Angeliki Antoniou
Assistant Professor @ UNIWA, Greece
Journal paper
Publication Types:
VR Games in Cultural Heritage: A Systematic Review of the Emerging Fields of Virtual Reality and Culture Games.
Special issue on Advanced Visual Interfaces and Interactions in Cultural Heritage (Editorial).
exhiSTORY: Smart self-organizing exhibits
“Real change comes from within!”Towards a symbiosis of human and digital guides in the museum
Abstract
Extensive research on mobile guides for museums has explored the potential of technology to offer some of the services that have been traditionally provided by human guides, including guiding visitors in the museum space, providing information about the exhibits and using more advanced interpretative approaches such as digital storytelling and gamified techniques. However, the majority of these approaches either ignores or tries to substitute entirely the role of the human guide. In this work we present a user study with ten experienced tour guides, currently working in the museum of modern art of the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation. Based on a three-phase procedure, the study is designed to empower professionals into envisaging their work in symbiosis with current technological developments. Firstly, we attempt to identify existing challenges guides face and to capture their tacit knowledge in addressing emerging problems in guided tours. In the second and third stage, through a reflective and productive discussion, we employ a set of contemporary innovative digital applications as a starting point to elicit their views on their role in an envisaged symbiotic future of human-led hybrid digital experiences.
Keywords
human guides, museum applications, collaborative interfaces, cultural heritage
‘What artists want’: Elicitation of artist requirements to feed the design on a new collaboration platform for creative work
On how technology-powered storytelling can contribute to cultural heritage sustainability across multiple venues - evidence from the CrossCult H2020 project
Abstract
Sustainability in Cultural Heritage (CH) is a complex question that needs to be addressed by a group of experts tackling the different issues. In this light, the present work wishes to provide a multi-level analysis of the sustainability in CH, using as an example a recent European H2020 project (CrossCult) and the lessons learnt from its design, implementation and evaluation. The sustainability of CH has qualitatively changed over the last few years, under the developments in digital technology that seems to affect the very nature of the cultural experience. We discuss sustainability in venues using digital technologies, covering a span of needs of small/unknown and large/popular venues, which try to enhance the visitor experience, attract visitors, form venue networks, etc. Moreover, we explore issues of sustainability of digital content and its re usability through holistic design. Aspects of technology, human networks and data sustainability are also presented, and we conclude with the arguments concerning the sustainability of visitor reflection, the interpretation of social and historical phenomena and the creation of meaning.
Nano-Games for Cultural Venues: the HEAL game
Abstract
Many are the times when visitors leave an exhibition without a clue about its message. In an effort to eliminate this phenomenon, museums, institutes and organisations (MIOs) adopt more attractive, engaging and fun content to provide a high quality and fast learning experience. Games seem to be an interesting suggestion to this approach but they are time consuming. To this end, we introduce nano-games. We define nano-games as short, easy to master, self–contained games of a single level of difficulty, having basic and direct rules that stay unaltered throughout the play and challenge players with clearly defined goals reachable within tens of seconds of gameplay. This approach has been adopted and evaluated in the premises of European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).
“Let Them Talk!” - Exploring Guided Group Interaction in Digital Storytelling Experiences
Abstract
Visits to cultural heritage sites are generally social in nature, yet resources to support these sociable experiences are often individualized, catering to the solitary visitor. Digital technologies offer means to disrupt this predicament, encouraging social engagements in cultural contexts. Here we present the results of a user study that systematically investigates the effects of face-to-face group conversation and physical interactions within a digital cultural storytelling experience at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, with the objective of promoting engagement, learning, and perspective taking. Seeking to articulate the benefits and weaknesses of promoting social interactions in digital storytelling settings, we start with a story-based experience that was designed for individual use, we extend it with novel system-driven interaction prompts, and then we evaluate the two versions with 102 participants. Our findings provide statistically significant evidence that conversation is related to longer and more absorbed participation in the experience and greater learning regardless of personality traits. Where social interaction is purposefully integrated into the story, more conversation is generated, and these interactive prompts do not disrupt the story flow even though participants report awareness of them. Finally, certain tendencies among users affect their talkativeness and enjoyment, providing future designers of digital stories with guidance to better address audience needs.
