The pictures we like are our image: continuous mapping of favorite pictures into self-assessed and attributed personality traits

Flickr allows its users to tag the pictures they like as “favorite”. As a result, many users of the popular photo-sharing platform produce galleries of favorite pictures. This article proposes new approaches, based on Computational Aesthetics, capable to infer the personality traits of Flickr users from the galleries above. In particular, the approaches map low-level features extracted from the pictures into numerical scores corresponding to the Big-Five Traits, both self-assessed and attributed. The experiments were performed over 60,000 pictures tagged as favorite by 300 users (the PsychoFlickr Corpus). The results show that it is possible to predict beyond chance both self-assessed and attributed traits. In line with the state-of-the art of Personality Computing, these latter are predicted with higher effectiveness (correlation up to 0.68 between actual and predicted traits)

Interactive exploration of historic information via gesture recognition

Developers of interactive exhibits often struggle to �nd appropriate input devices that enable intuitive control, permitting the visitors to engage e�ectively with the content. Recently motion sensing input devices like the Microsoft Kinect or Panasonic D-Imager have become available enabling gesture based control of computer systems. These devices present an attractive input device for exhibits since the user can interact with their hands and they are not required to physically touch any part of the system. In this thesis we investigate techniques to enable the raw data coming from these types of devices to be used to control an interactive exhibit. Object recognition and tracking techniques are used to analyse the user's hand where movement and clicks are processed. To show the e�ectiveness of the techniques the gesture system is used to control an interactive system designed to inform the public about iconic buildings in the centre of Norwich, UK. We evaluate two methods of making selections in the test environment. At the time of experimentation the technologies were relatively new to the image processing environment. As a result of the research presented in this thesis, the techniques and methods used have been detailed and published [3] at the VSMM (Virtual Systems and Multimedia 2012) conference with the intention of further forwarding the area

Research on the application design of new media in modern museum interior display

This paper introduces the research results of new media application design in modern museum interior display. The purpose is to explore a feasible use of new media technology to better promote the exchange and mutual learning of human civilization museum interior display design scheme or design concept. In the study of the development history of museum display design and the realization trend of cultural value, it is determined that using new media to design narrative virtual tour can attract people who hate passive indoctrination to explore actively. In the study of museum participation in culture and modern social culture, the construction of social museum is determined. The necessity, feasibility and realization of cross-regional resource co-construction and sharing are determined in the study of the current situation of museum community interconnection

Share - Publish - Store - Preserve. Methodologies, Tools and Challenges for 3D Use in Social Sciences and Humanities

Through this White Paper, which gathers contributions from experts of 3D data as well as professionals concerned with the interoperability and sustainability of 3D research data, the PARTHENOS project aims at highlighting some of the current issues they have to face, with possible specific points according to the discipline, and potential practices and methodologies to deal with these issues. During the workshop, several tools to deal with these issues have been introduced and confronted with the participants experiences, this White Paper now intends to go further by also integrating participants feedbacks and suggestions of potential improvements. Therefore, even if the focus is put on specific tools, the main goal is to contribute to the development of standardized good practices related to the sharing, publication, storage and long-term preservation of 3D data

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

Impressionist Rendering of an Animated Painting

The following thesis documents the development of a non-traditional rendering technique, that of classic impressionist painting, and its use to create an animated three-dimensional painting. Impressionist style painting has an organic feel to it, with brush strokes that remain visible in the dried paint and a light, lively color palette that seeks to capture the light in an image. Reproducing this style in a computer-generated image is no small task. For this project a CG paint method was developed, utilizing Maya Paint Effects and particles. This method was implemented with a script, saving time by automating the process as much as possible. This project was implemented by a group of graduate students. Before settling on the above described solution, many alternative methods were researched and tested. The use of Maya Paint Effects and particles was proven an effective choice for this project because it produced the visual effects desired in a manner that was fairly easily handled by the available equipment. The particle script has been used successfully through three iterations of this project, each time bringing it closer to the original vision

