The Online Museum and its Contribution to E-humanities
NODEM2013
Chiel van den AkkerVU University Amsterdam Agora
Agora and the hermeneutics of access
Le Musée Imaginaire
hermeneutic devices
framingcenteringenlarging
decreasingisolating focusing
comparing combining
manipulatingzooming in/out
online access to cultural heritage
• requires a hermeneutic approach • contributes to the conceptualization of e-humanities
Agora Team: Lora Aroyo, Guus Schreiber, Lourens van der Meij, Marieke van Erp, Chiel van den Akker, Susan Legêne, Geertje Jacobs, Johan Oomen
digital hermeneutics
• a theory of interpretation• is concerned with the limits of automation and modeling on the one hand, and the
interaction of people and technology on the other
Information: the museum as an inventory of the world
Interpretation: the museum as a place to engage with the world
evaluating online access to cultural heritage
four dimensions• information - interpretation• provision - support• automatic - manual• lay-users - expert-users
evaluating applications
provide information:• manual: metadata, wiki, links • automatic: entities and event extraction, data-mining
support information:• manual: users tag, add comments and links• automatic: search & browse
‘‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web”,Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, (ACM: New York, 2013), 431-440
provide interpretation: • manual: add stories or links between objects• automatic: generation of narrative relations between events and objects (e.g.
proto-narratives in Agora)
support interpretation:• manual: favorites, personal spaces• automatic: supporting creating (narrative) relations between events and objects
(e.g. plot-features in Decipher)
‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web’
evaluating applications
Description vs. Narration-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Information vs. Interpretation
Identification vs. Signification- e.g. database- e.g. metadata- e.g. vocabularies
Re-description vs. Retroactive Alignment - e.g. Musée Imaginaire anticipating online museum
Event-model vs. Narrative-model- e.g. Simple Event Model (SEM) - e.g. proto-narratives Agora
Documentation vs. Exhibition
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Method to Model Historical Events
Method for Historical Narrative Generation
agora event-centered collection browser
The pilot demonstrator can be found at http://agora.cs.vu.nl
Two conceptions of e-humanities
Guus Schreiber on the Agora-project, 30-05-2013.
framework of digital hermeneutics enables us to
• analyze applications providing online access to cultural heritage• reason about online access to cultural heritage• theorize the Web: e.g. limits of modeling, human-machine interaction
take home message
• the online museum requires a hermeneutics of access• cultural heritage institutions need to find a balance between (1) the provision and
support of information and (2) the provision and support of interpretation
Thank you for your attention
http://agora.cs.vu.nl