Po-Chou Chan

Digital content development of taiwanese folklore artifacts

Folklore artifacts hold strong cultural meaning for a people. Taiwan Folklore Museum (TFM) is Taiwans first official folklore museum which aims at providing the people of Taiwan with a place where they can reflect about the past and experience how the pioneers lived. There are a great variety of artifacts, which were classified into ten categories according to their life styles and functions, collected in the museum and it attracts a great number of oversea tourists each year. The museum is also the most popular place for students from kindergartens and primary schools and for general citizens to learn what their tradition is and how their ancestors lived. In this paper, we report our current progress in digitization and content development of the artifacts. Totally 1412 collected artifacts have been digitized so far. The originality and function of each collected artifact was described in three different languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and English, in which detailed information of the artifacts were examined and studied by several Taiwanese folklore specialists. To facilitate inter-museum communication, metadata based on Dublin core and its extensions were provided as well. A website (http://www.folkpark.org.tw) dedicated to demonstrate the digital contents of the artifacts and to support digital surrogates for the folklore researchers was also constructed. It allows people from all over the world to surrogate the information about the collected artifacts so that studies regarding Taiwanese folklore artifacts can be done without territory constraint. Future works will focus on the construction of 3D models for the artifacts on demonstrating their global views. E-learning contents for Taiwanese folklore courses will also be authored for providing general publics and children an interactive way of learning on the Internet.

A digital library for preservation of folklore crafts, skills, and rituals and its role in folklore education

The importance of folklore can be manifested by Alan Jabbours speech in the 100th anniversary of American Folklore Society-“folklore reflects on the ancestral missions that have shapes us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future”. Currently, most of the digital preservation projects focus mainly on digitizing artifacts, in which the crafts of how to make them and skills of how to use them are neglected. Besides, folklore and religious rituals embed spiritual meanings. Step-by-step procedure of a ritual is not trivial for a people or a religion. The motivation of this project are manifested in three aspects: (1) folklore crafts, skills, and rituals play the same important roles in preserving our ancestors wisdom in addition to folklore artifacts; (2) media richness facilitates learning of courses with high uncertainty and equivocality; and (3) e-learning with interactive videos gains more learner satisfaction than non-interactive and traditional classroom learning according to recent studies. In this paper, video clips are used for recording step-by-step crafts, skills, and rituals. The metadata used here are modified from our previous work regarding digital preservation of Taiwanese folklore artifacts by emphasizing the “Relation” element in linking individual steps together. A website served as an extension to digital library of folklore artifacts has been constructed to be used as an e-learning platform for folklore education in obligatory and higher education. The system not only constructs a digital library for folklore preservation but provides instructional interactive materials with media richness to support a more effective method for folklore education than non-interactive or traditional classroom learning.

Quantitative assessment of Pap smear cells by PC-based cytopathologic image analysis system and support vector machine

Cytologic screening has been widely used for controlling the prevalence of cervical cancer. Errors from sampling, screening and interpretation, still concealed some unpleasant results. This study aims at designing a cellular image analysis system based on feasible and available software and hardware for a routine cytologic laboratory. Totally 1814 cellular images from the liquid-based cervical smears with Papanicolaou stain in 100x, 200x, and 400x magnification were captured by a digital camera. Cell images were reviewed by pathologic experts with peer agreement and only 503 images were selected for further study. The images were divided into 4 diagnostic categories. A PC-based cellular image analysis system (PCCIA) was developed for computing morphometric parameters. Then support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify signature patterns. The results show that the selected 13 morphometric parameters can be used to correctly differentiate the dysplastic cells from the normal cells (p<0.001). Additionally, SVM classifier has been demonstrated to be able to achieve a high accuracy for cellular classification. In conclusion, the proposed system provides a feasible and effective tool for the evaluation of gynecologic cytologic specimens.

Development and evaluation of an E-health system to care for patients with bladder pain syndrome/interstitial cystitis

Bladder pain syndrome/interstitial cystitis (BPS/IC) is a chronic disease that highly degrades the quality of life for patients. In the present study, Internet intervention was used to care for bladder pain syndrome/interstitial cystitis patients to alleviate their pain and bothering symptoms.

