=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2412/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=Towards Technology-Mediated CH Experiences: Some Open Challenges
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-2412
|authors=Yannick Naudet,Louis Deladiennee
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/smap/NaudetD19
}}
==Towards Technology-Mediated CH Experiences: Some Open Challenges==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper2.pdf
Towards technology-mediated CH experiences:
some open challenges?
Yannick Naudet and Louis Deladiennée
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)
yannick.naudet@list.lu, louis.deladiennee@list.lu
http://www.list.lu
1 Introduction
The mediation chosen by a Cultural Heritage (CH) venue to transmit its message
to the visitors has always been of primary importance. Indeed, this is through
the lens of this mediation that visitors interpret, understand, reflect or learn
about CH, having emotions, and building finally their own personal experience.
Modern technologies seem to have an infinite potential to enhance this expe-
rience, however it comes with its own challenges, the main ones being related
to their integration within the mediation, mixing then technological with social
issues.
At the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, the ADAPT (Know-
ledge based and Context-aware Adaptive Systems) research group focuses on the
adaptation of computer systems in cognitive environments and Cyber-Physical
and Social Systems. Our experience in user modeling and personalisation (es-
pecially personalised recommender systems) is applied to the cultural Heritage
domain since 2015, in particular with participations to the FP7 Experimedia and
H2020 CrossCult European projects (see, e.g. [7][8][3]). After having worked with
humanity scientists, including museologists, built and experimented two smart
museum guides embedding different user profiling approaches and recommen-
dation algorithms, we are aware of the specificity and complexity of building
efficient IT-supported mediation for Cultural Heritage venues.
In this communication, we raise the main points related to this complex-
ity, taking the perspective of Personalisation and more specifically personalised
recommendations and guidance.
2 Issues in Humanities and Technology: open challenges
Personalisation of Cultural Heritage venues to their visitors remains a tricky
problem because it concerns mainly two entities, having potentially contradictory
objectives: the visitor and the venue. If everyone would agree that it relates to
offering a personal tailor-made visit to satisfy as much as possible visitors, it
?
Cultural Informatics 2019, June 9, 2019, Larnaca, Cyprus. Copyright held by the
author(s)
2 Yannick Naudet and Louis Deladiennée
has to be understood that user experience is not only about the user, but rather
about the user in context. We take here the perspective of recommender systems,
often used as a basis for visit Personalisation to guide users through collections or
venues. In CH venues, the classical approach of recommending items transforms
into a more complex mediation where items and associated narratives should be
presented in a coherent way.
Problem 1: Personalisation focusing only on user satisfaction can
miss the goal of the museum or CH venue. How to satisfy both? The
quality of the mediation in CH venues drives clearly the visitor’s quality of
experience. However it depends equally on both the visitors’ satisfaction and
the way it drives them across the venue.
Problem 2: Recommender systems are usually evaluated regarding their effi-
ciency and how well their propositions match user interests. However, the the-
oretically best algorithms might sometimes not satisfy the users, because inter-
ests can be volatile and are context-dependent, because diversity and surprise
are sometimes expected, maybe also because the interface is not well designed...
This is true from a generic perspective, but also in particular in the CH context.
The question is thus: should we not measure the quality of user expe-
rience only, instead of trying to have the best predictors of the user
behavior?
3 Discussion
Research over the last fifty years has shown that the visitor is not always pleased
with their visit in museums: they do not necessarily understand the exhibitions
meaning, see the collections that would have been interesting, may suffer from a
lack of information about the artworks etc. Furthermore, the visitor populations
are aging and museums find it more and more difficult to attract young people.
Along with this alarming situation, we witness the development of a screen
culture, where visitors (especially younger generations) expect cultural practices
to revolve around or be connected to mobile devices.
Historically the museum has always sought personalisation, which is one of
the ways to tackle the issues above. The rise of digital devices, and now Mixed
Reality, can make it real and provide actual personal mediation and visits to each
visitor. From the perspective of Cultural Heritage professionals, it is recognised
that modern personalisation approaches allow perceiving the link with the visitor
not as a customer relationship, ”but rather as a dialogue between an institution
and a public cultural facility user [5]. Personalisation approaches do not share
the classical logic of audience segmentation (one offer per audience type: young,
adults, general public, etc.) but try instead to take into account the interests
of the individuals, their identity or their diversity [2]. It is in line with the role
of the museums, which is to promote the expression and sense of control of the
visitors rather than to be a voice of authority, like it was in the past [5].
Towards technology-mediated CH experiences: some open challenges 3
3.1 Problem 1
The trending goal of personalisation is the satisfaction of the visitor, with the
strong hypothesis that this will happen by satisfying his interests and prefer-
ences. However from a museology point of view, the question is rather how to
build a great experience for the visitor, both bringing him satisfaction and taking
into account the museum stakes and the philosophy of todays museum. On site,
personalisation is still often reduced to simple predefined or stereotypical sce-
narios proposed to visitors, and is rarely implemented out of research projects.