Technology-Powered Strategies to Rethink the Pedagogy of History and Cultural Heritage through Symmetries and Narratives
Abstract
Keywords
Digital Innovation for Cultural Heritage: Lessons from the European Year of Cultural Heritage
Abstract
Keywords
Compatibility of small team personality in computer based skills
Abstract
Keywords
personality-based balancing; team formation; team compatibility
Bringing a peripheral, traditional venue to the digital era with targeted narratives
Abstract
The current work presents a method of enhancing museum content with narratives targeting history reflection in a personalized manner, delivered by an especially designed mobile app. The mobile app is a part of a technology ecosystem that supports the visitor before, during and after her visit. Within the framework of the European H2020 CrossCult project, a method was designed, implemented and tested to enhance museum content with digital material, enriched narratives and means to actively engage visitors. In particular, the method was implemented and tested for the content of the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis (Greece) and specific content examples are presented here, together with data from visitor evaluation. The results showed that content was significantly and qualitatively enhanced and visitors recognized the potential of the app in triggering visitor curiosity, new forms of engagement, and the ability to reflect on the connections between historical and social phenomena.
A Mobile App to Learn About Cultural and Historical Associations in a Closed Loop with Humanities Experts
Abstract
Keywords
cultural heritage; semantic associations; reflective topics; visualization; storytelling
“Museum Escape”: a game to increase museum visibility
Abstract
A peripheral museum with a nevertheless important collection of ancient items, wished to increase its visibility and digital presence in order to become more known and attract new visitors. Among the different solutions designed and implemented, we also designed a series of games of different kinds (i.e. mini vs complex games) for different purposes, like profiling of potential visitors and advertising the venue in social media. Based on lessons learnt from physical games played at museums of the same type in the same region, we designed and implemented a museum escape game. The game is presented here, to provide implementation details regarding the concept, the game mechanics, the interface design, the technical details, as well as the game art. We conclude with primary user testing and future steps that include plans for creating museum escape games with different technologies, like augmented reality and virtual reality.
Keywords
Museum Games Escape room
The personality of the influencers, the characteristics of qualitative discussions and their analysis for recommendations to cultural institutions
Abstract
Keywords
personalization; user modeling; personality traits; social media influencers; cultural informatics; serious conversations; digital humanities
Predicting Cognitive Profiles from a Mini Quiz: A Facebook Game for Cultural Heritage
Abstract
Games are used in cultural heritage to engage visitors, to function as learning tools, or even advertise a venue. However, games can be also used for quick profiling purposes to overcome the cold start problem of personalized museum applications. A profiling game aiming to extract users’ cognitive profiles was developed and tested with real users. The game follows the principles of pop psychology quizzes. The results of the game showed its potential in correctly predicting the cognitive profiles of users with average success rate around 90%. Being an entertaining and engaging way to involve visitors with diverse needs, games and especially profiling have a clear place in cultural heritage and should be investigated further. Our future work will focus on games that will try to predict different personality aspects, like Big Five dimensions.
Keywords
Games Cultural heritage Profiling Cognitive profiles
exhiSTORY: Smart Exhibits That Tell Their Own Stories
Abstract
Museum exhibitions are designed to tell a story; this story is woven by curators and in its context a particular aspect of each exhibit, fitting to the message that the story is intended to convey, is highlighted. Adding new exhibits to the story requires curators to identify for each exhibit its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. The availability of rich semantic information for exhibits, allows for exploiting the wealth of meanings that museum exhibits express, enabling the automated or semi-automated generation of practically countless stories that can be told. Personalization algorithms can then be employed to choose from these stories the ones most suitable for each individual user, based on the semantics of the stories and information within the user profile. In this work we examine how opportunities arising from technological advances in the fields of IoT and semantics can be used to develop smart, self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. These notions are included in the design of a system named exhiSTORY, which also exploits previously ignored information and identifies previously unseen semantic links. We present the architecture of the system and discuss its application potential.
Keywords
Teacher and student views on educational robotics: The Pan-Hellenic competition case
Abstract
The present work is an observational study recording the teachers’ and students’ attitudes from the Pan-Hellenic Educational Robotics (ER) competition. The study investigates the benefits of students’ involvement with robotics regarding skills, motivation and learning. Additionally, it is researched whether ER should be introduced in the compulsory curricula. A qualitative methodology was used with teachers. Although the sample was relatively small, the results were quite homogeneous showing a very high level of engagement and motivation of teachers and students. A mainly quantitative methodology was used to gather data from students. The results show that there are numerous benefits for students: they seem to increase their collaboration, problem solving and creativity skills; understand STEM concepts in computer science and engineering, and gaining programming knowledge in particular. Also, most of the teachers and many of the students consider that ER should be part of the compulsory curriculum. Under certain conditions, ER could be an essential part of the school program, as it can bring together young people from all over the world to learn and develop important 21st century skills.
