Technology-Powered Strategies to Rethink the Pedagogy of History and Cultural Heritage through Symmetries and Narratives

Abstract

Recent advances in semantic web and deep learning technologies enable new means for the computational analysis of vast amounts of information from the field of digital humanities. We discuss how some of the techniques can be used to identify historical and cultural symmetries between different characters, locations, events or venues, and how these can be harnessed to develop new strategies to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects that support the teaching and learning of history and heritage. The strategies have been put to the test in the context of the European project CrossCult, revealing enormous potential to encourage curiosity to discover new information and increase retention of learned information.

On How Technology-Powered Storytelling Can Contribute to Cultural Heritage Sustainability across Multiple Venues—Evidence from the CrossCult H2020 Project

“…Valtolina [37] provided an overview of software tools that aim to facilitate the work, coming to the conclusion that this is a niche market still at an incipient stage, and that it is necessary to develop further the capability to involve a variety of users groups with different backgrounds. In the meantime, researchers keep devising new models, algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques that may be integrated in those tools, e.g., to navigate large online knowledge bases in search for possible associations among artworks, historical events, locations or people that could be turned into interesting stories [8], to automatically retrieve multimedia contents that may be used to illustrate whichever topics [38,39], or to allow museum objects to self-organise and cooperate with other exhibits in order to make comprehensible stories [7]. All in all, the state of the art is such that museum curators and other participants can be given valuable aids in the creative processes of creating stories, but it does not seem feasible (or even desirable) to automate the whole tasks end-to-end, at least in the medium term [40].…”

“…Specifically, we present evidence gathered during the H2020 project CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) about how technology-powered storytelling can contribute to the sustainability of the heritage kept by museums (in different ways depending on their size, popularity and topics) by presenting historical knowledge, interrelated facts and events, interpretations and narratives across countries and cultures to non-specialist audiences in an engaging way. The project can be considered a representative of the state-of-the-art, as it dealt with semantic reasoning technologies [6] to bring together multiple exhibits according to different criteria, with personalisation and recommendation systems to address the personal context that the museum visitors bring with them [7], with different storytelling and gamification strategies to assess the value of playful elements towards reflection and engagement with the venues and exhibitions [8,9], with location tracking and path routing optimisation to ensure that each visitor were navigated through the conceptually-linked exhibits while avoiding congested spaces as much as possible [10], and with innovative practices to address visitors' interaction with the physical context of the museum [11].…”

Reliving the Experience of Visiting a Gallery: Methods for Evaluating Informal Learning in Games for Cultural Heritage

“…The CC app was a multi-venue mobile experience that utilises game play and content discovery to stimulate public reflection on the topic of archaeology, water and healing. The first evaluation phase provided us with feedback on the gameplaying modes of the app, the graphs and visual components; a significant number of participants expressed positive emotions [22], triggered mainly by correct answers when interacting with the graph, discovery of new content and reading the stories [9,47]. For the final version of this CrossCult app, synchronous social interactions and multi-user features were removed, since playing in a team was not appreciated by the test users.…”

Using dates as contextual information for personalised cultural heritage experiences

“…In this line, a team of Humanities experts from the CrossCult consortium developed a set of 75 reflective narratives about life in antiquity involving the heritage items of the museum, using a controlled vocabulary about appearance, mortality, religion, rituals, goddesses, humans, amazons, nudity, social status, education, daily life, weaving, dowries, food, names, wild animals and healing practices. These narratives were associated (via human curation, assisted by CrossCult tools for experts [31,32]) to 17 archaeological items displayed physically at the AMT. These narratives provide a wealth of opportunities to automatically identify the most interesting stories to offer to any visitor, enabling synthesised views on reflective topics that could hardly be conveyed before.…”