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Personalising Access to Cultural
     Heritage Collections using
              Pathways
                 Paula Goodale1, Paul Clough1, Nigel Ford1 & Mark
                                   Stevenson2
                        The Information School1, University of Sheffield
                    Department of Computer Science2, University of Sheffield
                     http://www.paths-project.eu/eng

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Overview
• Information access in cultural heritage
• The PATHS project received funding from
  the European Community
• Pathways for navigation and personalised
  access
• Summary




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Information access in Cultural Heritage
 • Significant amounts of CH material available online
       – Web portals, digital libraries, Wikipedia …
       – aggregated portals (e.g. Europeana)
 • Users may find it difficult to navigate and interpret
   wealth of information
       – keyword-based access provides limited success
       – many users are not domain or subject experts
       – limited support for knowledge exploration and discovery
 • Cultural institutions looking at new ways of providing
   rich user experiences
       – user participation (e.g. web2.0), personalisation, …



Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
The project vision
• Provide functionality to support user‟s knowledge discovery and
  exploration

• The use of pathways/trails to help users navigate and explore the
  information space

• The use of personalisation (e.g. recommender systems) to adapt
  views/paths to specific users or groups of users

• Show links to other items within and external to an item to help
  users contextualise and interpret the item




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Differing types of search task

Task type                Example

Specific fact-finding    How many works by Henry Bishop are in the collection?



Extended fact-finding Which of the following artists lived during the same time
                      period?


Open-ended browsing Find as many artists as you can who lived between 1800 and
                    1900.


Exploration              Find an abstract painting that you like in the collection


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Personalised Access To cultural Heritage
                                Spaces (PATHS)
 • STREP funded under the Community's Seventh
   Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
   grant agreement n 270082
 • 36 months
       – 1st January 2011 to 31st December 2013
 • Budget – 3,199,299 euros in total
       – 2,300,000 euros EU grant
 •   6 partners in 5 countries
 •   334 person months
 •   8 work packages
 •   22 deliverables

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
The consortium
 • PATHS is a partnership project which involves the
   work of many individuals:
 • Two universities
       – Sheffield University
       – Universidad del Pais Vasco
 • Two technology enterprises
       – i-sieve technologies Ltd
       – Asplan Viak Internet Ltd
 • Two cultural heritage enterprises
       – MDR Partners
       – Alinari 24 Ore Spa
 • Additional content provider
       – Europeana
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Europeana




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  3/2/2011   © The University of Sheffield
Project objectives
• Analysis of users‟ requirements for discovering knowledge in based
  on Cultural Heritage collections and construction of pathways/trails
• Automated organisation and enrichment of Cultural Heritage content
  for use within a navigation system
• Implementation of a system for navigating Cultural Heritage
  resources that is applied to data provided by Europeana and Alinari
• Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural Heritage
  content (e.g. recommender systems)
• Porting the navigation system for use on mobile devices and
  Facebook
• Evaluation with user groups and in field trials




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Research areas
• Information Access
    – user-driven navigation through collections of information
    – knowledge of users‟ requirements for access to cultural heritage
      collections
    – modeling of user preferences and context
• Educational Informatics
    – adapting to individual learners in relation to being directed and
      being allowed the freedom to explore autonomously
• Content Interpretation and Enrichment
    – representation and sharing of information about items in Digital
      Libraries
    – identifying background information related to the items in cultural
      heritage collections (e.g. links to Wikipedia pages)

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Pathways for navigation and personalisation

• Navigation through the information is based around the
  metaphor of “paths”
    – flexible model of navigation and exploration onto which various
      levels of personalisation can be added
• Paths provide the following information
                                                          Which can be
    – a history of where the user has been                adapted and
    – suggestions of where the user might go next         mapped to
    – a (thematic) narrative through a set of items       individual
                                                          learning styles
• Items in a path can be ordered
    – chronologically
    – thematically
    – ...


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Paths and trails have been studied in many fields

• Trails (Memex, 1945)
    – Associative trails explicitly created by users forming links
      between stored materials to help others navigate
• Destinations (search engines and web analytics)
    – Origin/landing page (from query), intermediate pages and
      destination page
• Search strategies (information seeking)
    – Users moving between information sources, perhaps due to
      changes in their information needs
• Guided tours (hypertext)
    – authors create sequence of pages useful to others (manual)
    – automatically generated trails to assist with web navigation
    – used in educational informatics and cultural heritage


