Chiara Ponchia

User needs for enhanced engagement with cultural heritage collections

This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts.

Evaluating a digital humanities research environment: the CULTURA approach

Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment.

Engaging the User: Elaboration and Execution of Trials with a Database of Illuminated Images

Currently one of the most important challenges for curators and providers of digital cultural heritage is to increase and enhance the engagement of users and communities with digital humanities collections. The reflections and efforts made to open up the IPSA database to new user categories is an ongoing process able to offer useful suggestions and contributions to this field of investigation. The considerations taken into account to elaborate the IPSA database trials engaging non-domain users are presented and the design of the trials is described.

Methods of personalising a collection of images using linking annotations

This paper reports the results of an ongoing project that deals with the development of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research purposes, but also as a tool that can be used to disclose cultural heritage contents to the general public. The digital archive is currently used as a case study to provide innovative tools for researchers and scholars active in the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. In particular, we investigate the use of linking annotations to express the relations between images. We represent annotations with a hypergraph structure and we exploit this information to personalize the way images are presented to the final users.

The Evaluation Approach of IPSA@CULTURA

This paper reports on the original approach envisaged for the evaluation of a digital archive accessible through a Web application, in its transition from an isolated archive to an archive fully immersed in a new adaptive environment.

Enhancing End User Access to Cultural Heritage Systems: Tailored Narratives and Human-Centered Computing

This paper reports on the results of a study that aims to support end users of a multimedia system that manages a digital cultural heritage collection. The system is provided with automatic tools that simulate the behavior of the research method adopted by professional users when they interact with the multimedia application. The experimental results have been obtained using a multimedia application that manages the digital representation of historical botanical manuscripts.

Guided Tours Across a Collection of Historical Digital Images

We propose the use of short lectures, called narratives, embedded in a digital archive as a personalization method to support and guide users within a collection of historical material. The effectiveness of the approach has been evaluated with two groups of users. An analysis of the results has been conducted enabling the presentation of preliminary results.

Issues to Be Addressed for Transforming a Digital Library Application for Experts into One for Final Users

This paper reports on the effort we made in adapting and opening a specialist tool, focused on illumination and designed purposely for scholars and researchers, in order to be suitable also for the general public. We describe the ongoing process we are conducting: the adaptation and the improvement of the IPSA digital archive using the results we collected after several sessions of user interviews, following suggestions of both scholars and simple users. We discuss user studies dynamics, that we consider as a loop-interaction, and the consequences that they entail upon the system design.

A Case Study for the Development of Methods to Improve User Engagement with Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

The aim of this paper is to report the results of an ongoing project that deals with the exploitation of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research and educational purposes. A prototype system, called IPSA (Imaginum Patavinae Scientiae Archivum), has been developed and is currently used as a case study to provide innovative tools for researchers and scholars active in the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. After describing the initial user requirements that motivated the development of IPSA, we focus on the research questions that can be addressed by new system functions and on its extension to additional user groups, including students, experts in other domains, and the general public.

Evaluating the Deployment of a Collection of Images in the CULTURA Environment

The paper reports on the effort of reconsidering the characteristics of the IPSA online collection of illuminated images created for specialised users, involving the redesigning of the interaction functions to make the online collection of interest for new and diverse user categories. The effort is part of the design and development of a new adaptive and dynamic environment that aims at increasing user engagement with cultural heritage collections and which is taking place in the context of the European CULTURA project.