Technology-Enhanced Interaction with Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Digital technology in museum practice provides new means of interaction with artifacts and collections. In particular, we need interactive installations in order to encourage and stimulate visitors to learn and understand archaeological musical instruments through engagement and active participation: these instruments (i.e., interactive artifacts per se ) are de facto unplayable and inaccessible to visitors, as a consequence of their preservation issues. However, presenting artifacts to the general public is a complex task for their multifaceted nature, and digital technology must not sacrifice accuracy or depth of information for the sake of entertainment. Moreover, deploying digital technology is a multidisciplinary effort that requires an interplay among different fields, from history and archaeology to information engineering and craftsmanship. In this article, we present a methodology to relate such disciplines in order to design a digital multimedia installation that promotes archaeological musical instruments in a museum. In defining the problem, we identify four different aspects to consider: the museum collection, the museum environment, the manufacturing opportunities for the installation, and the user experience. Such aspects are integrated in a design approach that is centered on Design Thinking . The proposed methodology is exemplified in the designing and manufacturing of an installation for a Pan flute from Egypt dated back to 700 A.D., a case in which multisensory interaction is particularly important to convey the lost sound of the instrument. We describe in detail an installation (exhibited at the Museum of Archaeological Science and Art at the University of Padova), which virtually recreates the Pan flute and communicates information related to its history, iconography, acoustics, and musicology. Just after the deployment of the installation, we also carried out an assessment with a group of experts in the fields of information engineering, music, musicology, and archaeology. The good results obtained demonstrate that the installation is a convenient way of interaction, simple to use and aesthetically integrated in the museum context.

Four Decades of Music Research, Creation, and Education at Padua's Centro di Sonologia Computazionale

“…Other multidisciplinary work carried out at CSC in the field of computer engineering for musical cultural heritage concerned the enhancement of modern electrophonic instruments (e.g., Studio Fonologia Musicale della RAI di Milano, see Canazza et al 2011) and of historical musical instruments (e.g., a pan flute, cf. Pretto et al 2020). At CSC, a methodology to develop a multimedia installation that communicates and enhances both acoustic and electrophonic instruments by considering their cultural context has been defined.…”

“…The interaction model used to provide access to the general public is based on multisensory interplay (visual, auditory, and tactile) that includes both contextual information and a virtual counterpart of the artifact. The methodology includes an adaptation of "design thinking" for interactive museum installations and a deeply interdisciplinary matching design process (Pretto et al 2020).…”

Digital Cultural Items in Space: The Impact of Contextual Information on Presenting Digital Cultural Items

“…Efforts persist towards digitizing cultural heritage collections and placing them 'online', for reasons such as the preservation of the original analogue item and education [25] [42]. While research in the area continues to grow, there is still an observed lack of literature that focuses on the theory and methodology of user interaction and experience regarding digital cultural experiences [25].…”

“…Cultural heritage scholars study how DCIs might be formed better, faster and with greater accuracy [23][14], while those focusing on UX informed research draw upon research into formal UX practices [46] [20]and ask how we can use DCIs to create more compelling, more valuable, 'better', cultural user experiences [29] [34]. Curators tackle the technical challenges of developing proficiency in, or gaining access to, an eclectic set of technical and artistic skills required to form and display DCIs, all the while working within strict professional deadlines and institutional budgets [42][27] [47]. Meanwhile, visitors can access vast collections of DCIs from their portable devices and personal computers, with each DCI offering the potential for experiences formed from interactions that would simply be impossible with an analogue cultural item.…”

“…The question of interaction and its effect on visitor enjoyment has been posed and explored [19], with researchers exploring the emotive qualities of interaction [39] and how we might better form relationships between visitor and analogue cultural artifacts through contextual interaction [1]. Technology enables new ways to create engaging visitor experiences, through 3D printing DCI for tactile interaction [12] to digitally fracturing DCIs so that they might be presented as puzzles [42]. We aim to align our study with these related research efforts as we take a typical use-case for DCIs; that of the DCI presented in the 'grey void', and then explore the benefits of gathering contextual information in their presentation.…”