A Personal View of EVA London: Past, Present, Future

I first encountered EVA London in 1995 through my establishment of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. In 2003, I was invited back as a keynote speaker on the subject of website accessibility for cultural heritage resources. Since then I have been involved with every EVA London conference either as an author or since 2007 as a proceedings editor. This paper summarises the developments of the EVA London conference over the past 25 years from a personal viewpoint and celebrates the 30th anniversary of EVA London and the whole family of international EVA conferences. The development of the community around EVA (Electronic Visualisation and the Arts) is evaluated in the context of a Community of Practice. The paper also considers possible future directions for EVA

Computational Culture and A.I.: Challenging human identity and curatorial practice

This paper records a half-day Symposium of invited talks on the first day of the EVA London 2020 Conference. It continues a series from the previous four EVA London Symposiums held since 2016 (Bowen & Giannini 2016; Bowen, Giannini & Polmeer 2017; Bowen, Giannini, et al. 2018; 2019)

Augmented Reality Experience for Inaccessible Areas in Museums

In recent years, new innovations have been introduced into the cultural heritage sector, aimed at offering more engaging and accessible tours to the public. The article discusses the development process of the VirgilTell project, for the visit of inaccessible places in the Racconigi Castle, one of the Savoy residences in Piedmont (Italy), by the UXD Team of Politecnico di Torino. The places assigned to the project are being restored and therefore excluded from the tour. The VirgilTell experience aims to include and make them accessible to visitors, through a virtual tour including multimedia content for the entertainment and involvement of the users. The visit has been realised through mixed techniques between VR and AR for the narration of the spaces in which the user takes part in a journey made of narratives by characters from the past and objects that no longer exist. The VirgilTell visit was also created with the aim of anticipating, in promotional terms, the physical visit to the museum spaces undergoing restoration, so as to attract visitors back inside once the work is finished

Can I believe what I see? Data visualisation and trust in the humanities

Questions of trust are increasingly important in relation to data and its use. The authors focus on humanities data and its visualisation, through analysis of their own recent projects with museums, archives and libraries internationally. Their account connects the specifics of hands-on digital humanities work to larger epistemological questions. They discuss the sources of potential mistrust, and examine how different expectations and assumptions emerge depending on the use and user of the data; they offer a simple schema through which the implications may be traced. It is argued that vital issues of trust can be engaged with through design, which, rather than being conceived as a cosmetic finish, is seen as contributing insights and questions that affect the whole process. The article concludes with recommendations intended to be useful in both theory and practice

EVA London 2022: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2022 Conference (EVA London 2022) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. Of course, this has been a difficult time for all conferences, with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time since 2019, the EVA London 2022 Conference is a physical conference. It is also an online conference, as it was in the previous two years. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, for the second year in full colour. Over recent decades, the EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most innovative and interdisciplinary conferences. It brings together a wide range of research domains to celebrate a diverse set of interests, with a specialised focus on visualisation. The long and short papers in this volume cover varied topics concerning the arts, visualisations, and IT, including 3D graphics, animation, artificial intelligence, creativity, culture, design, digital art, ethics, heritage, literature, museums, music, philosophy, politics, publishing, social media, and virtual reality, as well as other related interdisciplinary areas. The EVA London 2022 proceedings presents a wide spectrum of papers, demonstrations, Research Workshop contributions, other workshops, and for the seventh year, the EVA London Symposium, in the form of an opening morning session, with three invited contributors. The conference includes a number of other associated evening events including ones organised by the Computer Arts Society, Art in Flux, and EVA International. As in previous years, there are Research Workshop contributions in this volume, aimed at encouraging participation by postgraduate students and early-career artists, accepted either through the peer-review process or directly by the Research Workshop chair. The Research Workshop contributors are offered bursaries to aid participation. In particular, EVA London liaises with Art in Flux, a London-based group of digital artists. The EVA London 2022 proceedings includes long papers and short “poster” papers from international researchers inside and outside academia, from graduate artists, PhD students, industry professionals, established scholars, and senior researchers, who value EVA London for its interdisciplinary community. The conference also features keynote talks. A special feature this year is support for Ukrainian culture after its invasion earlier in the year. This publication has resulted from a selective peer review process, fitting as many excellent submissions as possible into the proceedings. This year, submission numbers were lower than previous years, mostly likely due to the pandemic and a new requirement to submit drafts of long papers for review as well as abstracts. It is still pleasing to have so many good proposals from which to select the papers that have been included. EVA London is part of a larger network of EVA international conferences. EVA events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge (both UK and USA), Canberra, Copenhagen, Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu (Japan), Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, St Petersburg, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw. Further venues for EVA conferences are very much encouraged by the EVA community. As noted earlier, this volume is a record of accepted submissions to EVA London 2022. Associated online presentations are in general recorded and made available online after the conference

