Academic literature on the topic 'Museum Ubiquitous Visitors'

In increasingly hyper-connected societies, where individuals rely on short and fast online communications to consume information, museums face a significant survival challenge. Collaborations between scientists and museums suggest that the use of the technological framework known as Internet of Things (IoT) will be a key player in tackling this challenge. IoT can be used to gather and analyse visitor generated data, leading to data-driven insights that can fuel novel, adaptive and engaging museum experiences. We used an IoT implementation—a sensor network installed in the physical space of a museum—to look at how single visitors chose to enter and spend time in the different rooms of a curated exhibition. We collected a sparse, non-overlapping dataset of individual visits. Using various statistical analyses, we found that visitor attention span was very short. People visited five out of twenty rooms on average, and spent a median of two minutes in each room. However, the patterns of choice and time spent in rooms were not random. Indeed, they could be described in terms of a set of linearly separable visit patterns we obtained using principal component analysis. These results are encouraging for future interdisciplinary research that seeks to leverage IoT to get numerical proxies for people attention inside the museum, and use this information to fuel the next generation of possible museum interactions. Such interactions will based on rich, non-intrusive and diverse IoT driven conversation, dynamically tailored to visitors.

As immersive technologies have become ubiquitous today, traditional museums are finding success augmenting existing exhibits to increase visitors’ satisfaction. However, due to the immutable nature of house museums, and their tendency to place visitors in direct contact with historical artifacts, museum managers are seeking original approaches to cultural preservation. Implementing mixed reality systems into historic house museums is one such approach. The goal of this study is to develop and test a conceptual matrix that guides how designers use the affordances of mixed reality systems to create experiences that align with the range of historical narratives found in house museums. Experiences that can contribute to improving visitors’ satisfaction, self-interpretation, and understanding of the homeowner’s life and the community within which they lived. Building on human-centered design methods, the researcher developed and tested a prototype of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application centered on the Pope House Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. The outcome of the research suggests house museum visitors should have agency in deciding the lens through which they experience the variety of historical narratives present in the home.

As novas relações que se estabelecem entre a técnica e a vida social geram novas formas de comunicação, de produção cultural e fenômenos sociotécnicos, desenvolvendo uma nova cultura contemporânea, a cibercultura. Diante desse novo contexto sociotécnico, os museus passaram a fazer uso das tecnologias digitais em rede e móveis, visando potencializar a experiência comunicacional e educacional de/com seus visitantes. Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir o espaço museal na cibercultura, apresentando-o como rede educativa e espaço multirreferencial de aprendizagem, e mostrar exemplos de usos das tecnologias digitais em rede por parte dos museus na contemporaneidade. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: cibercultura; educação museal; aprendizagem ubíqua; ciberpesquisa-formação; espaços multirreferenciais; ABSTRACT The new relations established between technique and social life have generated new forms of communication, cultural production and sociotechnical phenomena, developing a new contemporary culture, cyberculture. Faced with this new sociotechnical context, museums began to make use of mobile and online digital technologies, aiming at enhancing the communicational and educational experiences of/with their visitors. This article aims to discuss the museum space in cyberculture, presenting it as an educational network and a multi-referential learning space, and to show examples of use of online digital technologies by museums in the contemporary world. KEYWORDS: cyberculture; museum education; ubiquitous learning; cyber research-training; multi-referential spaces.

The moving image has become ubiquitous in museums that deal with traumatic, violent, and difficult histories and could be described as "memorial museums." This article investigates exhibition practices in the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, in which large-scale video installations provide evocative recreations of traumatic experiences that are designed to unsettle and disturb visitors, providing them with a visceral and vicarious experience that calls for witnessing and "empathic unsettlement." It also queries the assumption that the capacity for empathy forms the basis for responsible moral agency, and whether museums aiming to encourage social responsibility should rely on such technologies.

Implicit learning, learning we are not aware of, or learning which results inknowledge we do not know we possess or cannot articulate, is often consideredto be a ubiquitous part of life, and yet is rarely studied in real-world contexts. Thispaper presents an attempt to research implicit learning amongst museum andgallery visitors, with the ultimate aim being to understand whether implicit learningtakes place in the museum and how we might begin to unearth such tacit (silent)knowledge. Examples drawn from interviewees with members of gallery ‘friends’associations provide evidence that people often possess knowledge they areseemingly unaware of, directly derived from their museum/gallery experiences. Themethodology explored here acts as a formative means to study implicit learningand the paper suggests how this might be further developed.

