the online museum and its contribution to e-humanities. agora and the hermeneutics of access

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

13

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