Stimulation of Reflection and Discussion in Museum Visits through the use of Social Media
Abstract
In this paper, we examine how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. More specifically, we explore the following aspects: (a) how social media sites can be integrated into the museum user experience (b) how user interactions within the social media, both within the context of the museum experience and outside it, can be exploited to enhance the quality of recommendations made to the users, (c) how trending topics from social media can be used to link museum exhibits with today’s topics of interest and (d) how multi-level related terms extraction from social media data can lead to proposals for reflections to users. The end goal is to provide increased stimuli for users to study exhibits deeper and reflect on them, as well as to trigger discussion between the users, thus maximizing the impact of a museum visit.
Social Network Profiling for Cultural Heritage: combining data from direct and indirect approaches
Abstract
The work argues for quick profiling methods from social networks for use in cultural heritage applications. Explicit (inquiries about user actions, like game playing) and implicit (observations from user actions on social networks) methods are tested, in an attempt to extract user personality profiles and in particular cognitive style profiles, using the MBTI tool. Qualitative and quantitative approaches have been applied to validate the results. So far, it seems that users’ cognitive profiles can be predicted from social media observations and user actions (i.e., playing games) for 3 out of the 4 MBTI dimensions. There seem to be relatively accurate predictions for the dimensions Judging–Perceiving and Extraversion–Introversion. Sensing–Intuition is a little more difficult to predict. Currently, the Thinking–Feeling dimension cannot be predicted from the existing data. Future works will concentrate on improving the prediction rate for the Sensing–Intuition dimensions and discovering ways to predict the Thinking–Sensing dimension from social network information.
Integrating technological means in small museums: the case of The Historical & Folklore Museum Of Kalamata, Greece
Abstract
This research aims to address the needs of small and local museums when it comes to the attraction of tourists, both foreign and domestic, through the use of new technological means. As a case study, the Historical & Folklore Museum of Kalamata that is located in the Messenian Prefecture, Greece has been chosen. This museum attracts more than 2000 visitors per year, and this can be considered a great number, taking into consideration its size and complicated layout. In order to make the right suggestions that would fit exactly the needs of the museum, intensive observation sessions took place. Two different sets of questionnaires were prepared and distributed via social media, and after the visitor tours. Moreover, interviews were carried out with all the employees, and also a complete space syntax analysis was conducted so as to outline the interaction between visitor and museum space. The proposals were based on the identified requirements and the space utilization. Some of the technologies proposed are: the creation of a user friendly website, mobile and tablet auto guides (mobile storytelling application), the creation of a computer “corner” on the ground floor for the needs of disabled people, TV screens showing stories and documentaries based on each thematic area of the museum, and VR and AR applications. Moreover, taking into consideration that there are 22 Folklore Museums in the Messenian Prefecture, 6 indoor and outdoor museums in the city of Kalamata, and since the building itself is considered an important architectural element of the city, the creation of an application that would embed the Historical and Folklore Museum of Kalamata in cultural routes of folklore and architectural interest was suggested. The majority of the proposals is low cost and can be easily adapted by small museums.
Keywords
How do different cognitive styles affect programming? Insights from a Game Based Approach in Greek Schools
Abstract
Is there any relationship between students’ cognitive style and the ability to learn programming through serious games? The aim of this work is to assess the learning effectiveness and motivational appeal of digital games for learning basic programming concepts, involving secondary education students. For this purpose, the Code.org®’s activity named K-8 Intro to Computer Science was used. The study investigated students’ attitudes from gaming activities to reveal the quality of their learning experience. Next, students’ attitudes from games were correlated with their cognitive profile to reveal potential differences. Finally, students’ performance from the digital games was assessed to reveal game-based learning (GBL) effectiveness compared to their cognitive styles. In the study, 77 students of two Greek high schools participated in the context of the European Code Week. The results suggest that these specific games, or similar educational computer games, can be exploited as effective and motivational learning environments within schools, as they provide a high-quality learning experience. Cognitive style was found to be a significant learning characteristic that should be taken into consideration when using digital games to learn programming.
Museum Personalization Based on Gaming and Cognitive Styles: The BLUE project
Abstract
This paper details and discusses experimental results obtained towards personalizing a museum visit through a personal mobile guide, using an approach relying on users’ cognitive style, gaming, social networks, and recommendations. It describes the personalization system, which relies on a Facebook game to infer users’ cognitive style, visiting style and interests, and a recommendation algorithm offering sequences of points of interests to visit. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of an experiment conducted in a museum is given, offering first conclusions and perspectives on the approach.
User Profiling: Towards a Facebook Game that Reveals Cognitive Style
Abstract
This paper presents an innovative approach based on social-network gaming, which will extract players’ cognitive styles for personalization purposes. Cognitive styles describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information and can be exploited to personalize user interaction. Questionnaires are usually employed to identify cognitive styles, a tedious process for most users. Our approach relies on a Facebook game for discovering potential visitors’ cognitive styles with an ultimate goal of enhancing the overall visitors’ experience in the museum. By hosting such a game on the museum’s webpage and on Facebook, the museum aims to attract new visitors, as well as to support the user profiling process.