In 1931, the Finnish painter Juho Rissanen (1873-1950) travelled to the tourist city Biskra in Algeria, then spending there the winter season, a most agreeable time in North Africa. It is situated on the verge of the Saharan desert, and ever since Algeria had become a French colony in the early nineteenth century, the city hosted hordes of tourists. (Algeria became independent as late as in 1962.) Biskra was known for its sulphate baths, which were supposed to improve health. But as several travellers and painters have observed, it was also the perfect spot where to hire a camel and a driver for a journey into an unwelcoming desert. Algerian Sahara had in fact been the target of many earlier nineteenth century Orientalists, and the country’s status as a French colony made its sights relatively accessible to foreigners. Rissanen was one of those following in the footsteps of earlier itinerants. The authenticity of the city as the visitors saw it is, however, a complex question. The travellers usually lived at the same hotel near the baths and stayed mostly in the company of each other. The locals in their turn – a travel account of the time explains – were always ready to pose wherever a Kodak camera would turn up, and as a result, costume studies were produced and camels painted. All foreigners regarded camel excursion as the climax of the stay. In Finland, Rissanen is best known for his late nineteenth- and early twentieth century portraits of Finnish rural types, let be that he later turned to other motifs and techniques. Even today, the latter part of his production is much lesser known than the celebrated highlights. Chronic anxiety about health constantly led the painter to warmer climates; he spent his final years in Florida after having sauntered around the Mediterranean, e.g. Southern France, in the interwar years. The aim of my article is threefold: firstly, to investigate Rissanen’s motifs for travelling to Biskra; secondly, to show that Rissanen’s encounter with the city was purely touristic, in line with its reputation as a travel destination in colonial France; and thirdly, to present its outcome as an example of late Orientalist painting. To sum up, I consider the reception of Rissanen’s later art production, in order to situate his Biskra-pictures within a larger context. Unfortunately, I have, so far, only been able to locate a handful of watercolours now belonging to Kuopio Art Museum. The Kuopio collection also contains Rissanen’s letters to his friend, the physician Emil Suihko, as well as to the art historian Onni Okkonen, among others. In his correspondence, Rissanen lingers on Biskra. The works I have found depict craftsmen sitting in the streets and women wearing colourful, local dresses. Needless to say, even Rissanen proved his love of the desert by drawing camels. It is another matter that these ubiquitous animals of course could be spotted in the streets, too. Interestingly, in an interview made shortly after Biskra and published in a 1931 issue of the Finnish magazine Konstrevyn, Rissanen says very little of why and how he painted in Northern Africa. Virtually, the whole text deals with touristic trivia. Keywords: Juho Rissanen (1873-1950), Biskra, French Orientalism, tourism, 20th century visual arts