Digital Content Development of Folklore Artifacts and Activities for Folklore Education

Digital preservation of museum artifacts has been widely promoted by governments around the world in recent years. However, the artifacts collected by national or local museums are not very exhaustive. Recently, the collected folklore artifacts accompanied with crafts in how to make them and skills and rituals in how to use them have been digitized in Taiwanese Folklore Museum. In order to supplement insufficiency of artifacts collected by the museum, folklore hobbyists are regularly invited to demonstrate their private collections. At the mean time, the task force of digital preservation team digitizes the artifacts for extending its contents. Another way to aggressively increase the number of digitized contents is to sign cooperation agreements with members of the folklore associations by giving services to digitize their personal collections. After having extended the digital contents, we expect that the website of Taiwanese Folklore Museum will become even more popular for teachers and students, especially in kindergartens and elementary schools, to extract and prepare useful materials for folklore education. In conclusion, the paper presents the digital contents which include folklore artifacts and folklore activities developed in Taiwan Folklore Museum. Additionally, other digital contents developed in other museums or personal collectors can be retrieved by using XML technique. The scheme supplements the insufficiency of national or local museums and provides inter-museum architecture for supporting more complete contents for folklore education.

Digitization and value-add application of bamboo weaving artifacts

Chinese people used bamboo to make bamboo weaving utensils for hunting, farming, fishing, and even transportation before. However, bamboo weaving utensils are no longer needed in daily life nowadays. The craft of bamboo weaving utensils is gradually losing peoples attention that few craftsmen can still work on it. In this study, a folklore hobbyist, a craftsman, a horticulturist, and an interior decorator were invited to digitize bamboo weaving artifacts and crafts, as well as to develop value-add applications of the artifacts. Among the 1200 collected bamboo weaving artifacts, 150 artifacts accompanied with 20 weaving patterns have been digitized and stored with image and video formats, respectively. The value-add refers to the adoption of the bamboo weaving artifacts as flower vases for orchid planting and flower arranging with artworks designed by the horticulturist, which were then adopted by the interior decorator to decorate restaurants to elevate the environmental quality. The digitized contents were also used as part of the e-learning materials in a community college. The questionnaire surveys show that the digitized material is useful for learning bamboo weaving craft and flower arrangement skills for students. It was found that combination of bamboo weaving artifact and flower arrangement highly promote quality of service of restaurants.

Digital folklore contents on education of childhood folklore and corporate identification system design

Digital artifacts preserved in digital repositories of museums are mostly static images. However, the artifacts may be lost, degraded, or damaged no matter how well the preservation and exhibition environments have been controlled, which makes the artifacts difficult to recover. Furthermore, if not properly inherited, information regarding making, function, and usage of an artifact might be lost after several generations. Hence, in addition to digitizing folklore artifacts, we have also digitized the crafts in how to make them and skills and rituals in how to use them to be recorded in videos. With abundant digitized collections, the repository website is becoming more and more popular for teachers and students, especially in kindergartens and elementary schools, to extract and create useful teaching materials for folklore education. Recently, folklore contents have been encouraged to be applied in the education of English as second language (ESL), social work, and mathematics. In this study, we applied the digital folklore contents for developing story books to be used in childhood folklore education and for instructing students to design corporate identification system (CIS) as a class exercise. Technology acceptance model (TAM) was used to evaluate perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEU), and behavior intention (BI) in using these digital contents to accomplish their tasks. The results show that the scores of PU, PEU, and BI are all greater than 3 (5-point Likert scale) indicating usefulness and ease of use of the contents and website, as well as a positive attitude toward continuous use of the contents in various educational areas.

Perimeter intercepted length and color t-value as features for nature-image retrieval

This paper proposes a context-based image retrieval system based on color, area, and perimeter intercepted lengths of segmented objects in an image. It characterizes the shape of an object by its area and the intercepted lengths obtained by intercepting the object perimeter by eight lines with different orientations passing through the object center, and the object color by its mean and standard deviation (STD). Recently, we reported that the color-shape based method (CSBM) is better than conventional color histogram (CCH) and fuzzy color histogram (FCH) in retrieving computer-generated images. However, its performance is only fair in the retrieval of natural images. For CSBM, object color is treated as uniform by reducing the number of colors in an image to only 27 colors. In this paper, we improve the performance by representing the color features of an object with its mean and STD. During the image retrieval stage, t-value is calculated based on the color features of two images, one in the query and the other in the database. The result shows that the proposed method achieves better performance in retrieving natural images compared to CCH, FCH, and CSBM. In the future, the proposed technique will be applied for the retrieval of digitized museum artifacts.