Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed

Conversational Exploratory Search via Interactive Storytelling

Conversational interfaces are likely to become more efficient, intuitive and engaging way for human-computer interaction than today's text or touch-based interfaces. Current research efforts concerning conversational interfaces focus primarily on question answering functionality, thereby neglecting support for search activities beyond targeted information lookup. Users engage in exploratory search when they are unfamiliar with the domain of their goal, unsure about the ways to achieve their goals, or unsure about their goals in the first place. Exploratory search is often supported by approaches from information visualization. However, such approaches cannot be directly translated to the setting of conversational search. In this paper we investigate the affordances of interactive storytelling as a tool to enable exploratory search within the framework of a conversational interface. Interactive storytelling provides a way to navigate a document collection in the pace and order a user prefers. In our vision, interactive storytelling is to be coupled with a dialogue-based system that provides verbal explanations and responsive design. We discuss challenges and sketch the research agenda required to put this vision into life.Comment: Accepted at ICTIR'17 Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI 2017

Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time

Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators, highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design in collaboration with one funding organization---the Pew Biomedical Scholars program---but the methods are generalizable to visualizations of scholarly influence. We applied the design method to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which includes more than 120 million publications. We validate our abstractions throughout the process through collaboration with the Pew Biomedical Scholars program officers and summative evaluations with their scholars

Design Fiction Diegetic Prototyping: A Research Framework for Visualizing Service Innovations

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose: This paper presents a design fiction diegetic prototyping methodology and research framework for investigating service innovations that reflect future uses of new and emerging technologies. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on speculative fiction, we propose a methodology that positions service innovations within a six-stage research development framework. We begin by reviewing and critiquing designerly approaches that have traditionally been associated with service innovations and futures literature. In presenting our framework, we provide an example of its application to the Internet of Things (IoT), illustrating the central tenets proposed and key issues identified. Findings: The research framework advances a methodology for visualizing future experiential service innovations, considering how realism may be integrated into a designerly approach. Research limitations/implications: Design fiction diegetic prototyping enables researchers to express a range of ‘what if’ or ‘what can it be’ research questions within service innovation contexts. However, the process encompasses degrees of subjectivity and relies on knowledge, judgment and projection. Practical implications: The paper presents an approach to devising future service scenarios incorporating new and emergent technologies in service contexts. The proposed framework may be used as part of a range of research designs, including qualitative, quantitative and mixed method investigations. Originality: Operationalizing an approach that generates and visualizes service futures from an experiential perspective contributes to the advancement of techniques that enables the exploration of new possibilities for service innovation research

Data Modelling in Architecture: Digital Architectural Representations

Digital Architectural Representations represent the most fruitful field of research of the last decade. Digital technologies and the use of internet in architectural representation shows how 3D visualization combined with storytelling can help to spread scientific knowledge over the web. These new technologies also affect the way of thinking 3D models, how to design them and how to build their related knowledge with the purpose of future reuse of information and data. The paper is focused on the analysis of current methodologies and workflows for data modelling in Architecture to better understand the potential of using standards in the 3D modelling sector with a focus on cultural and architectural heritage

From the Book Page to the Big Screen: An Exploration of Literature-to-Film Adaptions and Their Use in the Classroom

Many classic titles of children’s literature have been adapted into feature film presentations. Although often regarded as a mere form of entertainment, movies can and should be incorporated into the elementary classroom as supplementary material to be paired with their corresponding works of literature. The four examples provided include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. Each of these four works originated as a book that was later recreated into a film format with varying degrees of accuracy to the original story. Through a close examination of the author, theme, classroom application, and film connection, a greater appreciation is gained for the integration of film in the language arts classroom