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Example paths/trails in cultural heritage
• The Walden‟s Paths project
    – http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/
    – allow educators to arrange web pages into a series of sequential
      paths on specific topics
    – educators can add comments at each node
    – highly prescriptive and users cannot deviate from paths
• Thematic trails – Louvre
    – http://www.louvre.fr/llv/activite/liste_parcours.jsp?bmLocale=en
    – selection of works that typify a period, artistic movement or
      theme (routes provide narrative when viewing physical objects)
    – trails can be viewed online or printed prior to visit to museum
    – prescriptive with limited interactivity and personalisation


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Pathways
• A path is a „route‟ through an information space
    – defined as collections of cultural heritage resources
    – consists of nodes and links to connect nodes (graph)
• Nodes can be connected in different ways
    –   pre-computed based on similarity between items
    –   computed on-the-fly (automated) and personalised
    –   defined by system/designers (guided paths)
    –   defined by users (individual or collectively)
• Exist as information objects in their own right
    – can be indexed, organised and shared with others, and will be
      potential learning objects that can be offered to users alongside
      the cultural heritage content


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Possible paths
                Subject knowledge
                (e.g. taxonomy)




                                                       e.g. WW II
Start                        Knowledge discovery          Destination

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Independent paths
• Users can construct their own “independent paths”
    – can be saved for future reference, edited or shared with other
      users
    – e.g. “Sheffield steel industry”, “my favourite works by Rembrandt”
      or “items seen during my trip to London on 6th Feb 2010”
• More than a simple list of items in a collection that the
  user has visited (i.e. bookmarks)
    – also contain information about the links between the items
      (relationships)
    – descriptive text (e.g. annotations, tags)
    – details of others items connected to them
    – connections to information both within and outside the collection
      that provides context

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Guided paths
• Users can also follow pre-defined “guided paths”
    – created by domain experts, such as scholars or teachers
• Provide an easily accessible entry point to the collection
    – can be followed in their entirety
    – or left at any point to create an “independent path”
• Guided paths can be based around any theme
    –   artist and media (“paintings by Picasso”)
    –   historic periods (“the Cold War”)
    –   places (“Venice”)
    –   famous people (“Muhammed Ali”)
    –   emotions (“happiness”)
    –   events (“the World Cup”)
    –   or any other topic (e.g. “Europe”, “food”)



Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Collaborative paths

• Groups of users can work collectively to create
  “collaborative paths”
     – adding new routes of discovery and annotations that
       can build upon the contributions made by others
• Could be used to encourage social interaction




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Adapting to individuals and groups

• Different users will have differing needs from pathways
     – system will make user-specific recommendations about items of
       potential interest as individuals navigate through the collection
• Build up knowledge and understanding of users
     –   cognitive styles
     –   expertise/subject knowledge
     –   age                                   explicit
                                                          User model
     –   gender
     –   language abilities
     –   system interactions (implicit)
• User will be offered links to information both within and
  outside the collection
     – provide contextual and background information, individually
       tailored to each user and their context

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Learning and knowledge discovery
• A particular area of focus in PATHS will be on learning
  and knowledge discovery
    – Help people as they use cultural heritage resources to learn and
      discover new knowledge
• People learn and solve problems differently
    – some people require a lot of guiding; others are self-directed
    – some people welcome irrelevant material; others are intolerant
    – some people creatively explore and come up with new ideas;
      others want to simply answer a set problem
• Users may perform information seeking
    – must navigate through information spaces
    – different people may require different levels of assistance


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Local (analytic)                                                 Global
                    Learning/problem-solving goals
Convergent goals.                  Divergent goals.
“Find an answer”.                  Creatively explore.
Learn pre-defined content.         Come up with new ideas.
                               Process goals
Concerned with procedures          Concerned with conceptual                Adopting a navigation path that
and vertical deep detail           overview and horizontal broad inter-     matches one‟s predominant style
(procedure building).              relationships (description building).
                                                                            can influence the effectiveness of
                             Navigation styles
                                                                            the resultant learning.
Serialist navigation style         Holist navigation style
Narrow focus.                      Broad global focus.
One thing at a time.               Many things on the go at the same
Short logical links between        time.                                                    Autonomous
nodes.                             Rich links between nodes.
Intolerance of strictly            Welcoming of enrichment (but
irrelevant material.               strictly irrelevant) material.
Finish with one topic before       Layered approach returning to nodes
going on to the next.              at different level of detail.           Local                                   Global
                                                                           (analytic)
                       Positive learning outcomes
Good grasp of detailed             Well developed conceptual
evidence.                          overview.
Deep understanding of              Broad inter-relationship of ideas.                        Dependent
individual topics.                 Good grasp of the “big picture”.
In-depth understanding of the                                                Key cognitive dimensions (Pask and Witkin)
parts.
                   Characteristic learning pathologies
Poor appreciation of topic         Poor grasp of detail.
inter-relationships.               Over-generalisation.
Failing to see the “big
picture”.
Summary