Keywords
User Profile Cognitive Style Museum Visit Game Feature Personalized Application
Students teach students: Alternative teaching in Greek secondary education
Abstract
The students of a Greek junior high school collaborated to prepare the teaching material of a theoretical Computer Science (CS) course and then shared their understanding with other students. This study investigates two alternative teaching methods (collaborative learning and peer tutoring) and compares the learning results to the traditional learning context. A test was used to measure all participating students’ learning results and a questionnaire was distributed to record participant student attitudes towards the alternative teaching conditions. The questionnaire was designed to evaluate each aspect in terms of perceived knowledge, experience, satisfaction, diversity, oddness and interest. The analysis explores potential differences of students’ learning results between alternative and traditional teaching and also differences in the two aspects in relation to students’ preferences. Results provide evidence that active-learning methods can promote positive attitudinal shifts and improve skills in creativity, teamwork, collaboration and communication. Students perceived higher levels of learning than with traditional teaching. Finally in terms of students’ preferences, the majority wanted to have more courses taught with active-learning methods.
Facebook as teaching tool in Higher Education: a case study.
Abstract
Social networks (SN) seem to play a significant role in young adults’ and university students’ lives. Since students already use them in their daily life, why shouldn’t formal higher education incorporate them? The paper presents qualitative and quantitative data gathered through one academic term, after using Facebook as a teaching tool in Higher Education and investigates ways that SN can be used in teaching and learning. Issues of students’ personalities, learning efficiency, motivation, cultural differences, gender differences and patterns of use are discussed.
Keywords
Social networks, Face book, Higher education, Teaching, Cognitive Style
Methodology for Design of Online Exhibitions
Abstract
The process of designing systems or products largely depends on a number of decisions, like “who do I design for?”, “what should my product do?”, “what are the user requirements?” etc. The developing teams usually base their decisions on experience and/or heuristics and this is particularly the case, in the development of online products and especially online exhibitions. The different solutions are frequently case studies of specific museums or institutions that wish to provide online content to actual or possible visitors. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor, involving museology, technology but also education, poses important design problems. In the following sections, we present a generic methodology for the design of online exhibitions, using top-down processes and transferable findings across museum types that wish to assist the designers during the early decision stages. This paper provides an introduction to the field, emphasising its interdisciplinary nature and reviews related work in the area of online exhibition design. It also presents an overview of the methodology, elaborating on the individual methodology steps; in particular, the processes for determining the visitors’ perception of the museum (degree of museumness); the museum needs that require to be supported; the educational approach to be adopted; the relevance to life-long learning activities; the approach to adaptivity; and user involvement have been reviewed.
An approach for serious game development for cultural heritage: case study for an archaeological site and museum
Abstract
The unique aspects of different places seem to require games of different characteristics. This paper describes the initial steps of an attempt to design games for different places of cultural heritage and consists of three parts. In the first part, the descriptive model to be used as a classification method for games of different characteristics for cultural heritage sites is presented. In the second part, the model is used for the creation of different cultural heritage games. Finally, the third part presents a detailed case study of one of the developed games, showing the implementation and user testing processes as well as its efficiency in terms of education and visit motivation.
Towards a methodological framework for the cognitive-behavioural evaluation of educational e-games
Abstract
The proposed methodological framework reviews and uses knowledge from the field of cognitive psychology in order to evaluate aspects of educational games. In particular, we concentrate on two components of human cognition that play a central role in learning, namely memory and motivation. After having reviewed theories in the field, we created a questionnaire in order to evaluate educational games. The questionnaire incorporates different experimental findings of cognitive psychology. In particular, we have applied Maslow’s motivation theory, behavioural findings on reinforcement, experimental findings about attention and memory. We present the results obtained from the evaluation of three games, Angry Birds, PAC-MAN and Mega Jump. The results confirmed the user ratings of the three games, showing that there seem to be cognitive reasons for the success/failure of different games. Finally, a list of guidelines for developers is included.
Modeling visitors’ profiles: a study to investigate adaptation aspects for museum learning technologies
Abstract
The time restrictions that apply in museum learning increase the need for adaptive and/or adaptable technologies. However, deriving a visitor’s profile is not an easy task, since most common ways (asking direct questions, recording user actions) are either intrusive or time consuming. Observing the visitors’ movement (visiting style) within the museum could provide valuable information regarding adaptivity. In the present study, issues of visiting style were explored and statistical significance was found once different factors were analyzed. Most importantly, there seems to be a connection between the way people move in a museum and the way they prefer to approach and process information cognitively. Environmental factors that can affect the expression of visiting style were also identified.