A 3D Digital Approach to the Stylistic and Typo-Technological Study of Small Figurines from Ayia Irini, Cyprus

The thesis aims to develop a 3D digital approach to the stylistic and typo-technological study of coroplastic, focusing on small figurines. The case study to test the method is a sample of terracotta statuettes from an assemblage of approximately 2000 statues and figurines found at the beginning of the 20th century in a rural open-air sanctuary at Ayia Irini (Cyprus) by the archaeologists of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. The excavators identified continuity of worship at the sanctuary from the Late Cypriot III (circa 1200 BC) to the end of the Cypro-Archaic II period (ca. 475 BC). They attributed the small figurines to the Cypro-Archaic I-II. Although the excavation was one of the first performed through the newly established stratigraphic method, the archaeologists studied the site and its material following a traditional, merely qualitative approach. Theanalysis of the published results identified a classification of the material with no-clear-cut criteria, and their overlap between types highlights ambiguities in creating groups and classes. Similarly, stratigraphic arguments and different opinions among archaeologists highlight the need for revising. Moreover, pastlegislation allowed the excavators to export half of the excavated antiquities, creating a dispersion of the assemblage. Today, the assemblage is still partly exhibited at the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and in four different museums in Sweden. Such a setting prevents to study, analyse and interpret the assemblageholistically. This research proposes a 3D chaîne opératoire methodology to study the collection’s small terracotta figurines, aiming to understand the context’s function and social role as reflected by the classification obtained with the 3D digital approach. The integration proposed in this research of traditional archaeological studies, and computer-assisted investigation based on quantitative criteria, identified and defined with 3D measurements and analytical investigations, is adopted as a solution to the biases of a solely qualitative approach. The 3D geometric analysis of the figurines focuses on the objects’ shape and components, mode of manufacture, level of expertise, specialisation or skills of the craftsman and production techniques. The analysis leads to the creation of classes of artefacts which allow archaeologists to formulate hypotheses on the production process, identify a common production (e.g., same hand, same workshop) and establish a relative chronological sequence. 3D reconstruction of the excavation’s area contributes to the virtual re-unification of the assemblage for its holistic study, the relative chronological dating of the figurines and the interpretation of their social and ritual purposes. The results obtained from the selected sample prove the efficacy of the proposed 3D approach and support the expansion of the analysis to the whole assemblage, and possibly initiate quantitative and systematic studies on Cypriot coroplastic production

Visualisation of Large-Scale Call-Centre Data

The contact centre industry employs 4% of the entire United King-dom and United States’ working population and generates gigabytes of operational data that require analysis, to provide insight and to improve efficiency. This thesis is the result of a collaboration with QPC Limited who provide data collection and analysis products for call centres. They provided a large data-set featuring almost 5 million calls to be analysed. This thesis utilises novel visualisation techniques to create tools for the exploration of the large, complex call centre data-set and to facilitate unique observations into the data.A survey of information visualisation books is presented, provid-ing a thorough background of the field. Following this, a feature-rich application that visualises large call centre data sets using scatterplots that support millions of points is presented. The application utilises both the CPU and GPU acceleration for processing and filtering and is exhibited with millions of call events.This is expanded upon with the use of glyphs to depict agent behaviour in a call centre. A technique is developed to cluster over-lapping glyphs into a single parent glyph dependant on zoom level and a customizable distance metric. This hierarchical glyph repre-sents the mean value of all child agent glyphs, removing overlap and reducing visual clutter. A novel technique for visualising individually tailored glyphs using a Graphics Processing Unit is also presented, and demonstrated rendering over 100,000 glyphs at interactive frame rates. An open-source code example is provided for reproducibility.Finally, a novel interaction and layout method is introduced for improving the scalability of chord diagrams to visualise call transfers. An exploration of sketch-based methods for showing multiple links and direction is made, and a sketch-based brushing technique for filtering is proposed. Feedback from domain experts in the call centre industry is reported for all applications developed