Mobile applications – The Interpretation Game

Personalisation redux

January 4, 2021 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

My external examiner at my viva was Daniella Petrelli, an academic in the field of HCI (Human Computer Interfaces) who I had referenced a few time in my thesis particularly after discovering she was behind a platform to help curators to write the sort of content I had created for Chawton. I found that work too late, after completing the Chawton experiment. Among the “modest” changes that Daniella recommended in my viva is a considerable amount of further reading, including this paper, which to my shame I had not discovered in my literature search, and which would have saved me doing a whole lot of reading and improved my PhD! (Which is of course what a viva is for 🙂)

The paper (ARDISSONO, L., KUFIK, T. & PETRELLI, D.. 2012. Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead. User Modeling and UserAdapted Interaction 73 – 99.) Is an incredible useful survey and summary of personalisation techniques employed in cultural heritage up to 2012. I am pretty sure it came out of somebody else’s own PhD literature search. It is very biased of course towards computer enabled personalisation (because it comes out of that discipline) but it looks at 37 separate projects and charts a history of personalisation since the early 90’s. ” when some of the adaptive hypermedia systems looked at museum content (AlFresco (Stock et al., 1993), ILEX (Oberlander et al., 1998)) and tourism (AVANTI (Fink et al., 1998)) as possible application domains” (p7) These early experiments included “a human-machine dialogue on Italian art and combined natural language processing with a hypermedia system connected to a videodisc”, and “automatically generated hypertext pages with text and images taken from material harvested from existing catalogues and transcriptions of conversations with the curator”.

The authors chart the development of web–based interfaces that don’t rely on kiosks or laserdiscs, though WAP (Wireless Application Protocol – which delivered a very basic web service to “dumb” mobile phones) to multi-platform technologies that worked on computers and Personal Digital Assistants. They note two parallel streams of research – “Hypermedia and Virtual Reality threads” adapting the content to the user, and presenting overlays on maps etc. The appearance of PDA’s so personalisation becoming more content aware, with plug in GPS units, but the difficulty of tracking people indoors led to experiments in motion sensing, Petrelli herself was involved in Hyperaudio, wherein “standing for a long time in front of an exhibit indicated interest while leaving before the audio presentation was over was considered as displaying the opposite attitude” (I might need to dig that 2005 paper out, and 1999 paper on HIPS).

There is also an excellent section on the methodologies used for representing information, modelling the user, and matching users and content. When it talks about information for example, it suggests different Hypermedia methodologies, including:

“A simple list of objects representing the exhibition as “visit paths” (Kubadji (Bohnert et al., 2008));
Text descriptions and “bag of words” representations of the exhibits on display9 (Kubadji and PIL);
“Bag of concepts” representations generated by natural language processing techniques to support a concept-based item classification (CHAT (de Gemmis et al., 2008)); and
Collection-specific ontologies for the multi-classification of artworks, such as location and culture, and multi-faceted search (Delphi toolkit (Schmitz and Black, 2008))”

The paper also articulates the challenges to heritage institutions wanting to personalise their user experience, including a plethora of technologies and not standards yet reaching critical mass. Tracking users outside (before and after) their heritage experience is another challenge – membership organisations like the National Trust have a distinct advantage in this regard, but have spend most of the decade since this paper was written getting there. Of course heritage visits are made as part fo a group, more than by individuals, and personalisation by definition is about individuals – yet in most of the projects in this survey, the social aspect was not considered. The paper also acknowledges that most of these projects have involved screen based hypermedia while augmented reality and and physical interaction technologies have developed alongside.

Evaluation is a challenge too. In a section on evaluation which I only wish I had read before my project, the paper foreshadows the all the difficulties I encountered. But also says “a good personalization should go unnoticed by the user who becomes aware of it only when something goes wrong.” (p 25) It is reassuring too that the paper concludes “the real issue is to support realistic scenarios – real visitors and users, as individuals and groups in daily interactions with cultural heritage. It is time to collaborate more closely with cultural heritage researchers and institutions” (p27) which is (kind of) what I did. I had better quote that in my corrections and make it look as though I was inspired by this paper all along 🙂.

