Curate and storyspace: an ontology and web-based environment for describing curatorial narratives

Existing metadata schemes and content management systems used by museums focus on describing the heritage objects that the museum holds in its collection. These are used to manage and describe individual heritage objects according to properties such as artist, date and preservation requirements. Curatorial narratives, such as physical or online exhibitions tell a story that spans across heritage objects and have a meaning that does not necessarily reside in the individual heritage objects themselves. Here we present curate, an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. This draws on structuralist accounts that distinguish the narrative from the story and plot, and also a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions and the curatorial processes that contributed to them. Storyspace, our web based interface and API to the ontology, is being used by curatorial staff in two museums to model curatorial narratives and the processes through which they are constructed

Story Space : spatial semantic comparison of narrative

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (page 38).It is well known that humans are far more adept than computers at identifying similarities between stories. Humans are able to communicate values and event patterns back and forth through these narratives. Parents communicate through the telling of "The Tortoise and the Hare" that hard work and determination can often trump talent, and that hubris can lead to one's downfall. It would be quite useful to develop a computational technique to apply this type of analysis to a story to relate to more generic cases. In this paper, I demonstrate the beginnings of a technique called Spatial Semantic Analysis of Narrative that identifies a "trajectory" for each story that enables comparison between them. These trajectories take into account the temporal progression of a story, which aims to provide a dimension of information beyond traditional "bag of words" comparisons. I present promising results when this technique is applied to a corpus of "how-to" articles scraped from the Internet as well as a corpus of Islamic texts annotated using Mark Finlayson's Story Workbench application. I also present next steps for improving the algorithm and allowing it to operate on standard untagged datasets.by Michael L. Puncel.M. Eng

Experiences Migrating Microcosm Learning Materials

Microcosm was an open hypertext system that evolved in the early 1990s, before the advent of the Web. Apart from its success as a research platform it was widely used for presenting interactive educational materials. Since the commercial version of the product ceased to be supported it became necessary for users to migrate their educational materials, generally to the Web. However, the SToMP consortium chose to implement their own environment copying parts of the functionality of Microcosm in order to achieve their educational objectives. This paper examines the motivations of this work in order to understand whether there were features that were available in Microcosm that were not replicated in current Web based solutions

La Web Victoriana y el Curso Victoriano Wiki: comparación de la eficacia educativa de tareas idénticas en la Web 1.0 y la Web 2.0

El autor del presente texto pronunció un discurso en Porto, Portugal, para el WikiSym 2008, realizado en septiembre del mismo año, titulado ‘’Cuando una Wiki no es una Wiki: veinte años de la Web Victoriana’’, en el que argumentó que los 45.000 documentos que conforman la www.victorianweb.org funcionan como una Wiki moderada y que, por lo tanto, la Web 1.0 puede funcionar para propósitos educativos tan bien como la Web 2.0, además, afirmó que ha sido así durante muchos años.Con esto en mente, Landow asumió el reto de emplear una Wiki real y para hacerlo enseñó el mismo curso, con las mismas tareas estudiantiles semanales, durante los siguientes dos años (2009, 2010); en 2009 utilizó el sitio Web antes mencionado, mientras que en 2010 empleó una Wiki cerrada, protegida con contraseña. En el presente artículo se realiza una breve descripción de la composición, historia y autoría de la Web Victoriana y de los componentes claves que han existido en múltiples ambientes hipermedia desde su creación en 1988, para el proyecto de Intermedia de la Universidad de Brown. Además, se presenta la tarea realizada, explicando sus metas, para finalmente establecer los resultados de esta experiencia haciendo un listado de las ventajas y desventajas del uso de la Wiki para los docentes, estudiantes y el sitioWeb correspondiente

Orchestrate: A System Demonstrating Easy Substitution of Browsing Semantics Engines

The Orchestrate project explored the separation of a browsing semantics engine from the other user-visible components of a hypertext or other linking system. This allows more flexibility in the semantics of the links themselves, enabling more variety with regards to conditionals behind links, and ultimately will greatly help the implementation of new and different linking semantics. The project builds upon much previous work in hypertext and linking semantics. The Orchestrate platform was designed and implemented to model several new and novel linking semantics and behaviors. It was built with the goal of enabling further work and development to take place from within or without the program, and will very probably be used in future studies and enable future academic papers for submission to scholarly venues. Once initial review, improvements and testing of the initial build of the Orchestrate platform was completed, additional features and tests using various browsing semantics methods were undertaken