Advances in mobile computing technologies have enabled the personal ubiquitous computing environment for ubiquitous visitors. In the case of museum services, a ubiquitous visitor is free to access his/her interested exhibit information and personalized services anywhere, any time through any possible mobile or fixed devices without making the explicit requests. However, often due to locations, availability of time, levels of understandings, devices, etc., museum ubiquitous visitors have dynamic requirements of services. Moreover, a wide variety of services and an increasing amount of information is overwhelming for the museum ubiquitous visitors. The designing of the museum service handling system makes a promising effort to cater to the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors and to mitigate the information overloading problem. The system essentially tailors to the requirements of the ubiquitous visitors, which need a different set of components to configure the required services. The objective of the thesis is to design the museum service handling system to cater to the individual requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The system is designed to provide exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. The proposed system obtains the ubiquitous visitor’s context information and their interests to design a museum ubiquitous visitor model. By adapting the ubiquitous visitor model, the museum service handling system first identifies the URLs of required exhibit information and later examines the ubiquitous visitor’s dynamic requirements such as the available time, present devices, etc., to provide appropriate exhibit information. The designing of the system is presented as follows. We present context information of the museum ubiquitous visitors to identify the required services for the visitors. We use the procedure of Context Information-Constructs (CI-Constructs) to acquire the physical environment context information, visitor activity context information, and network context Information. Further, context information is processed in two’s, three’s, and in higher combinations to formulate Composite Context (CC) and Essential Context-derived Reasons (ECR). ECR is further used to provide required services to the museum ubiquitous visitors. We design the museum ubiquitous visitor model to provide personalized services to the ubiquitous visitors. To design the model, museum ubiquitous visitor’s interest is extracted by analysing the history of previously accessed exhibit information museum services. Moreover, Visitor Personal Information (VPI) is obtained through the pre-visit registration process. Further, ECR, Interests, and VPI of the museum ubiquitous visitors are combined to design the ubiquitous visitor model. The proposed model characterizes the multifaceted information about the ubiquitous visitors which enables the system to provide personalized services. We propose the organization of museum exhibit information to cater to the individual requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The Introductory Attributes (IA), Functional/Behavioural Attributes (F/BA), and Descriptive Attributes (DA) which broadly characterize the exhibit information are identified and used to organize the exhibit information. The exhibit information is organized as essential information and further as elaborated information at the level of school kids, college students, and professionals ubiquitous visitors. We propose the system of identifying and providing museum services to cater to the required services to the ubiquitous visitors. The system is designed to provide exhibit information museum services to the ubiquitous visitors. The system, based upon the ubiquitous visitor model, first identifies the required exhibit information URLs. Later, according to the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors, the system provides tailored exhibit information to the visitors. The case study is presented with a variety of context information and interests to provide exhibit information museum services to the ubiquitous visitors. The museum environment is simulated with a wide variety of exhibits and for the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The simulation results show that the proposed system significantly reduces the time to identify and provide required exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. In summary, we have presented: i) Museum ubiquitous visitors context information; ii) Museum ubiquitous visitor model; iii) Organization of museum exhibit information; iv) The system of identifying and providing museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. We have simulated the museum environment in different possible scenarios. The results obtained in the simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed system in handling exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors.

Technology was first implemented in exhibition design and gallery interpretations in the 1950s. Since then, the development and instructional use of technology in museums has increased significantly. With the recent trend in visitor-centered initiatives being encouraged by museum professionals, cultural institutions are arranging exhibitions and displays, offering activities and programs, as well as developing materials to better augment visitors’ on-site and off-site learning experiences. The most ubiquitous augmentations are the utilization of different digital technology and virtual museum (Mediati, 2011). For instance, Lu (1999) pointed out that museums installed flat-screen televisions for presenting exhibition and art object information while Chao and Lai (2008) found that museums used personal portable electronic devices for interpreting articles and developed interactive computer programs for inviting audiences’ active discovery learning. Recently, Buffington (2008) and Lopez, Daneau, Rosoff, and Cogdon (2008) indicated that distance learning and virtual exhibitions through museum websites, podcasts, and electronic networking are becoming more common.

Visitors to the Lawrence Room, Girton College, Cambridge University, on Thursday afternoons (when the small one room museum is open to the public) will find a dead body on display. The body is that of an Egyptian mummy from the Coptic period with a painted face mask and inscription ‘Hermione Grammatike’. It was this inscription that attracted Girton College to acquire this ancient body. A loose translation suggests this was a woman scholar, and therefore the first recorded woman scholar in history and as such an appropriate ‘mascot’ for one of the early great champions for formal female education. The mummy was purchased from Egyptologist Flinders Petrie who had excavated it in 1910–11 (Imogen Gunn and Dorothy Thompson, pers. comm.). The case of Hermione is both particular and general. Across all of the UK and indeed the Western world, human remains from all ages and all parts of the world can be found in all types of museums of all sizes apparently isolated and insulated from society’s normal relationships with the dead: grief, morbidity, respect, invisibility. Context would appear to be everything in terms of attitudes to the display of the human dead. This paper reviews this concept of context, and offers some commentary on the origins, constraints, and boundaries for the display of human remains. To begin with an Egyptian mummy as an example is also appropriate, as this particular category has an almost ubiquitous and overpowering place in Western museums. It has been accepted practice to include human remains in displays since the widespread establishment of public museums in the nineteenth century. These are normally associated with archaeological discoveries but can also be found in physical and social anthropological displays, medical and history of medicine displays, and occasionally in other contexts. Museum practice is very much a creation of Western, primarily Enlightenment, values and the inclusion of human remains in displays can be traced in these values (for example, the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and the public anatomy demonstrations of the nascent Royal Society in London) and in the Christian European culture from which this derived (for example, the display in churches of saints’ relics: Weiss-Krejci this volume).