Mobile devices in heritage, why not?

September 30, 2018 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

Ages ago I surveyed people about mobile gaming and heritage. The results were not encouraging for my thesis, because interest in mobile gaming seemed low. Just under 200 people completed the survey, and most of them had at least heard of Minecraft (just 5% had not). But when asked about the most popular location-based game at the time, Ingress, the vast majority, 178 people (81.3%) hadn’t even heard of it.

Since then of course Pokemon Go happened. It’s by the same company as Ingress, and build on their limited success with that game by adding a globally recognised brand. So I wanted to see how much it had increased awareness of location based mobile gaming. I opened a second, shorter internet survey. Initially the results looked good. Awareness of Pokemon Go pretty much matched Minecraft. Just 2.5% of respondents were unaware of it. compared with 2.4% who were unaware of Minecraft.

There is some evidence that people are more aware of location based games in general. Only 64.6% of respondents were unaware of Ingress. In the both surveys I also asked about Zombies Run!, a mobile game which while not strictly location based, does involve taking your mobile device outside to track you as you move. In the earlier survey, 63.6% were unaware of it. By the second survey that proportion had reduced to 45.1%. So, though I had discounted further developing a location based game for cultural interpretation after the first survey, growing interest in location based games may make it a more fruitful avenue to explore in the future.

There is a another barrier to consider however. I have mentioned a perceived reluctance to use apps and the internet on mobile devices in previous posts. But I haven’t found much research on why people don’t seem to like using their phones. This second survey offered an ideal opportunity to actually ask that question.

Well, not just that question. I asked a few more. I started off asking which ways of learning about the site they used. I offered a list:

Just looking at stuff
Reading labels panels or gallery fact-sheets
Reading a guidebook
Talking to a guide, docent or interpreter
Talking with the people who came with you
Joining a tour (led by a guide)
Using an audio-guide or multimedia guide
Using an app on a mobile device
Using the internet on a mobile device

People could choose as many as they wanted. What I particularly wanted to know was which ones they did not pick. So in order of preference, it turns out that the most popular interpretive media are

Reading labels, panels or gallery fact-sheets (16% did NOT tick this)
Just looking at stuff (28%)
Talking with the people who came with you (47%)
Joining a tour (led by a guide) (61%)
Using an audio-guide or multimedia guide (62%) and Reading a guidebook (62%)
Talking to a guide, docent or interpreter (64%)
Using the internet on a mobile device (74%)
Using an app on a mobile device (78%)

It’s worth pointing out that some people use mobile devices for apps but not the internet, and vice versa, but still, only 11% use mobile devices for either one or both. That said, 11% is about twice as many as as we have observed in the National Trust, and about twice as many as has been identified in other data. This might be a systemic bias of collecting data in an online survey. I would like to try and ask a similar question on site. Partly because it’s thrown up some interesting results – I imagined that talking to guides, docent or interpreters might be more popular than taking a guided tour, but actually it turns out that taking a tour it more popular than conversation.

The sample for these questions is only 85, so its not particularly robust. But actually this question was a preamble to supplementary questions asking for qualitative rather that quantitative data. Respondents who said they did not use mobile devices were asked simply “What are the reasons why you prefer not to use an app on your mobile device?” and/or “What are the reasons why you prefer not to use the internet on your mobile device when visiting heritage sites?” each with a free text field. Some replies were just one simple short statement. Others gave multiple reasons. Analyzing all the responses, I first defined twelve categories of statement. Each reply scored one in each category to which it referred. In order the twelve categories are:

