Beyond Search

This research delves into the realm of digital audiovisual (AV) archives, focusing on user experience and advocating for the integration of exploratory approaches alongside conventional search. Within cultural heritage institutions, conventional keyword-based search interfaces have long served as the primary means to access digital AV archives. However, these interfaces often fall short in addressing the diverse needs of users and serving more exploratory or open-ended queries. Drawing on a series of illustrative case studies, this report showcases innovative practices in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, it looks beyond archives to seek inspiration from practitioners in other disciplines, such as artists, filmmakers, and community initiatives grappling with similar questions. The research report identifies four core themes: Generous + Fluid Interfaces; Situated + Experiential Entry Points; Computational Sensing + Algorithmic Metadata; and Participatory Sense-Making + Storytelling. Each theme offers distinct benefits in terms of user engagement, accessibility, contextualization, and storytelling. Challenges of complexity, accessibility, and compatibility are also discussed. This research endeavors to redefine the potential of the interaction paradigm and offer a rich set of pathways, where digital AV archives transcend conventional search methods to offer immersive, dynamic, user-centric experiences. By integrating exploratory interfaces, cultural heritage institutions can unlock the full potential of their collections, making them more engaging and accessible to a broader audience

Interpretation at the controller's edge: designing graphical user interfaces for the digital publication of the excavations at Gabii (Italy)

This paper discusses the authors’ approach to designing an interface for the Gabii Project’s digital volumes that attempts to fuse elements of traditional synthetic publications and site reports with rich digital datasets. Archaeology, and classical archaeology in particular, has long engaged with questions of the formation and lived experience of towns and cities. Such studies might draw on evidence of local topography, the arrangement of the built environment, and the placement of architectural details, monuments and inscriptions (e.g. Johnson and Millett 2012). Fundamental to the continued development of these studies is the growing body of evidence emerging from new excavations. Digital techniques for recording evidence “on the ground,” notably SFM (structure from motion aka close range photogrammetry) for the creation of detailed 3D models and for scene-level modeling in 3D have advanced rapidly in recent years. These parallel developments have opened the door for approaches to the study of the creation and experience of urban space driven by a combination of scene-level reconstruction models (van Roode et al. 2012, Paliou et al. 2011, Paliou 2013) explicitly combined with detailed SFM or scanning based 3D models representing stratigraphic evidence. It is essential to understand the subtle but crucial impact of the design of the user interface on the interpretation of these models. In this paper we focus on the impact of design choices for the user interface, and make connections between design choices and the broader discourse in archaeological theory surrounding the practice of the creation and consumption of archaeological knowledge. As a case in point we take the prototype interface being developed within the Gabii Project for the publication of the Tincu House. In discussing our own evolving practices in engagement with the archaeological record created at Gabii, we highlight some of the challenges of undertaking theoretically-situated user interface design, and their implications for the publication and study of archaeological materials

Towards immersive generosity: The need for a novel framework to explore large audiovisual archives through embodied experiences in immersive environments

This article proposes an innovative framework to explore large audiovisual archives using Immersive Environments to place users inside a dataset and create an embodied experience. It starts by outlining the need for such a novel interface to meet the needs of archival scholars and the GLAM sector, and discusses issues in the current modes of access, mostly restrained to traditional information retrieval systems based on metadata. The paper presents the concept of ``generous interfaces" as a preliminary approach to address these issues, and argues some of the key reasons why employing Immersive Visual Storytelling might benefit such frameworks. The theory of embodiment is leveraged to justify this claim, showing how a more embodied understanding of a collection can result in a stronger engagement for the public. By placing users as actors in the experience rather than mere spectators, the emergence of narrative is driven by their interactions, with benefits in terms of engagement with the public and understanding of the cultural component. The framework we propose is applied to two existing installations to analyze them in-depth and critique them, highlighting the key directions to pursue for further development.Comment: This is the pre-published version (after peer-review

A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Digital Collections Service for the ROSSIO Infrastructure

Nowadays, especially during these challenging pandemic times, the need to have valuable cultural assets preserved online and available for current and future generations has grown exponentially. Cultural and educational sectors faced unprecedented obstacles as a result of the pandemic’s containment measures since many physical places such as schools, libraries, and museums had little choice but to close temporarily. Digital media has played a vital role in people’s daily interactions and was essential for the affected sectors to continue their work remotely. The pandemic has given an opportunity for cultural heritage organizations to show the benefits of digital collections and resources. By increasing access to a multitude of resources, spotlighting "hidden gems", preserving content, giving students digital materials to learn from, and providing users a different view on cultural heritage, the digital libraries and their digital collections have demonstrated how much they can enable a rich and diverse public domain. This Master’s dissertation was developed in collaboration with the ROSSIO infrastruc- ture, intending to create a service for their platform that allows the creation of digital collections made up of cultural heritage resources gathered by ROSSIO and its partner institutions. The developed service aims to give authenticated users access to an intuitive interface that includes the tools they need to create, edit, and share collections with the public, showcasing the best of Portugal’s cultural heritage in thematic collections that anyone can explore, enjoy and share.Hoje em dia, especialmente durante estes tempos difíceis de pandemia, a necessidade de ter artigos culturais valiosos preservados online e disponíveis, tanto para gerações atuais como futuras, tem aumentado exponencialmente. Devido às medidas de confinamento impostas durante a pandemia, tanto o sector cultural como o educacional teve de enfrentar desafios sem precedentes, uma vez que muitos locais físicos como escolas, bibliotecas e museus não tiveram outra opção que não fosse fechar temporariamente. Os meios digitais têm sido sem dúvida importantes para as interacções diárias entre as pessoas e foram essenciais para que os sectores afectados pudessem continuar o seu trabalho remotamente. A pandemia deu uma oportunidade para as organizações de património cultural mostrarem os benefícios de coleções e recursos digitais. Ao aumentar o acesso a uma infinidade de recursos, destacando "gemas escondidas", preservando o conteúdo, dando aos alunos materiais digitais para estudar e fornecendo aos utilizadores uma visão diferente sobre o património cultural, as bibliotecas digitais e suas coleções digitais demonstraram o quanto podem contribuir para um domínio público rico e diversificado. Esta dissertação de Mestrado foi desenvolvida em colaboração com a infraestrutura ROSSIO, com o objetivo de desenvolver um serviço na sua plataforma que permita a criação de coleções digitais, compostas por recursos patrimoniais culturais recolhidos pela ROSSIO e suas instituições parceiras. O serviço destina-se a ser usado por utilizadores autenticados, oferecendo-lhes um serviço com interface intuitiva que contém as ferramentas necessárias para criar, editar e partilhar coleções com o público, trazendo ao de cima o melhor que o património cultural português tem para oferecer, em coleções temáticas que qualquer um pode explorar, desfrutar e compartilhar com outras pessoas

Digital for Heritage and Museums: Design-Driven Changes and Challenges

In the recent decade, cultural institutions have increasingly embraced digital technologies as key resources for accomplishing their mission and innovating their cultural activities. In the present work, we attempt to disentangle through a design-driven and multidisciplinary approach the challenges brought by digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. A diversified research team has thus been involved to include scholars with different backgrounds around the common phenomenon of investigation of Digital (Cultural) Heritage, under the Design Think Thank project. The Introduction is followed by a Methodological section, which outlines the approach to select and review case studies from the exploratory literature for producing a state-of-the-art report and delineates the methodology to map the main user behaviours and needs in the digital experience of CH throughout the value chain. The research team identified three relevant and major themes for the investigation which are addressed in the Literature Review Section through the lenses of design research and practices; simultaneously, design knowledge emerges to have an agency in the transformation. The following section tries to triangulate the results from the literature review, and the mapping of users and stakeholders throughout the cultural institutions value chain, to track and highlight their role and interest in changing heritage panorama. The contribution of the present work wishes to consolidate the results gathered in the first phases of the TT, providing the design community of academics and practitioners with a theoretical contribution about digital changes and challenges of heritage and museums based on a design perspective

Random display and recommendations – exploring the web platform of the artist Ivar Arosenius and other digital collections of art

This article concerns efforts to increase the accessibility of art through digital collections on the web. Features for display and comparison used by the platform of the Swedish artist Ivar Arosenius and by web projects such as Europeana and Google Art Culture will be discussed. These features include random display, recommendations and machine learning of visual similarities. Key questions are: What are the general implications of these features for the art history canon? What are the relations between the digital collections on the web and the physical museum? There is a risk that recommendations based on machine learning will come to influence the way we perceive similarity. If the canon is to be challenged, a closer cooperation between the digital collections and the physical exhibitions will be needed

Speculative metaphors: a design-led approach to the visualisation of library collections

We are at a critical moment when a library patron’s first, and sometimes only, point of access to library collections is an interface. The relationship we have with physical collections can not be discounted but it also can not be re-created within the screen space. There is a need to understand not only how interfaces operate and how they can be ‘usable’ but also how they shape our relationship with library collections. There is a need to understand how dominant orders of classification are reinforced through their visual representation within collection interfaces and how this shapes the way in which we come to know things. Johanna Drucker notes: “Digital technology depends on visual presentation for much of its effectiveness…but critical understanding of visual knowledge production remains oddly underdeveloped”. We have an opportunity to rethink how we encounter collections through the physical act of browsing and through an interface; an opportunity that is not being addressed. What does each of these experiences afford? How can we reimagine the library collection? In this dissertation I will explore these opportunities through a practice-based approach to the development of a set of speculative prototypes. I will seek to re-imagine the collection through an exploration of the role of metaphor in the visual language of library interfaces and our experience of library collections