The CULTURA Project: Supporting Next Generation Interaction with Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

Abstract

Abstract. In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far, and the future work necessary to be implemented before the project concludes.

Enhancing Digital Heritage Archives Using Gamified Annotations

“…These resulting digital heritage archives have become highly specialised environments, thus making it more difficult to instigate and enhance engagement with the archives by the viewers [49].…”

“…Art historians were able to view extra information such as pictorial techniques and iconography, which they could then use to recognise the authorship of the artist. Professional researchers in turn highlighted details that were relevant to their research and professors would then use the information to teach their students more about how art historians work with art [27,49].…”

“…A user evaluation carried out on the CULTURA environment revealed that professionals who were well versed in the cultural collection were less likely to utilise recommendations when compared to researchers learning about the collections [49]. However, annotations and bookmarks were found to be more useful to the professional [31,49].…”

“…One of the objectives of CULTURA was to bridge the gap between the expert users, who were knowledgable on the relevant search parameters to access the digital content and the other users who had to be guided through good user interface and intuitive design in order to retrieve the content [26,49,50].…”

Fostering Interaction with Cultural Heritage Material via Annotations: The FAST-CAT Way

“…FAST-CAT is being developed as part of the CULTURA project [9][10]. A key aspect of CULTURA is the production of an online environment that empowers users, of various levels of expertise, to investigate, comprehend and contribute to digital cultural collections.…”