Presence – for example “Want to be present in the place.” or “Detracts from looking at the exhibits and the moment” (33)
Data/signal/battery limits – for example “Not always got data/coverage.” (32)
One-use apps – for example “I have limited memory on my phone, and don’t want to install apps that I’ll only use temporarily” (10)
Pre/post-reading – for example “I do normally read and research about the subject beforehand at home (computer, books…), so I don´t need to use such apps.” (6)
Tech lack – for example “I don’t have that sort of phone” (6)
Tech break – for example “I regard tech’ as a work tool so don’t engage with it for fun.” (5)
Analogue experience preference – for example “I prefer my interaction with heritage to be unmediated by tech!” (5)
Competence – for example “Do not know how to” (4)
Social preference – for example “I generally visit with my family so want to explore with them and feel that using an app could be an experience that potentially minimises our interaction.” (4)
Conversation preference – for example “I like to talk to real people and enjoy their enthusiasm” (4)
Focus – for example “Too many other distractions with an open internet.” (1)
Hassle – the simple statement “Too much hassle” (1)

So, regular readers will guess I might be expecting the presence category to be the overwhelming reason why people didn’t use mobile on site. As so it proves to be, but only just. I wasn’t expecting data/signal/battery limits to be an almost as big (and given the limited sample size – possibly bigger) objection to using mobile devices. The reluctance to download apps with limited or one-time use has been documented elsewhere, but given that 74% of my sample said they didn’t use the internet on their mobile devices when on site, a web-based on-site solution still doesn’t look like an attractive investment proposition. Web-based pre- and post- reading however seems like a reasonably strong impulse among an minority of visitors. As long as web content is made responsive, and easy to look at on small screen, it may help migrate users to on-site use as data/signal/battery issues are resolved (though I note that the latest generation of phones at the end of 2018 seem to have short battery life than their predecessors).

Are we all cyborgs? Digital media and social networking

March 2, 2018 Matthew Tyler-Jones1 Comment

Continuing with my reading of Staiff’s Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation, I come to his chapter on digital media and social networking. He wastes little time on those who “persist wit the idea that podcast audio-tours and GIS-activated commentries care just extentions of ‘old’ ways on interpreting material culture, but simply using digital techniques,” rather (writing in 2014, remember) Staiff is a champion of “Web 2.0 as all it emblematically stands for”:

Web 2.0 and the generation of of users who inhabit this experience […] are not interested in pre-packaged information that is passively received; rather they want open access to databases so that they as visitors can share the content and be co-authors of the interpretation. The digital-savvy wants to be a creator of meaning as well as a consumer of meaning.

I shared a similar optimism when he was writing, but I am less convinced now. Yes, visitors to cultural heritage do share their experiences on social media, but they are not yet demanding access to databases to share that content and their own interpretation. Or at least not many are, despite the prevalence of smartphones, and our seeming inability to let go of them. The majority of visitors that I (and others) observe do not use their devices on site. It’s worth mentioning that back in 2014, he also saw 3G wireless as more of a gamechanging technology than it turned out to be. Even 4G speeds haven’t enabled mass use of the internet on-site in heritage. Recently a colleague spoke hopefully that fifth generation wireless technology might finally get people using mobile devices more on site. We shall see, but I remain unconvinced.

But digital interpretation does not need to take place on-site. Staiff writes enthusiastically of a student’s response to a digital heritage interpretation assignment he regularly hands out. He describes how “Gabriel” chose his/her ancestral home town, Sienna, and started off creating an inventory of all the information s/he could find on the web about it, including Wikipedia and Youtube, official civic sites and personal blogs by both tourists and residents. Then, says Staiff “Gabriel” built an interactive website that allowed visitors to mash up the content he had sourced, and add to it. “Gabriel” built the code, but didn’t control the content “what emerged was a ceaseless interaction between fellow classmates, his/her family, and friends. It is impossible to describe in words the way this digital creation worked out or what it included because what stood out changed, at any point in time, as did the conversations and contributions.”

Staiff lists some of the things that caught his eye, representative of the dynamic and user generated nature of the site, and that list includes, for example:

A grandmother’s reflection about growing up in the contrade

a recipe for panforte

a poem about a beloved aunt who lived in Sienna

a friend’s university essay on Ducio’s Maesta; and,

a link to a video game Assassin’s Creed

… among many other things. Apparently the site “is a special place/space in Gabriel’s family with contributions both the Sienese side of the family and and Sydney side of the family.”

