Miniature illustrations retrieval and innovative interaction for digital illuminated manuscripts

In this paper we propose a multimedia solution for the interactive exploration of illuminated manuscripts. We leveraged on the joint exploitation of content-based image retrieval and relevance feedback to provide an effective mechanism to navigate through the manuscript and add custom knowledge in the form of tags. The similarity retrieval between miniature illustrations is based on covariance descriptors, integrating color, spatial and gradient information. The proposed relevance feedback technique, namely Query Remapping Feature Space Warping, accounts for the user’s opinions by accordingly warping the data points. This is obtained by means of a remapping strategy (from the Riemannian space where covariance matrices lie, referring back to Euclidean space) useful to boost the retrieval performance. Experiments are reported to show the quality of the proposal. Moreover, the complete prototype with user interaction, as already showcased at museums and exhibitions, is presented

The Museum Wiki: A Model for Online Collections in Museums

Museums increasingly use the Internet, digitization, and social tagging to publicize their collections in online databases. However, these online collections museums frequently lack contextual and interpretive information that objects require to be understood by the general public. Other sources, such as Wikipedia, consistently deliver more in-depth information on artworks than museums. The Museum Wiki proposes a solution for the Museum Studies field to address this information gap by emulating Wikipedia’s framework of interlinked articles for online museum collections. Additionally, this model raises the online visibility of these collections by editing relevant Wikipedia articles with information from articles written for the museum’s collection. These Wikipedia edits are then cited back to the museum website to drive visitors to the collection. The Museum Wiki uses the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA to pilot the project with its collection of Albert Bierstadt paintings

Introducing the TISMIR Education Track: What, Why, How?

This editorial introduces the new education track for the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR) and aims to provide guidance to both prospective authors and users of this track’s material regarding its context, goals, and scope. To begin, we offer TISMIR-specific context, including the journal’s history, its unchanged scope and remit, and the motivations behind introducing the new track. This context is supplemented by broader insights into developments in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), the personal pedagogical experiences of the authors, and the rapid, extensive development of Open Educational Resources across various domains. We highlight the key characteristics of educational articles in general and explore why the music domain may provide an intuitive and motivating setting for education across various levels and disciplines. The education track aligns with existing tracks in terms of TISMIR’s dedication to scientific research in MIR, broadly defined as the processing, analyzing, organizing, and creating of music and music-related information using computational methods. Educational articles within this track maintain the high standards expected in terms of scientific rigor, clarity of language, and compelling presentation. However, they differ in their focus on a tutorial-style delivery and their emphasis on existing MIR research methods, techniques, principles, and practical matters relevant to the diverse interests of the MIR community. Through this editorial, our objective is to offer guidance, clarify review criteria, and stimulate discussion on crafting effective educational articles, thereby laying the foundation for a broader discourse on education within MIR and beyond

Communicating an arts foundation’s values: sights, sounds and social media

Purpose This paper tests and refines the long-established signal transmission model of the communication process by examining the ways in which a newly-formed nonprofit arts foundation communicated its professed values to its stakeholders. Methodological approach The study uses a mixed method case study approach. Interviews with key informants and observations of the foundation’s webpages enabled the identification of the professed values of the arts foundation. Next, a questionnaire survey established whether these values had been successfully decoded by stakeholders and identified the channels via which the values-related signals had been received. Findings The transmission model was found to be relevant as a model. However, to improve its fit within a nonprofit arts context, a modification to the model is suggested which highlights the importance of multi-sensory channels, the importance of context, and the increasingly important role of the stakeholder. Research limitations This study is a small-scale case study, although its mixed methods help to ensure validity. Practical implications The findings will help nonprofit arts organisations to decide on how to best communicate their values to their stakeholders. Social implications A determination by an organisation to uphold an uplifting range of values, such as those which were found to be transmitted by Folkstock, impacts upon society by the potential contribution to a better quality of life. Originality /value Literature which provides in-depth examination of the communication of values within a nonprofit arts context via a range of channels, including traditional, online and multi-sensory, is sparse. The opportunity to study a newly-formed nonprofit arts organisation is also rare. The results of this study provide valuable evidence that even in today’s social media-rich world, people, sounds, sights and material objects in physical space still have a vital role to play in the communication of values

Understanding and Supporting Visual Communication within Costume Design Practice

Theatres provide artistic value to many people and generate revenue for communities, yet little research has been conducted to understand or support theatrical designers. Over 1,800 non-profit theatres and 3,522 theatre companies and dinner theatres operate in the United States. In 2008, 11 million people attended 1,587 Broadway shows for a total gross of 894 million dollars. These numbers do not take into account College and community theatres, operas, and ballets, all of which also require costumes. This dissertation studied image search, selection, and use within costume design practice to: 1) understand how image use as a collaborative visual communication tool affects the search and selection process and 2) assist an often overlooked community. Previous research in image search and selection has focused on specific resources or institutions. In contrast, this research used case study methodology to understand image search, selection, and use within the broad context of an image-intensive process. The researcher observed costume designers and other theatre members as they located, selected, shared, discussed, and modified images through an iterative design process resulting in a final set of images, the costumes themselves. The researcher also interviewed participants throughout the design process, photographed artifacts, and conducted a final interview with participants at the end of each case study. The resulting data was coded using grounded theory and guided by previous research. Based on the analysis, the researcher suggests a three-stage model that describes image use in costume design and provides a starting point for understanding image use in other collaborative design practices. Participants used a wide range of analog and digital resources, including personal and institutional collections, but often used the same three search and selection strategies regardless of the resource type. Set building and refinement, image comparison, and tagging were all important features of the image search and selection process but are not well supported in most image search systems. In addition, participants continuously added resources to personal collections for future use on individual productions. This research set out to understand search and selection within the context of collaborative use on a single production, but what became apparent was the central nature of collaboration across productions to the search and selection process itself. Personal networks between costume designers and within the theatre community played a central role in solving challenges costume designers encounter as part of their work. This research bridges a gap in current image research by placing image search and selection within the context of a collaborative design practice. At the same time, it suggests guidelines for developing technology to support a community which has long been overlooked. With additional research, the findings from this research can be extended to apply to the theatrical community as a whole and also to other design professionals

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

MACE – Enriching Architectural Learning Objects for Experience Multiplication.

