. Der zweite Abschnitt gibt einen knappen Überblick über den Einfluß der neuen Medien (Text, quantitative Daten, Ton, Bild und elektronische Kommunikation) auf die Forschungstechniken selbst und das traditionelle Selbstverständnis der Humanwissenschaften. Abschließend wird auf organisatorische Fragen wie Aus- und Weiterbildung des Personals, maschinelle Ausrüstung,- Zugang zu Netzwerken und die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen des 'information handling' eingegangen. (pmb)'The British Academy and the British Library Research convened the Humanities Information Review Panel in April 1990. The Panel's brief was to examine all aspects of the generation, storage, and use of information in the humanities, and to look especially at the new methods of handling information provided by the use of computers, telecommunications, and other associated technologies. Section two of this concise report outlines the impact of new technology on scholarship (text, data, images, sound, combined sources, electronic communication, tools); section three discusses new developments and the change of the traditional image of the humanities scholar; section four describes training and support, network access and equipment, research infrastructure, information ressources, regulatory issues and funding; section five summarises the recommendations of the Panel.' (author's abstract

METHODOLOGIES FOR DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING HYPERMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Hypermedia design, as any other design activity, may be observed according to two points of view: methods which suggest milestones to guide the designer's work and process which concerns the actual detailed behavior of the designer at work. Cognitive studies assess that mental processes involved in any design process show widely shared human characteristics regardless to the used design method. Thereby, they provide general keys to help designers. Thus, a hypertext design environment should equally consider the two dimensions of a hypertext design activity, in particular it should support the natural design process specificities, mainly the incremental and opportunist aspects. The paper focuses on the hypertext design as a computer supported human activity. It examines what is general both in the design methods and in the design process of hypertexts in order to determine which general features are helpful to designers. This analysis has raised from the observation of the behavior of MacWeb users during design tasks. It is related to sound and well known results in cognitive science. The paper also describes how the proposed features are implemented in the MacWeb system.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Current Trends of Computing in the Humanities in England

Computerizing the materials used by humanistic scholars requires sophisticated and innovative use of the latest of new technologies as these are areas which pose particularly complex problems of mixed media data handling. The popular view of humanists is that they are either non-technological or that their needs are extremely simple, far simpler than those of scientists; perhaps limited to the use of word-processors and a little e-mail. This is far from being the truth: the key limiting factor on the use of computers in the humanities in the past has been the inability of the technology to handle many of the highly technical and abstruse problems of data handing which are dealt with daily in humanities scholarship. Now, however, the technology is rapidly catching up with the disciplines in its ability to handle the varieties of media: text, images, graphics, sound, and video. Computers are now used by humanists around the world for many different applications in a large number of subject areas, for quantitative analysis of those topics which are amenable to numerical study, such as the analysis of datasets for historians, for the study of paintings and artefacts by art historians and archaeologists, for the sophisticated study of textuality by literary critics and textual editors, for the study of the moving image by film theorists, and many, many more. The topics which I should like to consider in this paper are: electronic publishing and the changes which are being wrought in the publishing industry; the uses of networks; image digitization; hypermedia and multimedia; and finally the uses of computers in humanities teaching. In particular, I will be looking at the current state of these in Britain

1001stories+: An effective and affordable multi-media, multi-format communication framework for cultural heritage institutions