Which all sounds wonderful, in the new media mode of Manovich, something more than the sum of its parts, created by its users. Here, heritage is not simply an object or place that you look at, but (Staiff cites Laurajane Smith’s Uses of Heritage) something you do, a verb rather than a noun. Garbriel’s website is a utopian interpretation of the city.

Utopian in its truest sense, because it doesn’t exist.

Gabriel is in fact, a “hypothetical student” and the website Staiff describes “is the work of a number of students over several years […] merged together to form a composite example”, which is a pity because it sounds fun. Now, any one of Staiff’s students may have produced a site as dynamic, as comprehensive and as well supported by its users, but somehow I think not. I have written before about the critical mass of users that heritage specific social media sites need to be dynamic. I have also written about the luxury of time available to digital creators/curators, that very many people simply don’t have. The students that constituted “Gabriel” were given an assignment, given time to create their work. The majority of social media users are necessarily more passive. These are concerns that I think Staiff shares:

“In the digital world, who is participating, who gets to speak, are all speaking positions valid in relation to cultural places, objects and practices, who is listening/viewing, who is responding and why, what are the power relations involved here, do marginal voices continue to be sidelined, what about offensive and politically unpalatable commentary?”

But it can not be denied that there is truth at the heart of Staiff’s argument. Much more is being researched, written, drawn, filmed and in other ways created about the heritage than can possibly be curated by the traditional gatekeepers – museums, trust’s, agencies and their staff. Staiff acknowledges “the anxiety about who controls the authoritative knowledge associated with heritage places” but counters that “What is needed is a complete rethink and conceptualization of the role of heritage places in the digital age and to see the technological devices used by visitors, not as ‘things’ separate from the carrier, but as ‘organic’ and constitutive parts of the embodied spatial, social and aesthetic experience.”

Smart conservation

October 20, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

Yesterday, to Oxford, to meet with the brilliant Niki Trigoni, who among many other things founded Navenio, a company that provides infrastucture free mobile location analytics.

It occurred to me, during our conversation, that there is a case for MLA in heritage sites that may be stronger than the story delivery that I’ve seen concentrating on. Organisations that look after heritage sites are normally incorporated with a mission something along the lines of “preserving (the site) for public benefit.” The “benefit” in that phrase is most commonly understood as access. Sometimes however, allowing access to the site so risks the preservation of the site that it has to be closed, for example at Lascaux.

So heritage sites must balance their duty of public benefit against their duty of preservation. A balance that its complicated by the fact that the visiting public support the preservation, with admission fees at the very least,or being so inspired by the preserved site that they go to contribute by subscription, donation, volunteered time etc. There is thus, generally, a conservation imperative to increase visits, to better finance preservation.

To help get that balance right, heritage sites monitor the impacts of visitor upon the place, and one tool they use is mapping the way visitor behaviours change, over time as visiting habits change, or in responses to changes within the site itself. The National Trust, for example, uses a methodology called Conservation for Access, or C4A.

But C4A is relatively resource heavy – it requires the (generously given) support of a small army of volunteers, and the analysis of the data takes time. So it is done only occasionally, every few years, and provides only a snapshot of visitor behaviors from the period when the data collection took place. It is thus a relatively blunt tool. It is used to help the organisation budget for conservation, including staffing levels, and sometimes to inform changes to the visitor route, to protect fragile environments. But the effect of those changes might not be measured until the next time resources are dedicated to a C4A data collection and analysis.

Could we use MLA to crowdsource similar data? Could we persuade our visitors to share their movements around the place every day, building up a more accurate, always up-to-date and year round (the C4A toolkit was originally developed when most National Trust buildings only opend between March and October) picture of how the place is used? Would we find out that visitor behaviours change as, for example, ambient light levels change with the seasons?