Stefaner, M., Dalla Vecchia, E., Condotta, M., Wolpers, M., Specht, M., Apelt, M., Duval, E. (2007) MACE – Enriching Architectural Learning Objects for Experience Multiplication. In: Duval, E., Klamma, R., & Wolpers, M. (eds.) EC-TEL 2007. LNCS 4753; Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; pp. 322-336.Education in architecture requires access to a broad range of architectural learning material to develop flexibility and creativity in design. The learning material is compromised of digital information captured in textual and visual media including single images, videos, description of architectural concepts or complete architectural projects, i.e. digital artifacts on different aggregation levels. The repositories storing such information are not interrelated and do not provide unified access so that retrieval of architectural learning objects is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we describe how an infrastructure of federated architectural learning repositories will provide unique, integrated access facilities for high quality architectural content. The integration of various types of content, usage, social and contextual metadata enables users to develop multiple perspectives and navigation paths that support experience multiplication for the user. A service– oriented software architecture that is based on open standards, and a flexible user interface design solutions based on widgets ensure easy integration and re- combinability of contents, metadata and functionalities

Exploratory Browsing

In recent years the digital media has influenced many areas of our life. The transition from analogue to digital has substantially changed our ways of dealing with media collections. Today‟s interfaces for managing digital media mainly offer fixed linear models corresponding to the underlying technical concepts (folders, events, albums, etc.), or the metaphors borrowed from the analogue counterparts (e.g., stacks, film rolls). However, people‟s mental interpretations of their media collections often go beyond the scope of linear scan. Besides explicit search with specific goals, current interfaces can not sufficiently support the explorative and often non-linear behavior. This dissertation presents an exploration of interface design to enhance the browsing experience with media collections. The main outcome of this thesis is a new model of Exploratory Browsing to guide the design of interfaces to support the full range of browsing activities, especially the Exploratory Browsing. We define Exploratory Browsing as the behavior when the user is uncertain about her or his targets and needs to discover areas of interest (exploratory), in which she or he can explore in detail and possibly find some acceptable items (browsing). According to the browsing objectives, we group browsing activities into three categories: Search Browsing, General Purpose Browsing and Serendipitous Browsing. In the context of this thesis, Exploratory Browsing refers to the latter two browsing activities, which goes beyond explicit search with specific objectives. We systematically explore the design space of interfaces to support the Exploratory Browsing experience. Applying the methodology of User-Centered Design, we develop eight prototypes, covering two main usage contexts of browsing with personal collections and in online communities. The main studied media types are photographs and music. The main contribution of this thesis lies in deepening the understanding of how people‟s exploratory behavior has an impact on the interface design. This thesis contributes to the field of interface design for media collections in several aspects. With the goal to inform the interface design to support the Exploratory Browsing experience with media collections, we present a model of Exploratory Browsing, covering the full range of exploratory activities around media collections. We investigate this model in different usage contexts and develop eight prototypes. The substantial implications gathered during the development and evaluation of these prototypes inform the further refinement of our model: We uncover the underlying transitional relations between browsing activities and discover several stimulators to encourage a fluid and effective activity transition. Based on this model, we propose a catalogue of general interface characteristics, and employ this catalogue as criteria to analyze the effectiveness of our prototypes. We also present several general suggestions for designing interfaces for media collections

Immediation (Cultures of Immediacy):Liveness and immediacy in creative and everyday media praxis

La pràctica dels mitjans del segle xxi es caracteritza cada vegada més per l'emergent principi cultural, condició o cultura «de la immediatesa». Aquest procés, resumit en anglès sota el terme immediation (‘immediació’), suggereix el tancament d'un «buit» espaciotemporal entre les agències i els mitjans implicats i té com resultat una interacció complexa entre qüestions socials, de seguretat, científiques i econòmiques. L’interès creixent per a aquesta immediació en confirma l’estatus de nou, i subestimat, paradigma de les arts, les ciències i les humanitats, que requereix una recerca de les cultures de la immediatesa centrada en el futur. No obstant això, en els discursos acadèmic i popular, l'interès rau a documentar o bé els reptes (socials) o bé les solucions (tècniques). Aquest estudi pretén abordar aquest desequilibri i respondre a la necessitat urgent d'una comprensió sistemàtica de les principals formes d'aparició d'aquesta immediació: 1) les produccions actuals amb sistemes de circuit tancat a tot el món, i 2) les pràctiques de transmissió en directe. Es proposa una combinació innovadora de perspectives i mètodes interdisciplinaris per tractar les opcions disponibles i incrementar i enriquir la comprensió del potencial de la immediació per així impulsar-ne la immensa varietat d'aplicacions socials. Així concebuda, la recerca futura de la immediació i la retransmissió en directe promet, en concret, respondre qüestions sobre: 1) les repercussions concretes de les produccions creatives realitzades amb sistemes de circuit tancat sobre l'emergent «domesticació» de la retransmissió en directe, i 2) les mesures reals necessàries que cal prendre dins de la recerca emergent de la retransmissió en directe per avaluar la R+D més innovadora en un futur pròxim