Top Museums on Instagram

Pictures speak louder than words. In this fast-moving world where people hardly have time to read anything, photo-sharing sites become more and more popular. Instagram is being used by millions of people and has created a “sharing ecosystem” that also encourages curation, expression, and produces feedback. Museums are moving quickly to integrate Instagram into their marketing strategies, provide information, engage with audience and connect to other museums Instagram accounts. Taking into consideration that people may not see museum accounts in the same way that the other museum accounts do, the article first describes accounts' performance of the top, most visited museums worldwide and next investigates their interconnection. The analysis uses techniques from social network analysis, including visualization algorithms and calculations of well-established metrics. The research reveals the most important modes of the network by calculating the appropriate centrality metrics and shows that the network formed by the museum Instagram accounts is a scale–free small world network.

A Digital (3D) Reconstruction of a Lost Planetarium

After many years of research, it has been concluded that Antikythera mechanism is a more complicated device than initially was thought. Recently, the rapidly increasing development of 3D modeling and simulation software, resulted in attempts to recreate the mechanism's 3D construction. These 3D replicas are based on advanced knowledge, gathered by the study of the mechanism remnants or the deciphered inscription on its surfaces. The latest decrypted inscriptions on the back door of the mechanism refers to planetary motion, which might be illustrated by a planetarium formation, which is absent from the remains of Antikythera mechanism. The authors propose a 3D reconstruction of this alleged planetarium, as a possible sequence of the existed mechanism's remains, compatible with the surviving inscriptions. Specifically, the authors introduce a lot of constructional differentiations compared to the other suggested, focusing mainly on measurements accuracy which this planetary system could perform.

Spatial Organization and Semantic Modelling of Historical Data

This article presents the methodological framework and the first results of the research towards the spatial organization and semantic modelling of the work of the French Scientific Mission (1828-1829), the first systematic mapping of the Hellenic State. Ultimate goal of this research is to create an integrated spatial database that incorporates the geographic information from the historical maps enriched with multimedia and texts from the published work of the Mission. For this, the technological approaches suggested by the Semantic Web have been followed introducing the concepts of semantic interoperability and geographic data models in the management of historical data. Eventually, the historical map becomes the medium on which the historical data are organized as well as the narrative medium that conveys the historical knowledge to the wider public illuminating the status of the Hellenic State at the time of its establishment, from a spatial point of view.

On the End-to-End Development of a Cultural Tourism Recommender

Recommenders are systems that employ some knowledge on items and user preferences, along with sophisticated algorithms to provide personalised content and services. They have been around to tackle the information overload and personalisation demand in today's always-connected world. This technology appeared in the cultural heritage domain relatively recently, but the bibliography is already rich, as cultural tourism plays an important role for regional economies. From the technical perspective, different approaches, like collaborative filtering, content-based, knowledge-based and hybrid approaches, have been adopted. From the intuition perspective, the approaches are influenced by current conceptualisation and specific application domains and demands. The museum has been one of the main target applications, either as a part of visit support or in the context of cultural tourism initiatives. This article presents a review of the domain and draws a generic blueprint for the end-to-end development of a recommender for cultural tourism that outperforms a baseline popularity-based approach.

Minding the Gap Between Perceived and Projected Destination Image by Using Information and Communication Platforms and Software

The article examines a double case study framework for analyzing perceived and projected destinations by using ITC solutions. First, 22,362 photos tagged with “Brasov” were collected and analyzed using the Flickr API. Second, a descriptive-explanatory research was employed, applying an instrument for the analysis and to address the online identity of place brands where a proposed online platform generates an automatic score calculation. The spatial patterns of tourist activity revealed many similarities and differences compared to promoted attractions by the DMOs, as the results indicated that geotagged photos reflect the projected image of the destination as the data provided a hotspot distribution of popular tourist attractions. The article makes a theoretical and practical contribution: (a) visual imagery may be more fully implemented in research studies; and (b) the distribution of popular tourist attractions may be in synergy between the perceived and projected image of a destination. Implications for marketing managers are presented.