A first iteration could offer us more accurate data for conservation monitoring and forward planning, but if it also demonstrated dynamic changes to visitor behaviors triggered by changes in the environment, then it might help make the case for real time analytics. Imagine being able to change the offer subtly to reduce the conservation pressure on one part of the site. Imagine the site being able to do that automatically, for example playing an audio presentation in an adjacent room, not triggered by visitors entering that room, but to attract visitors into that room, when the heritage assets next door are under too much visitor pressure.

Is it possible? I’m sure it is. Is it cost effective yet? That I don’t know, but a suitable experiment, over a few years across and number of sites might help us find out.

Designing another survey

August 24, 2017August 24, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

I’ve been mulling it for weeks, but I’ve decided that I need to get some more data. So I’m preparing another survey, to be promulgated via the internet. It’s going to be asking cultural heritage visitors about their use of mobile devices around heritage sites. I got a pretty good sample size last time, so I hope I’ll get a similar response this time.

Though I feel that my social networks might be more likely to fill this one in, I’m curious to see how it compares to the one that was overtly about gaming. I don’t want to wonder whether there are more gamers than museum visitors in the world… 🙂

Actually though, I am going to include a couple of questions about mobile gaming. I want to see if certain attitudes have changed in the three years(!) since that survey. I expect to see more people (even museum visitors) aware of location based gaming after the Pokemon Go phenomenon. So I’ll have two questions based upon (but updated) a couple from that survey.

The main purpose of the survey though is to identify barriers to mobile device use around heritage sites. There’s a lot of conjecture it seems, in the literature but very little data. I think that’s partly because most of the audience research is based on questions asking “what would encourage you to use mobile devices” rather than “why wouldn’t you use them”.

A new, easy to read guide

July 27, 2017July 29, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

In a pleasant surprise today, a new book dropped through my letterbox. Interpretation in a Digital Age, by Paul Palmer and Neil Rathbone, is a concise, easy to read introduction and guide for Heritage professionals starting digital projects in their places. It promises "objective and practical guidance", and lives up to that promise.

It's an easy read, and neatly sums up the history of handheld guides in heritage sites as it walks the reader through concepts like: Bring Your Own Device; native, web and hybrid apps; media creation; webcams; and locational and proximity triggering. Palmer and Rathbone conclude a useful chapter on accessibility and inclusiveness with with a section on Mindfulness, wherein they argue we "need to develop more skill in the psychology of storytelling using digital media rather than blame the media". A sentiment with which, given the subject of my study, I can only agree.

There are chapters on using technology outdoors, understanding wifi, compliance and intellectual property, and project management. An optimistic chapter near the end explores some of the possibilities that "the digital toolbox" might enable, and the book ends with a jargon busting glossary that reveals the intended audience museum and cultural heritage professionals who not digital experts but are thinking of commissioning something and don't want to be fast-talked by potential suppliers.

It's not an academic work, it doesn't have references to other texts. Rather it is based on the practical experience to the two authors. So it's very good, if not technically detailed, on the how, and also offers practical advice on project management that will last longer than some of the technologies that are now current, but it lacks the why. It's not their intention (I think) to sell the concept of digital technology to heritage sites, rather it's a response to heritage sites looking to see what what is possible. Indeed in the introduction the authors refer to the "Gartner hype cycle", the tendency to over-estimate the potential of technology, and peter to be disappointed by its limitations. Given that more and more evidence I'm seeing suggests only a maximum of five percent of heritage visitors use apps or other mobile technologies, and that I heard recently that mention of an app is currently likely to kill an HLF bid stone dead, I'm still questioning whether it's possible to build a business case for the creation of digital content, let alone the purchase of hardware etc.

Pokémon Big Heritage event, Chester

July 21, 2017August 6, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

It had to happen, and Big Heritage stepped up to the plate and made it happen. Tomorrow and Sunday, there will be a Pokémon Big Heritage event around the streets of Chester.

