-
CH has traditionally been an area that is favored by personalization research [
1
].
Visitors come to CH sites to experience and learn new things, usually without a clear idea
of what to expect. CH sites are rich in objects and information; much more than the
visitor can absorb during their limited time of a visit. The above poses the following
challenges: How can we use state-of-the-art technology to provide an engaging
experience for the ‘digital’, ‘mobile’ and ‘traditional’ CH visitors, before, during and after
their visit? How can we exploit visitor information from their previous interactions with
CH venues, their interaction with the current venue, and data extracted from the
ubiquitous Web? (How) can this kind of support be a basis for maintaining a lifelong chain
of personalized CH experiences? From a technological point-of-view, the evolution of
methods for managing and integrating Open Data, as well as for delivering mobile
services, opens new research opportunities about personalization. For example, we can
expect improvements in the presentation of information, in the exploration of content
and in the discovery of events suitable for the specific user/group. New research can
also be foreseen to improve the collaboration among users with similar interests, the
facilitation of human learning and the adaptation of technology to heterogeneous user
contexts and devices.
Personalization could improve the interaction and experience of visitors both in CH
virtual spaces (like web platforms or social media) and visitor interaction with CH
guide systems on-site. As discussed by Falk [
2
], CH visitors differ, and their visit
experience is a combination of physical, personal, socio-cultural and identity-related
aspects. Hence, visitors may benefit from individualized support that takes into account
their particular contextual and personal attributes. Personalization can also be related
to collaboration for preserving, enriching and accessing cultural heritage, by
considering crowdsourcing techniques and based on the active involvement of a broad range of
people. In parallel, several projects have developed – and keep developing – data
collection tools and museum or city guides, as means of demonstrating concepts like
location, context awareness, and smart built environments. Together, these represent two
ends of the “production” process of bringing cultural heritage from the research
environment to its consumers. A key challenge is to address many classes of ambience:
touristic routes, cities, archaeological sites, ancient buildings and museums, as well as
spontaneous sources of artwork such as street art. Finally, at present, various initiatives
are inviting people to engage with their online collections (e.g., Tate Modern,
Powerhouse Museum), or reach out to them via Social Web platforms (e.g., Flickr the
Commons, Brooklyn Museum on Facebook, augmented reality browser of Netherlands
Architecture Institute with Layar). However, personalization strategies for CH have been
largely limited to research projects and experiments (e.g., PEACH1, INTRIGUE2,
Kubadji, PIL3, CHIP4, PrestoPrime5, WantEat6) and mainly focused on ad-hoc,
withinsession or -visit personalization, or visitor behavior analysis7.
2
Workshop summary
Ten papers and four posters/demos were submitted to the workshop, out of them eight
papers (6 long papers, 1 short paper, 1 position paper) were accepted, and two
demonstrations and one poster were accepted.
The contributions spanned over a variety of topics, but still focusing on several
themes, mostly mobile, as the focus is in general on mobile CH. The themes included
mobile learning of CH [
10,13
], Evaluating the impact of technology on visitors’
expe1 http://peach.fbk.eu/home.html
2 http://www.di.unito.it/~seta/intrigue.htm
3 http://cri.haifa.ac.il/project/pil/pil.html
4 http://chip.win.tue.nl/home.html
5 http://www.prestoprime.org/
6 http://www.piemonte.di.unito.it/
7 http://senseable.mit.edu/louvre/
rience [
8
], CH preservation using mobile technology [
4
] and the main theme (not
surprisingly) was using novel mobile technology for exploring the potential of enhancing
visitors experience. This included the use of mobile eye trackers for human-computer
interaction in CH [
7
], tangible human-computer interaction [
9
], Exploring the potential
of chatbots in museums [
11
], identifying and supporting visitors’ personas [
1
] and
extending the boundaries of the museum to the outdoors [
12
].
In general, the submissions focused on traditional aspects of enhancing learning in
CH sites and on exploring the potential of state of the art technology to enhance the
museum experience. Still, there were also contributions that tried to extend the
boundaries of mobile technology in experiencing CH – to preservation and linking the
museum to the outdoors.