A Survey of Augmented Reality Applications in Cultural Heritage

Augmented reality is now a well-known concept, a technology that integrates digital content to the user's physical world. As more and more applications begin to reshape user's daily lives in multiple domains, cultural heritage sites have begun to focus on capitalizing augmented reality's potential and improve their visitor experience. This work provides an overview of the state-of-the-art techniques, methodologies, and technologies integrated with augmented reality applications for cultural heritage while also categorizing the current works according to the latest techniques as they integrate to enrich the user's experience. The survey presents an overview of the characteristics of an augmented reality system, and discusses the current challenges, issues, limitations, and future directions. Finally, this work examines the methods and techniques that are used in the cultural heritage and augmented reality integration, outlining benefits, and open issues.

Serious Games Classification for Digital Heritage

Gamification mechanics have been introduced in the philosophy of many modern user experience (UE) systems, including those used in museums, cultural sites and various other kinds of digital heritage (DH) applications. Gamified user experiences include on-site navigation, playful interaction with museum artefacts, virtual tours in ancient or modern times using virtual reality (VR) applications and more. Although the gamification principles have been well adopted in the DH domain, a common language used to describe and classify serious games (SG) and gamified applications in DH is still under development. The current work aims to discuss first the complementarity of existing classification approaches along their possible limitations and finally to propose a classification schema for SGs and game-like environments used in museum, galleries and other organizations of cultural and touristic interest. The proposed classification system is being presented with respect to the entertaining, informational and educational characteristics of the SGs under study.

Assisting Pottery Restoration Procedures with Digital Technologies

The fragmentary nature of pottery is considered a common place. Conservators are requested to apply a proper restoration solution by taking under consideration a wide range of morphological features and physicochemical properties that derive from the artefact itself. In this work, the authors discuss on a low-cost pottery-oriented restoration pipeline that is based on the exploitation of technologies such as 3D digitisation, data analysis, processing and printing. The pipeline uses low-cost commercial and open source software tools and on the authors' previously published 3D pose normalisation algorithm that was initially designed for 3D vessel shape matching. The authors objectively evaluate the pipeline by applying it on two ancient Greek vessels of the Hellenistic period. The authors describe in detail the involved procedures such as the photogrammetric 3D digitisation, the 3D data analysis and processing, the 3D printing procedures and the synthetic shreds post processing. They quantify the pipeline's applicability and efficiency in terms of cost, knowledge overhead and other aspects related to restoration tasks.

The Educational Application Of Virtual Laboratories In Archaeometry

The digital cultural heritage field has been developing in parallel with modern archaeology by collecting and storing data from all aspects of field work, from excavations to virtual representations and to exhibitions, and by transforming data into knowledge and new services, ranging from supporting scientists to offering edutainment content. As an integral part of archaeology, the field of archaeometry deals with exploiting laboratory techniques and ICT tools to examine and analyze archeological findings. The present article briefly review works on the use of virtual environments in the digital cultural heritage field, and secondly reviews applications of virtual laboratories in archaeometry and, finally, based on the observation that virtual laboratories are now increasingly finding their way into education, to highlight the key aspects of a proposal to integrate virtual laboratories in Archaeometry education.

Personalized Real-Time Virtual Tours In Places With Cultural Interest

Virtual tours using drones enhance the experience the users perceive from a place with cultural interest. Drones equipped with 360o cameras perform real-time video streaming of the cultural sites. The user preferences about each monument type should be considered in order to decide the appropriate flying route for the drone. This article describes a scheme for supporting personalized real-time virtual tours at sites with cultural interest using drones. The user preferences are modeled using the MPEG-21 and the MPEG-7 standards, while Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies are used for metadata structure and semantics. The Metadata-Aware Analytic Network Process (MANP) algorithm is proposed in order to weigh the user preferences for each monument type. Subsequently, the Trapezoidal Fuzzy Topsis for Heritage Route Selection (TFT-HRS) algorithm ranks the candidate heritage routes. Finally, after each virtual tour, the user preferences metadata are updated in order in order the scheme to continuously learn about the user preferences.