Part of Chester’s Heritage Festival, but officially in partnership with Niantic, the creators of Pokémon Go, the event was brought to my attention via the Pokemon Go app. Chester Castle will be open to the public for the first time, and there will be re-enactors a-plenty there, but there will also be Pokestops and Pokegyms. There are also two paper-based trails: a Pokémon Pastport that you can get stamped at four (currently secret, to be revealed on the day) locations; and, a ten question quiz trail that you’ll need the help of the app to solve.

Big Heritage may have been canny in approaching Niantic for an event this weekend, and it’s the first anniversary of the launch of Pokémon Go. Would Niantic be so willing to support similar events in the future at different times of the year?

My family are cast to the three corners of the country that aren’t near Chester this weekend, so I won’t be able to go. But I’ll try and drop Big Heritage a line, and see if they’ll share their evaluation. 2400 Facebook users have said that they are planning to attend. Are they all from Chester? Or are any of the travelling? Of course Niantic will know exactly where everyone comes from 😉

Digital Interpretation – changing the rules

July 13, 2017July 13, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

Just in time for my thesis’ debate on affective interpretation, the excellent Steve Poole’s write up of Ghosts in the Garden, Ghosts in the Garden: locative gameplay and
historical interpretation from below is published in International Journal of Heritage Studies. It starts of very well, by describing three ways in which digital technology has been used: “as an augmented guidebook and information resource, as a tool for enhanced simulation, and (less frequently) as a tool for changing the rules by which we construct and define historical knowledge [my emphasis] at heritage sites.” I’m feeling a little ground down by the limited scope of that my work has ended up with , which I think (I hope) is normal at this stage of the process, so it was refreshing to feel Steve’s sense of ambition.

So how does Steve propose that we use digital technology to change the rules? Well, he says it better than me, but its worth pointing out that its the ludic nature of digital story-telling that enables this rule-change: “Yet what most sets historical analysis apart from other forms of enquiry in the arts and social sciences is the fragmentary nature of the evidence around which historians build interpretative frameworks, the material irretrievability of past events (and people), and the inevitability of supposition, argument and disagreement. Construction, in other words, is as necessary a concept to historians as reconstruction. Accepting that history is a practice in which knowledge is crafted from often incomplete evidence challenges the authoritative basis on which explanation is conventionally built. Arguably, moreover, presenting the process of making history as
a craft rather than the knitting together of a series of factual certainties offers the heritage industry an opportunity to engage audiences in dialogue with the past.”

So games enable players to contruct their own understanding of history? Well I’m not entirely sure that’s the perception of the players. Ghosts in the Garden was running just as I was starting out on my own “choose you own PhD adventure”, and with the kind help of Steve’s collaborators on the project, Splash and Ripple, I surveyed a small but decent sample of visitors. I recall being particularly disappointed by responses to the question about whether their choices had changed the story. I’m forcing myself not to look at the data from my Chawton project yet, but I member taking my lunch while two participants discussed the survey at the next table. I’d asked a similar question, and these two discussed their answer. They concluded that (despite the narrative atoms they experienced, and the order they experienced them in being a lot less structured than the stories of Ghosts in the Garden), because the facts were historic there were immutable. They hadn’t changed the story with their choices, because they couldn’t change history.

Does it matter that (most) users don’t know that they are constructing the story through their choices? I don’t know. When I started out on this research, I thought it was important. Now I’m less sure.

Moving on, there’s a new reference I’ve not caught before, but which I know I must track down and read (Costikyan, G. 2006. “I Have No Words and I Must Design: Towards a Critical Vocabulary for Games.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, edited by K. Salen and E. Zimmerman, 192–211. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) if only to add it to the post popular topic on this blog (yawn): Ludology vs. Narratology.

There’s a more interesting one (Gottlieb, O. 2016. “Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary as Liminal Learning Space.” Gamevironments 5: 237–257) which I must also check out.