Storyspace: a Story-Driven Approach for Creating Musuem Narratives

In a curated exhibition of a museum or art gallery, a selection of heritage objects and associated information is presented to a visitor for the purpose of telling a story about them. The same underlying story can be presented in a number of different ways. This paper describes techniques for creating multiple alternative narrative structures from a single underlying story, by selecting different organising principles for the events and plot structures of the story. These authorial decisions can produce different dramatic effects. Storyspace is a web interface to an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. We describe how the narrative component of the Storyspace software can produce multiple narratives from the underlying stories and plots of curated exhibitions. Based on the curator’s choice, the narrative module suggests a coherent ordering for the events of a story and its associated heritage objects. Narratives constructed through Storyspace can be tailored to suit different audiences and can be presented in different forms, such as physical exhibitions, museum tours, leaflets and catalogues, or as online experiences

When Not All Papers are Paper: A Case Study in Digital Archivy

Hypertext poet Deena Larsen is worried about the potential loss of her digital poetry, but she has a plan to save it. In a 2004 article, “The Uncertain Fate of Scholarly Artifacts in a Digital Age,” Larsen revealed her plans for preserving her hypertext work Marble Springs. “Ms. Larsen started collecting old Macintosh computers so people will always be able to read Marble Springsin its original format. She has 100 computers in her two-bedroom apartment.” Although Larsen’s two-bedroom mausoleum of circa 1990s technology is one strategy for saving born-digital hypertext works, it is probably not the best. An armada of aging hardware will not protect digital objects from hard drive crashes, hardware failure, inoperable software, operating system malfunctions, unreadability, or natural disasters. Preservation of electronic records requires a commitment to active preservation practices including migration, refreshing, and integrity and authenticity checks of stored digital records. Maintaining the status quo, regardless of the magnitude of hardware and software stockpiles, is not a viable preservation strategy. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) notes the inadequacy of just holding onto digital materials and advocates more active digital preservation strategies in their latest publication, Born- Again Bits: “The stakes are even higher when we consider that keeping works of electronic literature alive in their original form does not serve all present needs, let alone those of the future.

Educational hypermedia resources facilitator

Se analiza el impacto que la enseñanza en web ha tenido en la educación superior y las distintas herramientas que permiten la creación de documentos hipertexto como recursos de enseñanzaWithin the university the introduction of computers is creating a new criterion of differentiation between those who as a matter of course become integrated in the technocratic trend deriving from the daily use of these machines and those who become isolated by not using them. This difference increases when computer science and communications merge to introduce virtual educational areas, where the conjunction of teacher and pupil in the space-time dimension is no longer an essential requirement, andwhere the written text is replaced (or rather complemented) by the digital text. In this article a historical defence is made of the presence of this new standard in the creation of digital educational resources such as the hyperdocument, as well as the barriers and technological problems deriving from its use. Furthermore, HyCo, an authoring tool, is introduced which facilitates the composition of hypertexts, which arestored as semantic learning objects, looking for that through of a simple and extremely intuitive interface and interaction model, any teacher with a minimum knowledge of computer science has the possibility of transforming his or her experience and knowledge into useful and quality hypermedia educational resources

Descent into Chaos: Ways of Reading St. Thecla

I find reading a hypertext akin to finding shapes in a cloud. One minute, the cloud clearly looks like two people in a row boat, then the wind blows and the cloud becomes a dinosaur. In a hypertext, just when an incipient shape presents itself in the text, then one clicks the mouse, and that meaning can completely change. In fact, unlike a cloudy sky, in which the context of the clouds, the sky, remains the same, the whole context of the text can change. Trying to analyze a particular hypertext, then, could be likened to trying to convince a friend that the cloud I see really does look just like a dinosaur. Even if she does see the same cloud, which I can never be sure of, she might not see the dinosaur; she may see an Indy car, instead. With all the opportuity for confusion, I understand how a little guidance or insight might be helpful for a reader drifting around in my text, St. Thecla: A Woman in Translations