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing number of technologies and devices (including smartphones, tablets and alike) able to provide new perspectives for the use of multimedia applications in the field of Cultural Heritage. This work arises from the interest in providing better authoring/delivery possibilities to cultural heritage institutions (small and medium sized in particular). Indeed, often medium and small sized museums do not have the necessary resources to create high quality multimedia productions. Not only have they faced short time and low budget, but a shortage of dedicated staff. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, this thesis focuses on the development of an effective and affordable multi-media, multi-format communication framework. The framework provides institutions with guidelines and methodologies and it is based on an innovative authoring tools (not developed in this thesis, but available). Specific concerns of the framework are: developing multimedia content within a short time span, developing multimedia content with a limited, low-budget, adapting multimedia content to different technologies and to different user experiences, making possible to “reuse multimedia content” (e.g. from websites, to audio guides, to multimedia guides, to YouTube or to paper brochures) This research has been conducted throughout parallel and intertwined processes, requiring a take of perspective. One the one hand, a general investigation (about multimedia formats, technologies and methodologies for production) has been conducted. On the other hand, an empirical work on real-life multimedia productions has been undergone. Indeed, the merging of theoretical knowledge and real fieldwork remains the main characteristic of this study’s methodological approach and of its strength. Its overall result is a fully developed framework (named 1001stories +), providing: multi-media, content information is presented throughout different media, including images, text, audio, and video; effective, the content can have the desired impact on the audience; affordable, content can be created in a short time, within low budget, and can be reused; multi-technology, content is available on different channels (web, smart phones, tablets, You tube, etc…); multi-format, content can be reorganized into various solutions, generating different formats for different user experiences. A more conceptual contribution of this thesis is about consideration of what communication in the Cultural Heritage domain is about, what its purposes are, and what the most appropriate means to reach the potential audience may be

Web-based strategies in the manufacturing industry

The explosive growth of Internet-based architectures is allowing an efficient access to information resources over geographically dispersed areas. This fact is exerting a major influence on current manufacturing practices. Business activities involving customers, partners, employees and suppliers are being rapidly and efficiently integrated through networked information management environments. Therefore, efforts are required to take advantage of distributed infrastructures that can satisfy information integration and collaborative work strategies in corporate environments. In this research, Internet-based distributed solutions focused on the manufacturing industry are proposed. Three different systems have been developed for the tooling sector, specifically for the company Seco Tools UK Ltd (industrial collaborator). They are summarised as follows. SELTOOL is a Web-based open tool selection system involving the analysis of technical criteria to establish appropriate selection of inserts, toolholders and cutting data for turning, threading and grooving operations. It has been oriented to world-wide Seco customers. SELTOOL provides an interactive and crossed-way of searching for tooling parameters, rather than conventional representation schemes provided by catalogues. Mechanisms were developed to filter, convert and migrate data from different formats to the database (SQL-based) used by SELTOOL.TTS (Tool Trials System) is a Web-based system developed by the author and two other researchers to support Seco sales engineers and technical staff, who would perform tooling trials in geographically dispersed machining centres and benefit from sharing data and results generated by these tests. Through TTS tooling engineers (authorised users) can submit and retrieve highly specific technical tooling data for both milling and turning operations. Moreover, it is possible for tooling engineers to avoid the execution of new tool trials knowing the results of trials carried out in physically distant places, when another engineer had previously executed these trials. The system incorporates encrypted security features suitable for restricted use on the World Wide Web. An urgent need exists for tools to make sense of raw data, extracting useful knowledge from increasingly large collections of data now being constructed and made available from networked information environments. This explosive growth in the availability of information is overwhelming the capabilities of traditional information management systems, to provide efficient ways of detecting anomalies and significant patterns in large sets of data. Inexorably, the tooling industry is generating valuable experimental data. It is a potential and unexplored sector regarding the application of knowledge capturing systems. Hence, to address this issue, a knowledge discovery system called DISKOVER was developed. DISKOVER is an integrated Java-application consisting of five data mining modules, able to be operated through the Internet. Kluster and Q-Fast are two of these modules, entirely developed by the author. Fuzzy-K has been developed by the author in collaboration with another research student in the group at Durham. The final two modules (R-Set and MQG) have been developed by another member of the Durham group. To develop Kluster, a complete clustering methodology was proposed. Kluster is a clustering application able to combine the analysis of quantitative as well as categorical data (conceptual clustering) to establish data classification processes. This module incorporates two original contributions. Specifically, consistent indicators to measure the quality of the final classification and application of optimisation methods to the final groups obtained. Kluster provides the possibility, to users, of introducing case-studies to generate cutting parameters for particular Input requirements. Fuzzy-K is an application having the advantages of hierarchical clustering, while applying fuzzy membership functions to support the generation of similarity measures. The implementation of fuzzy membership functions helped to optimise the grouping of categorical data containing missing or imprecise values. As the tooling database is accessed through the Internet, which is a relatively slow access platform, it was decided to rely on faster Information retrieval mechanisms. Q-fast is an SQL-based exploratory data analysis (EDA) application, Implemented for this purpose