Steve goes into great details on the construction of Ghosts in the Garden, most of which I already knew, but its good to have it in a form I can reference. I did like this revelation though, making a comparison I hadn’t though of before: “The Ghosts in the Garden approach to heritage interpretation adapts some elements of first-person computer games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honour; most notably in its attempt to subjectively immerse visitors in a past reality in which they are called upon to make decisions that impact upon outcomes.”

The most important bit though, was this:

“The process by which we might identify and evaluate alternative narratives ‘from below’, in other words, in a space from which they have been traditionally excluded, was more important to the project’s purpose than using technological gadgetry to retell familiar tales about elite social space. Inevitably, it was difficult to make such a methodology clear to public participants at the start. It was reasoned however, that the intrusion of a clearly ‘inauthentic’ Time Radio as a device through which ghostly voices from the past directly addressed a modern audience, was a sufficient indication that the experience was built as much around an imaginative world as a historically
accurate one. While it was important to the project that its narratives were based on researched archival evidence, the stories did not carry the consequential gravitas of those used in World War battle games and there was little danger of any factual inaccuracies compromising public understanding of its objectives”

He goes on the mention the Splash and Ripple project at Bodiam that i had a little to do with, and which I though was let down by the lack of exactly the sort of “History from Below” that Steve provides. (Though I don’t want to be too critical of that project – I heard recently that a team from Historic Royal Palaces had checked it out before their Lost Palace project.) And he finished with one final quote which I KNOW will make it into my thesis – because I’ve just pasted it in:

affective interpretation that privileges emotion, personal response and feeling as essential components of heritage can be a source of conflict amongst audiences for whom dispassionate factual rigour is essential to the understanding of history.

Its a great read, and a very helpful paper.

Apps not worth it, hard numbers

May 18, 2017 Matthew Tyler-Jones2 Comments

I’ve got to point people’s attention to this excellent blog post from Colleen Dilenschneider. Colleen works for a US market research firm called Impacts. They have a couple of hundred visitor facing clients, including for example, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and they combine their data from all the research to produce the National Awareness, Attitude & Usage Study, which is informed by on-site interviews, randomly selected telephone interviews and an on-line component. So though its commercial market research, and not academically peer reviewed, the approach seems to be pretty robust. I’ve been looking for some hard numbers about the benefit (or otherwise) of mobile device interpretation, not just for my research (and my talk next week), but also for work. It was a work colleague who pointed me to post, but I’ll happy include some of the data in next week’s presentation.

I’ll let you read it for yourself. Some if it is not so surprising, when it offers some numbers to support what has already been reported anecdotally. For example, that people are more likely to use the place’s website, social media and review sites to plan a visit, than an institution’s app, or that people are more likely to use social media than an app when they are on-site (old readers will be familiar with my usual rant on this subject, now available in print 🙂 ).

But there’s one chart I want to draw out, which makes two key points (both important enough for Dilenschneider to use bold text):

People who use mobile applications onsite do not report significantly higher satisfaction rates than those who do not.

and

People who use social media or mobile web while they visit a cultural organization have a more satisfying overall experience than people who don’t use social media or mobile web during their visit.

She illustrates both points with the same graph.

Image (c) Impacts, copied from: http://colleendilen.com/2017/04/05/are-mobile-apps-worth-it-for-cultural-organizations-data/

All of which adds weight to the argument that institutions like the one I work for should prioritize installation of free, easy to log on to, pervasive wifi over the commissioning of expensive, unused apps, and direct content development efforts towards the mobile web, in the knowledge that even then, users may prefer to publish out from a place, rather than read the content that you’ve created.

Some places get it.

Simulating ideology in storytelling

April 7, 2017 Matthew Tyler-JonesLeave a comment

The Story Extension Process, from Mei Yii Lim and Ruth Aylett (2007) Narrative Construction in a Mobile Tour Guide

Another great piece from Ruth Aylett, this time from 2007. Here, she and collaborator Mei Yii Lim are getting closer to what I’m aiming for, if taking a different approach. They kick off by describing Terminal Time, a system that improvises documentaries according to the user’s ideological preference, and an intelligent guide for virtual environments which take into account the distance between locations, the already told story, and the affinity between the the story element and the guide’s profile when selecting the next story element and location combination to take users to. They note that this approach could bring mobile guides “a step nearer to the creation of an ‘intelligent guide with personality'” but that it “omits user [visitor] interests”. (I can think of many of a human tour guide that does the same). They also touch on a conversation agent that deals with the same issues they are exploring.