• Pathways offer powerful metaphor for navigation onto
  which personalisation can be added
     – map onto user‟s existing models of user information behaviour
• Can be used to support various styles of cognitive
  information processing
     – surface as different routes taken through information space
• Offering users suggested routes will
     – help them locate information in large collections
     – help encourage information exploration and discovery
     – help them fulfil broader activities (e.g. constructing knowledge)
• Ultimately paths could help enhance user‟s information
  access experience of digital library resources
     – but we need to understand users and their needs


Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
Contact


                    Thank you for listening
                              Any questions?
                      p.goodale@sheffield.ac.uk




Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

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PATHS at PATCH 2011

  • 1. Personalising Access to Cultural Heritage Collections using Pathways Paula Goodale1, Paul Clough1, Nigel Ford1 & Mark Stevenson2 The Information School1, University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science2, University of Sheffield http://www.paths-project.eu/eng Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 2. Overview • Information access in cultural heritage • The PATHS project received funding from the European Community • Pathways for navigation and personalised access • Summary Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 3. Information access in Cultural Heritage • Significant amounts of CH material available online – Web portals, digital libraries, Wikipedia … – aggregated portals (e.g. Europeana) • Users may find it difficult to navigate and interpret wealth of information – keyword-based access provides limited success – many users are not domain or subject experts – limited support for knowledge exploration and discovery • Cultural institutions looking at new ways of providing rich user experiences – user participation (e.g. web2.0), personalisation, … Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 4. The project vision • Provide functionality to support user‟s knowledge discovery and exploration • The use of pathways/trails to help users navigate and explore the information space • The use of personalisation (e.g. recommender systems) to adapt views/paths to specific users or groups of users • Show links to other items within and external to an item to help users contextualise and interpret the item Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 5. Differing types of search task Task type Example Specific fact-finding How many works by Henry Bishop are in the collection? Extended fact-finding Which of the following artists lived during the same time period? Open-ended browsing Find as many artists as you can who lived between 1800 and 1900. Exploration Find an abstract painting that you like in the collection Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 6. Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces (PATHS) • STREP funded under the Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n 270082 • 36 months – 1st January 2011 to 31st December 2013 • Budget – 3,199,299 euros in total – 2,300,000 euros EU grant • 6 partners in 5 countries • 334 person months • 8 work packages • 22 deliverables Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 7. The consortium • PATHS is a partnership project which involves the work of many individuals: • Two universities – Sheffield University – Universidad del Pais Vasco • Two technology enterprises – i-sieve technologies Ltd – Asplan Viak Internet Ltd • Two cultural heritage enterprises – MDR Partners – Alinari 24 Ore Spa • Additional content provider – Europeana Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 8. Europeana Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011 3/2/2011 © The University of Sheffield
  • 9. Project objectives • Analysis of users‟ requirements for discovering knowledge in based on Cultural Heritage collections and construction of pathways/trails • Automated organisation and enrichment of Cultural Heritage content for use within a navigation system • Implementation of a system for navigating Cultural Heritage resources that is applied to data provided by Europeana and Alinari • Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural Heritage content (e.g. recommender systems) • Porting the navigation system for use on mobile devices and Facebook • Evaluation with user groups and in field trials Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 10. Research areas • Information Access – user-driven navigation through collections of information – knowledge of users‟ requirements for access to cultural heritage collections – modeling of user preferences and context • Educational Informatics – adapting to individual learners in relation to being directed and being allowed the freedom to explore autonomously • Content Interpretation and Enrichment – representation and sharing of information about items in Digital Libraries – identifying background information related to the items in cultural heritage collections (e.g. links to Wikipedia pages) Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 11. Pathways for navigation and personalisation • Navigation through the information is based around the metaphor of “paths” – flexible model of navigation and exploration onto which various levels of personalisation can be added • Paths provide the following information Which can be – a history of where the user has been adapted and – suggestions of where the user might go next mapped to – a (thematic) narrative through a set of items individual learning styles • Items in a path can be ordered – chronologically – thematically – ... Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 12. Paths and trails have been studied in many fields • Trails (Memex, 1945) – Associative trails explicitly created by users forming links between stored materials to help others navigate • Destinations (search engines and web analytics) – Origin/landing page (from query), intermediate pages and destination page • Search strategies (information seeking) – Users moving between information sources, perhaps due to changes in their information needs • Guided tours (hypertext) – authors create sequence of pages useful to others (manual) – automatically generated trails to assist with web navigation – used in educational informatics and cultural heritage Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 13. Example paths/trails in cultural heritage • The Walden‟s Paths project – http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/ – allow educators to arrange web pages into a series of sequential paths on specific topics – educators can add comments at each node – highly prescriptive and users cannot deviate from paths • Thematic trails – Louvre – http://www.louvre.fr/llv/activite/liste_parcours.jsp?bmLocale=en – selection of works that typify a period, artistic movement or theme (routes provide narrative when viewing physical objects) – trails can be viewed online or printed prior to visit to museum – prescriptive with limited interactivity and personalisation Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 14. Pathways • A path is a „route‟ through an information space – defined as collections of cultural heritage resources – consists of nodes and links to connect nodes (graph) • Nodes can be connected in different ways – pre-computed based on similarity between items – computed on-the-fly (automated) and personalised – defined by system/designers (guided paths) – defined by users (individual or collectively) • Exist as information objects in their own right – can be indexed, organised and shared with others, and will be potential learning objects that can be offered to users alongside the cultural heritage content Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 15. Possible paths Subject knowledge (e.g. taxonomy) e.g. WW II Start Knowledge discovery Destination Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 16. Independent paths • Users can construct their own “independent paths” – can be saved for future reference, edited or shared with other users – e.g. “Sheffield steel industry”, “my favourite works by Rembrandt” or “items seen during my trip to London on 6th Feb 2010” • More than a simple list of items in a collection that the user has visited (i.e. bookmarks) – also contain information about the links between the items (relationships) – descriptive text (e.g. annotations, tags) – details of others items connected to them – connections to information both within and outside the collection that provides context Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 17. Guided paths • Users can also follow pre-defined “guided paths” – created by domain experts, such as scholars or teachers • Provide an easily accessible entry point to the collection – can be followed in their entirety – or left at any point to create an “independent path” • Guided paths can be based around any theme – artist and media (“paintings by Picasso”) – historic periods (“the Cold War”) – places (“Venice”) – famous people (“Muhammed Ali”) – emotions (“happiness”) – events (“the World Cup”) – or any other topic (e.g. “Europe”, “food”) Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 18. Collaborative paths • Groups of users can work collectively to create “collaborative paths” – adding new routes of discovery and annotations that can build upon the contributions made by others • Could be used to encourage social interaction Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 19. Adapting to individuals and groups • Different users will have differing needs from pathways – system will make user-specific recommendations about items of potential interest as individuals navigate through the collection • Build up knowledge and understanding of users – cognitive styles – expertise/subject knowledge – age explicit User model – gender – language abilities – system interactions (implicit) • User will be offered links to information both within and outside the collection – provide contextual and background information, individually tailored to each user and their context Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 20. Learning and knowledge discovery • A particular area of focus in PATHS will be on learning and knowledge discovery – Help people as they use cultural heritage resources to learn and discover new knowledge • People learn and solve problems differently – some people require a lot of guiding; others are self-directed – some people welcome irrelevant material; others are intolerant – some people creatively explore and come up with new ideas; others want to simply answer a set problem • Users may perform information seeking – must navigate through information spaces – different people may require different levels of assistance Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 21. Local (analytic) Global Learning/problem-solving goals Convergent goals. Divergent goals. “Find an answer”. Creatively explore. Learn pre-defined content. Come up with new ideas. Process goals Concerned with procedures Concerned with conceptual Adopting a navigation path that and vertical deep detail overview and horizontal broad inter- matches one‟s predominant style (procedure building). relationships (description building). can influence the effectiveness of Navigation styles the resultant learning. Serialist navigation style Holist navigation style Narrow focus. Broad global focus. One thing at a time. Many things on the go at the same Short logical links between time. Autonomous nodes. Rich links between nodes. Intolerance of strictly Welcoming of enrichment (but irrelevant material. strictly irrelevant) material. Finish with one topic before Layered approach returning to nodes going on to the next. at different level of detail. Local Global (analytic) Positive learning outcomes Good grasp of detailed Well developed conceptual evidence. overview. Deep understanding of Broad inter-relationship of ideas. Dependent individual topics. Good grasp of the “big picture”. In-depth understanding of the Key cognitive dimensions (Pask and Witkin) parts. Characteristic learning pathologies Poor appreciation of topic Poor grasp of detail. inter-relationships. Over-generalisation. Failing to see the “big picture”.
  • 22. Summary • Pathways offer powerful metaphor for navigation onto which personalisation can be added – map onto user‟s existing models of user information behaviour • Can be used to support various styles of cognitive information processing – surface as different routes taken through information space • Offering users suggested routes will – help them locate information in large collections – help encourage information exploration and discovery – help them fulfil broader activities (e.g. constructing knowledge) • Ultimately paths could help enhance user‟s information access experience of digital library resources – but we need to understand users and their needs Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
  • 23. Contact Thank you for listening Any questions? p.goodale@sheffield.ac.uk Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011