Timeline design for visualising cultural heritage data

This thesis is concerned with the design of data visualisations of digitised museum, archive and library collections, in timelines. As cultural institutions digitise their collections—converting texts, objects, and artworks to electronic records—the volume of cultural data available grows. There is a growing perception, though, that we need to get more out of this data. Merely digitising does not automatically make collections accessible, discoverable and comprehensible, and standard interfaces do not necessarily support the types of interactions users wish to make. Data visualisations—this thesis focuses on interactive visual representations of data created with software—allow us to see an overview of, observe patterns in, and showcase the richness of, digitised collections. Visualisation can support analysis, exploration and presentation of collections for different audiences: research, collection administration, and the general public. The focus here is on visualising cultural data by time: a fundamental dimension for making sense of historical data, but also one with unique strangeness. Through cataloguing, cultural institutions define the meaning and value of items in their collections and the structure within which to make sense of them. By visualising threads in cataloguing data through time, can historical narratives be made visible? And is the data alone enough to tell the stories that people wish to tell? The intended audience for this research is cultural heritage institutions. This work sits at the crossroads between design, cultural heritage (particularly museology), and computing—drawing on the fields of digital humanities, information visualisation and human computer-interaction which also live in these overlapping spaces. This PhD adds clarity around the question of what cultural visualisation is (and can be) for, and highlights issues in the visualisation of qualitative or nominal data. The first chapter lays out the background, characterising cultural data and its visualisation. Chapter two walks through examples of existing cultural timeline visualisations, from the most handcrafted displays to automated approaches. At this point, the research agenda and methodology are set out. The next five chapters document a portfolio of visualisation projects, designing and building novel prototype timeline visualisations with data from the Wellcome Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City, and the Nordic Museum, Stockholm. In the process, a range of issues are identified for further discussion. The final chapters reflect on these projects, arguing that automated timeline visualisation can be a productive way to explore and present historical narratives in collection data, but a range of factors govern what is possible and useful. Trust in cultural data visualisation is also discussed. This research argues that visualising cultural data can add value to the data both for users and for data-holding institutions. However, that value is likely to be best achieved by customising a visualisation design to the dataset, audience and use case. Keywords: cultural heritage data; historical data; cultural analytics; cultural informatics; humanities visualisation; generous interfaces; digital humanities; design; information design; interface design; data visualisation; information visualisation; time; timeline; history; historiography; museums; museology; archives; chronographics

The Story of the Markham Car Collection: A Cross-Platform Panoramic Tour of Contested Heritage

In this article, we share our experiences of using digital technologies and various media to present historical narratives of a museum object collection aiming to provide an engaging experience on multiple platforms. Based on P. Joseph’s article, Dawson presented multiple interpretations and historical views of the Markham car collection across various platforms using multimedia resources. Through her creative production, she explored how to use cylindrical panoramas and rich media to offer new ways of telling the controversial story of the contested heritage of a museum’s veteran and vintage car collection. The production’s usability was investigated involving five experts before it was published online and the general users’ experience was investigated. In this article, we present an important component of findings which indicates that virtual panorama tours featuring multimedia elements could be successful in attracting new audiences and that using this type of storytelling technique can be effective in the museum sector. The storyteller panorama tour presented here may stimulate GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) professionals to think of new approaches, implement new strategies or services to engage their audiences more effectively. The research may ameliorate the education of future professionals as well

Conceptual design framework for information visualization to support multidimensional datasets in higher education institutions

Information Visualization (InfoVis) enjoys diverse adoption and applicability because of its strength in solving the problem of information overload inherent in institutional data. Policy and decision makers of higher education institutions (HEIs) are also experiencing information overload while interacting with students‟ data, because of its multidimensionality. This constraints decision making processes, and therefore requires a domain-specific InfoVis conceptual design framework which will birth the domain‟s InfoVis tool. This study therefore aims to design HEI Students‟ data-focused InfoVis (HSDI) conceptual design framework which addresses the content delivery techniques and the systematic processes in actualizing the domain specific InfoVis. The study involved four phases: 1) a users‟ study to investigate, elicit and prioritize the students‟ data-related explicit knowledge preferences of HEI domain policy. The corresponding students‟ data dimensions are then categorised, 2) exploratory study through content analysis of InfoVis design literatures, and subsequent mapping with findings from the users‟ study, to propose the appropriate visualization, interaction and distortion techniques for delivering the domain‟s explicit knowledge preferences, 3) conceptual development of the design framework which integrates the techniques‟ model with its design process–as identified from adaptation of software engineering and InfoVis design models, 4) evaluation of the proposed framework through expert review, prototyping, heuristics evaluation, and users‟ experience evaluation. For an InfoVis that will appropriately present and represent the domain explicit knowledge preferences, support the students‟ data multidimensionality and the decision making processes, the study found that: 1) mouse-on, mouse-on-click, mouse on-drag, drop down menu, push button, check boxes, and dynamics cursor hinting are the appropriate interaction techniques, 2) zooming, overview with details, scrolling, and exploration are the appropriate distortion techniques, and 3) line chart, scatter plot, map view, bar chart and pie chart are the appropriate visualization techniques. The theoretical support to the proposed framework suggests that dictates of preattentive processing theory, cognitive-fit theory, and normative and descriptive theories must be followed for InfoVis to aid perception, cognition and decision making respectively. This study contributes to the area of InfoVis, data-driven decision making process, and HEI students‟ data usage process

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2013 Florence

Important Information Technology topics are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, protection of data, access to the content. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (2D, 3D) regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace – Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The main parts of the Conference Proceedings regard: Strategic Issues, EC Projects and Related Networks & Initiatives, International Forum on “Culture & Technology”, 2D – 3D Technologies & Applications, Virtual Galleries – Museums and Related Initiatives, Access to the Culture Information. Three Workshops are related to: International Cooperation, Innovation and Enterprise, Creative Industries and Cultural Tourism