This being a 2007 conference paper, they are of course using a PDA as their medium. Equipped with GPS and text to speech software, a server does all the heavy lifting.

“After [an ice-breaking session where the guide extracts information about the user’s name
and interests], the guide chooses attractions that match the user’s interests, and plans the shortest possible route to the destinations. The guide navigates the user to the chosen locations via directional instructions as well as via an animated directional arrow. Upon arrival, it notifies the user and starts the storytelling process. The system links electronic data to actual physical locations so that stories are relevant to what is in sight. During the interaction, the user continuously expresses his/her interest in the guide’s stories and agreement to the guide’s argument through a rating bar on the graphical user interface. The user’s inputs affect the guide’s emotional state and determine the extensiveness of stories. The system’s outputs are in the form of speech, text and an animated talking head.”

So, in contrast to my own approach, this guide is still story lead, rather than directly user led, but it decides where to take the user based on their interests. But they are striving for an emotional connection with the visitor. So their story elements (SE) are composed of “semantic memories [-] facts, including location-related information” and “emotional memories […] generated through simulation of past experiences”. Each story element has a number of properties, sematic memories for example incude: name ( a coded identifier); type; subjects; objects; effects (this is interesting its lists the story elements that are caused by this story element, with variable weight); event; concepts (this that might need a further definition when fist mentioned); personnel (who was involved); division; attributes (relationship to interest areas in the ontology); location; and, text. Emotional story elements don’t include “effects and subjects attributes because the [emotional story element] itself is the effect of a SE and the guide itself is the subject.” These emotional memories are tagged with “arousal” and “valence” tags. The arousal tags are based on Emotional Tagging, while the valence tag “denotes how favourable or unfavourable an event was to the guide. When interacting with the user, the guide is engaged in meaningful reconstruction of its own past,” hmmmmm.

So their prototype, a guide to the Los Alamos site of the Manhatten project, the guide could be either “a scientist who is interested in topics related to Science and Politics, and a member of the military who is interested in topics related to Military and Politics. Both guides also have General knowledge about the attractions.” I’m not convinced by the artifice of layering onto the interpretation two different points of view – as both such are being authored by a team who in their creation of the two points of view will, even if striving to be objective, will make editorial decisions that reveal a third, authentic PoV.

When selecting which SE to tell next, the guide filters out the ones that are not connected to the current location. Then “three scores corresponding to: previously told stories; the guide’s interests; and the user’s interests are calculated. A SE with the highest overall
score will become the starting spot for extension.” The authors present a pleasingly simple (for a non-coder like me) algorithm for working out which SE goes next. But the semantic elements are not the only story elements that get told. The guide also measures the Emotional, Ideological story elements against the user’s initial questionnaire answers and reactions to previous story elements and decides whether or not to add the guide’s “own” ideological experience on to the interpretation, a bit like a human guide might. So you might be told:

Or, if the guide’s algorithms think you’ll appreciate it’s ideological perspective, you could hear:

“Estimates place the number of deaths caused by Little Boy in Hiroshima up to the end of 1945 at one hundred and forty thousands where the dying continued, five-year deaths related to the bombing reached two hundred thousands. The experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing was the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind. For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends, is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human action. In the bombing of Japanese cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end.”

I guess that’s the scientist personality talking, perhaps the military personality would instead add a different ideological interpretation of the means to an end. As I mentioned before, I’m not convinced that two (or more) faux points of view are required when the whole project and every story element that the guide gets to choose from are already authored with a true point of view. But in many other aspects this paper is really useful and will get a good deal of referencing in my thesis.