Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

An Investigation Of Digital Games Features That Appeal To Young Females And Males

This research is part of an attempt to address the well-known problem of female underrepresentation in computer science education and industry. This problem starts between ages 11 to 14 and gets progressively worse in what is often referred to as the “shrinking pipeline effect”. There has been considerable research into the causes of the shrinking pipeline and attempts to halt or reverse it. In spite of this, the causes remain unclear and there is evidence that the problem may be worsening. Digital games are increasingly used in education because of their ability to engage and motivate young learners. Unfortunately, digital games used in the teaching of IT and computer science have been found to appeal less to females than males. This is in spite of the fact that digital games intended for entertainment, as opposed to education, are now very popular with girls. There has been some research into this issue, however more is needed, especially into what game features do and do not appeal to girls at the age that the pipeline starts to shrink. The study reported here aims to identify what characteristics of digital entertainment games appeal to young females and males. The results can be used to guide educators, researchers and game developers and provide criteria for evaluating the suitability of digital educational games for use with specific age groups and genders. We used open card sort with participants aged 11 to 14 to explore their attitude to a range of digital entertainment games. Open card sort allows participants to categorise items in ways that are meaningful to them. There were 32 participants (24 females and 8 males) from four schools in south-east England. They were shown video clips of ten popular games. The participants were then given ten cards, each representing one of the games and asked to sort them into categories based on shared characteristics. This process elicited 131 features (95 from the females and 36 from the males). The data was analysed to identify the features that were a) most significant and b) most appealing to the participants. The findings indicate that there are some gender differences in which game features are perceived as most significant. Some features, such as game action, are significant to the males whereas others, such as game levels, are significant to the females. Interestingly, some features that both genders find significant have different degrees of appeal for example “fun” and “violence”. We are currently using the findings in an experiment with 480 young people. Two digital educational games have been created: one includes features found to appeal to young females and the other includes the opposite or neutral features. The results of this experiment will be used to validate the findings of the initial investigation and form the basis for a framework to facilitate the inclusion of characteristics that appeal to specific groups in educational games and other software

An audience perspective on the second screen phenomenon

Second screen applications are among the latest of the TV industry’s innovations to retain the TV viewer’s attention in a challenging multi-screen environment. These applications can be regarded as an extension of TV content consumed on a TV set towards lightweight portable devices such as tablets. While numerous commercial instances are available internationally and the existing literature on the topic from a technical perspective is extensive, the audience side of this phenomenon has been paid far less attention to. Moreover, in the case of Flanders, the successful commercial implementation of second screen applications remains limited. In this research, we aim to elicit what TV viewers’ expectations and preferences are regarding second screen functionalities. By applying means-end theory and a laddering approach we were able to discern how these preferences subsequently relate to the TV show itself, the consequences for the viewing experience, as well as how second screen applications and usages are expected to fit in the viewer’s everyday life

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

Ethical Engineering and Respect for The ‘Other’

Engineers have a very important role and responsibility in shaping modern society. Diversity amongst engineers is important in fulfilling this responsibility and ensuring that the creativity and needs of the whole population are taken account of. However, only a small percentage of engineers are female and very few of them are disabled. The paper discusses the experiences of women and disabled engineers in the context of othering and considers the way in which the existence of binary divides facilitates marginalisation and exclusion. It also discusses the need to involve end-users in design and development and education to encourage this, with a particular focus on disabled end-users

Taste and the algorithm

Today, a consistent part of our everyday interaction with art and aesthetic artefacts occurs through digital media, and our preferences and choices are systematically tracked and analyzed by algorithms in ways that are far from transparent. Our consumption is constantly documented, and then, we are fed back through tailored information. We are therefore witnessing the emergence of a complex interrelation between our aesthetic choices, their digital elaboration, and also the production of content and the dynamics of creative processes. All are involved in a process of mutual influences, and are partially determined by the invisible guiding hand of algorithms. With regard to this topic, this paper will introduce some key issues concerning the role of algorithms in aesthetic domains, such as taste detection and formation, cultural consumption and production, and showing how aesthetics can contribute to the ongoing debate about the impact of today’s “algorithmic culture”

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given