Writing Postcards from the Museum: Composing Personalised Tangible Souvenirs

Building a long-lasting personal relationship with visitors by maintaining their engagement after the visit is one of the most challenging endeavours cultural heritage sites face. When successful, this connection fosters new opportunities for the visitor to get in touch with the heritage, e.g. to visit again or to take part in cultural activities. One way to establish a personal connection is via personalisation services that generate souvenirs for the visitors to take away and foster future engagements with the heritage. This paper discusses how the techniques for personalised text generation can be applied to produce post-visit postcards exploiting the interaction logs collected during the museum visit. The personalised postcard summarises the visit, creates a link with what was experienced and suggests further paths for content discovery. A user study conducted over four weeks confirms the appreciation for the personalised postcard and suggests future developments

Supporting group interactions in museum visiting

Ethnographic study in two contrasting museums highlights a widespread but rarely documented challenge for CSCW design. Visitors' engagement with exhibits often ends prematurely due to the need to keep up with or attend to fellow group members. We unpack the mechanics of these kinds of phenomena revealing how the behaviours of summoning, pressurizing, herding, sidelining, and rounding up, lead to the responses of following, skimming and digging in. We show how the problem is especially challenging where young children are involved. As an initial prompt we explore two ways in which CSCW could help address this challenge: enabling a more fluid association between information and exhibits; and helping reconfigure the social nature of visiting

Blending customisation, context-awareness and adaptivity for personalised tangible interaction in cultural heritage

Shaping personalization in a scenario of tangible, embedded and embodied interaction for cultural heritage involves challenges that go well beyond the requirements of implementing content personalization for portable mobile guides. Content is coupled with the physical experience of the objects, the space, and the facets of the context – being those personal or social – acquire a more prominent role. This paper presents a personalization framework to support complex scenarios that combine the physical, the digital, and the social dimensions of a visit. It is based on our experience in collaborating with curators and museum experts to understand and shape personalization in a way that is meaningful to them and to visitors alike, that is sustainable to implement and effective in managing the complexity of context-awareness. The pro posed approach features a decomposition of personalization into multiple layers of complexity that involve a blend of customization on the visitor’s initiative or according to the visitor’s profile, system context-awareness, and automatic adaptivity computed by the system based on the visitor’s behaviour model. We use a number of case studies of implemented exhibitions where this approach was used to illustrate its many facets and how adaptive techniques can be effectively complemented with interaction design, rich narratives and visitors’ choice to create deeply personal experiences. Overarching reflections spanning case studies and prototypes provide evidence of the viability of the proposed frame work, and illustrate the final effect of the user experience

Men, Women, and Italians: The Masquerade of Narrative and Identity in Richardson\u27s \u3ci\u3eSir Charles Grandison\u3c/i\u3e

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement in the debates that birthed the modern individual and the “private” sphere. In part because of its historical positioning, Grandison serves as a catalog of the period’s identity debates. The dramatis personae divides characters into “men,” “women,” and “Italians,” but at the same time that the structure attempts to relegate characters to their respective narrative and social spaces, they resist, for the paratext provides framing that the narrative subverts. In the dramatis personae, characters dress for a masquerade; the text, however, rejects these superficial trimmings, stripping the characters, structure, and plot of their masks. The blurring between man and woman, Briton and Italian, realism and romance create crises of category, and so Grandison’s narrative uses disrupted generic modes and changeable character masks to imagine a stronger community not in spite of but due to the permeable boundaries of narrative, nation, gender, and even the human body itself. Literary conventions speak through the text, and in asserting arbitrary divisions remind us that boundaries in general are masquerades, that even genre itself simply apes order, protecting against the chaos that would unsettle what we believe about identity, community, and creation. The study of Grandison, a literary model for questioning binaries of all kinds, contributes to the field of cultural studies by providing a long scope of the identity debates which entangle the twenty-first century, and by suggesting that it is through the imaginative potential of fiction that we may begin to disentangle ourselves

Archaeology of Digital Environments: Tools, Methods, and Approaches

Digital archaeologists use digital tools for conducting archaeological work, but their potential also lies in applying archaeological thinking and methods to understanding digital built environments (i.e., software) as contemporary examples of human settlement, use, and abandonment. This thesis argues for digital spaces as archaeological artifacts, sites, and landscapes that can be investigated in both traditional and non-traditional ways. At the core of my research is the fundamental argument that human-occupied digital spaces can be studied archaeologically with existing and modified theory, tools, and methods to reveal that human occupation and use of synthetic worlds is similar to how people behave in the natural world. Working digitally adds new avenues of investigation into human behavior in relation to the things people make, modify, and inhabit. In order to investigate this argument, the thesis focuses on three video game case studies, each using different kinds of archaeology specifically chosen to help understand the software environments being researched: 1) epigraphy, stylometry, and text analysis for the code-artifact of Colossal Cave Adventure; 2) photogrammetry, 3D printing, GIS mapping, phenomenology, and landscape archaeology within the designed, digital heritage virtual reality game-site of Skyrim VR; 3) actual survey and excavation of 30 heritage sites for a community of displaced human players in the synthetic landscape of No Man’s Sky. My conclusions include a blended approach to conducting future archaeological fieldwork in digital built environments, one that modifies traditional approaches to archaeological sites and material in a post/transhuman landscape. As humanity continues trending towards constant digital engagement, archaeologists need to be prepared to study how digital places are settled, used, and abandoned. This thesis takes a step in that direction using the vernacular of games as a starting point

Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of ‘lived religion’, Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility

Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of ‘lived religion’, Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility