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

Profiling Attitudes for Personalized Information Provision

PAROS is a generic system under design whose goal is to offer personalization, recommendation, and other adaptation services to information providing systems. In its heart lies a rich user model able to capture several diverse aspects of user behavior, interests, preferences, and other attitudes. The user model is instantiated with profiles of users, which are obtained by analyzing and appropriately interpreting potentially arbitrary pieces of user-relevant information coming from diverse sources. These profiles are maintained by the system, updated incrementally as additional data on users becomes available, and used by a variety of information systems to adapt the functionality to the users’ characteristics

Personalizing Interactive Digital Storytelling in Archaeological Museums: the CHESS Project

The aim of this paper is to present the state-of-the art research project in digital storytelling for museums titled CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling). The goal of CHESS is to research, implement and evaluate an innovative conceptual and technological framework that will enable both the experiencing of personalised interactive stories for visitors of cultural sites and the authoring of narrative structures by the cultural content experts. We believe that the new modality of extended museum visit that CHESS proposes will make cultural heritage sites more attractive and effectively conveyed to audiences (especially to “digital natives”) and will provide new means to leverage and exploit the existing digital libraries that have been developed since several years in the cultural heritage world

The Museum as Digital Storyteller: Collaborative Participatory Creation of Interactive Digital Experiences

Digital storytelling is one resource museums have in hand for enriching their offer to audiences and society at large. But how is the museum to author digital storytelling experiences that cater to various needs while maintaining scientific integrity? In this paper, we report on a series of experiences involving the creation of several interactive rich-media museum stories. These digital stories were authored by experts who collaborated in numerous intensive, hands-on participatory design workshops held at high-profile cultural sites: the Acropolis Museum in Greece, the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. We present the story-authoring methodology and discuss the lessons learned regarding collaborative authoring of museum stories. We conclude with the potential impact this authoring process may have at the institutional level

A Life of Their Own: Museum Visitor Personas Penetrating the Design Lifecycle of a Mobile Experience

Sets of 'personas' representing archetypical visitors of two very different museums, the Acropolis Museum in Greece and Cité de l'Espace in France, were defined and described as part of a multitude of user-centered design methods used to better understand the needs of visitors and develop for them a personalized mobile storytelling experience. Here we reflect on the role and impact that these personas have had, not only on the design process but also as a mechanism to support the story authors and to bootstrap personalization of experiences. We conclude with a discussion of research challenges inherent in the integration of personas directly into systems intended to support the personalization of experiences

Designing Performative, Gamified Cultural Experiences for Groups

Envisioning cultural institutions as “social places”, where the visitors can “create, share, and connect to each other around the cultural heritage content” (as defined by Nina Simon), we explore how to design cultural group experiences that combine personal moments of reflection to social encounter. In previous work we proposed a storytelling game where visitors conceive and narrate stories about the artworks, orchestrating group interactions according to the game phases. Playtesting with physical materials revealed promising potential, cultivating theatrical narrations, lively discussions and fruitful social interactions. Here we present a mobile-based, group experience design for gamified cultural visits with performative elements, leveraging the trajectories HCI framework. We highlight the key role, interface and space transitions encountered in the experience and we elaborate on the adopted design choices, while we reflect on main challenges and future directions

Towards Personalized Group Play in Gallery Environments

This paper describes the personalization challenges that are faced when designing a gameful experience for groups of visitors in a cultural site. We present our approach to account for different player paces between members of the same group, by introducing short, in game activities. We discuss the relationships between player types, personality traits, and game elements to visitor attitudes and styles, summarizing results from our prior work and related literature. Finally we describe our first steps towards implementing intragroup personalization functionalities, designing a series of activity types that are targeted to different player types and visitor styles

Searching and Browsing Digital Library Catalogues: A Combined Log Analysis for The European Library

In this paper we present the results of a project named ASIt (\emph{Atlante Sintattico d'Italia}, Syntactic Atlas of Italy), which provides linguists with a crucial test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. In particular, ASIt aims to capture cross-linguistic variants of grammatical structures within a sample of about 200 Italian Dialects. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geo-linguistic parameters. Secondly, the information access system has been designed in order to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order) rather than a specific word. Thirdly, since ASIt has been specifically geared to the needs of linguists, user-friendly graphical interfaces have therefore been created to give easy access to language resources and to make the building of the language resources easier and distributed

Big Five and Cultural Experiences: Impact from Design to Evaluation

In this paper, we present the results of a user study focusing on whether the visitors' cultural preferences and expectations relate to different personality traits as defined by the Big Five personality model. We describe the user study procedure and report the correlations discovered between some of the Big Five factors and the participant assessments, over particular aspects of a shared digital storytelling experience. We suggest that the results may notably inform not only the design but also the evaluation of cultural experiences, laying the foundations for a promising line of work