Apart from technical and ethical barriers for its implementation, this could also
be explained by the fact a museum is a place of discovery and surprise, which is
opposed to the prevailing perception of satisfying the visitors expectations [1].
State of the art recommendation and personalisation techniques work well
with e-commerce platforms, as the objective is to identify a set of items that
fit the users expectation. E.g, “I expect my next pair of sneakers to be of a
specific colour, size, and to be within a specific price range”. Following a similar
characteristics -based approach, a smart system could identify that a visitor
likes impressionist paintings and depiction of plants and thus recommends all
the impressionist paintings on display in the venue that depict plants. This
sounds like a good first step as the visitor will be taken straight to the things he
effectively likes/expects.
These traditional personalisation approaches do not consider the venue’s own
effort to create a coherent narrative or to convey a specific message while de-
signing the exhibit, as it might completely take the visitor away from the initial
intention of the venue. As such, while they can bring satisfaction to the visi-
tor, those approaches can thus be harmful to the overall experience, as they do
not take into account the museum stakes. On the other hand, the human guide
creates a visit experience that fulfills both the museum stakes and the visitor
expectations. This is achieved by telling stories related to the artefacts the visi-
tors can see, adapting the visit to the visitors and their questions, while keeping
the discussion within the boundaries set by the venue.
In order to create a better and coherent user experience, a good CH per-
sonalisation system cannot simply recommend objects to see but should instead
create a true mediation offering coherent stories built from sequences of object-
narrative couples, which are organised in such a way the museum stake is taken
into account and adapted to the visitor’s profile and expectations. Building on
this, we propose to name such a system a smart mediation system.
3.2 Problem 2
Experiments realized so far highlight the benefits of Personalisation, illustrating
that: visitors like to receive propositions of exhibits to see; they tend to spend
more time in the museum [4]; the Personalisation tends to drive them to more
diverse points of interest and makes them discover more off the beaten track
items [9]; and in case the visit path is matched to appropriate content visitors
tend to demonstrate an increased interest for exhibits [6] (even if they do not
4 Yannick Naudet and Louis Deladiennée
necessarily follow them [9]). More recently personalised guiding was used to trig-
ger reflection by visitors [3]. However today, even if our bibliography is certainly
not exhaustive, very few evaluations have been made on the true effectiveness of
personalisation, and its relationship with the user experience and satisfaction.
The problem that the application of personalisation to CH sites reveals is
that a recommender system is always coupled with an interface allowing human-
machine interactions in a specific context. The user experience is then logically
dependent not only on the quality of recommendations, but also on the quality
of the associated HMI, regarding the user’s expectations and the context. It is
especially true when using a smart guide in a museum, but also with historical
recommendation providers like Amazon or Netflix: when the interface does not
fit your needs or preferences, the recommendation algorithm can be the best of
the world, your user experience is bad.
Another important aspect to consider, as we highlighted before, is the level
of context awareness of the smart mediation system. For example, experiments
at the National Gallery of London have indicated that the positioning feature
of the guide we tested was perceived as of very high value. It is thus clear that
classical evaluation methods used for recommender systems fail to really assess
the user experience, and will thus never work in the CH context. Instead, we
believe that a holistic approach must be followed where the system is evaluated
as a whole and not just as a sum of parts.
To support such an approach, we propose that a smart mediation system
should be evaluated on the three following dimensions:
– quality of the system UI/UX.
– level of context awareness of the system.
– the quality of the personalised recommendations.
Failing to deliver the appropriate quality on one of these three dimensions will
inevitably result in a poor user experience quality regardless of the quality of
the other dimensions.
Regarding the quality of the personalised recommendations, we suggest to
evaluate, at least, the following things:
– The relevance of the selected physical artifacts selected by the system.
– The relevance of the narrative element associated to these artifacts.
– The relevance of the selected overarching narrative connecting the different
elements.
– The perceived consistency of the generated tour.
And it is important to stress out that we define here the concept of relevance
as the alignment with the visitor’s expectations and preferences without contra-
dicting the venue’s own objective and constraints.
4 Conclusion
We have highlighted here two important challenges for the building of meaningful
technology-mediated CH experiences, related to personalised recommendations.
Towards technology-mediated CH experiences: some open challenges 5
These are only a few among a lot which will need to be tackled as well. Especially,
a very important one that has not been discussed is certainly the user profiling
problem, which is a common issue for all CPSS environments where people
are observed and tracked by technology. This for sure raises ethical and data
protection issues and requires a complete understanding and acceptance by the
user. The mediation should then comprise a dialog with the user, but is the
traditional user disclaimer really enough?
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