This document discusses the Online Museum and its contribution to digital humanities or e-humanities. It proposes that providing online access to cultural heritage requires a hermeneutic or interpretive approach. It evaluates applications that provide online access based on how they deliver information versus support for interpretation. Specifically, it evaluates them based on whether they employ manual or automatic methods and whether they are aimed at lay users or experts. The Agora project demonstrates a pilot collection browser and aims to find a balance between provision of information and support for interpretation.

1. The Online Museum and its Contribution to E-humanities
Agora and the hermeneutics of access
NODEM2013
Chiel van den Akker
VU University Amsterdam
Agora

2. Le Musée Imaginaire

3. hermeneutic devices
framing
centering
enlarging
decreasing
isolating
focusing
comparing
combining
manipulating
zooming in/out

4. online access to cultural heritage
•
•
requires a hermeneutic approach
contributes to the conceptualization of e-humanities

5. Agora Team: Lora Aroyo, Guus Schreiber, Lourens van der Meij, Marieke van Erp, Chiel van
den Akker, Susan Legêne, Geertje Jacobs, Johan Oomen

6. digital hermeneutics
•
•
a theory of interpretation
is concerned with the limits of automation and modeling on the one hand, and the
interaction of people and technology on the other

7. Information: the museum as an inventory of the world

8. Interpretation: the museum as a place to engage with the world

9. evaluating online access to cultural heritage
four dimensions
• information - interpretation
• provision - support
• automatic - manual
• lay-users - expert-users

10. evaluating applications
provide information:
• manual: metadata, wiki, links
• automatic: entities and event extraction, data-mining
support information:
• manual: users tag, add comments and links
• automatic: search & browse
‘‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web”,
Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, (ACM: New York, 2013), 431-440

11. evaluating applications
provide interpretation:
• manual: add stories or links between objects
• automatic: generation of narrative relations between events and objects (e.g.
proto-narratives in Agora)
support interpretation:
• manual: favorites, personal spaces
• automatic: supporting creating (narrative) relations between events and objects
(e.g. plot-features in Decipher)
‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web’

12. Description
vs.
Narration
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Information
vs.
Interpretation
Identification
vs.
Signification
vs.
Retroactive Alignment
- e.g. database
- e.g. metadata
- e.g. vocabularies
Re-description
- e.g. Musée Imaginaire anticipating online museum
Event-model
vs.
- e.g. Simple Event Model (SEM)
Documentation
Narrative-model
- e.g. proto-narratives Agora
vs.
Exhibition

13. Method to Model Historical Events
13

14. Method for Historical Narrative Generation

15. agora event-centered collection browser
The pilot demonstrator can be
found at http://agora.cs.vu.nl

16. Two conceptions of e-humanities
Guus Schreiber on the Agora-project, 30-05-2013.

17. framework of digital hermeneutics enables us to
•
•
•
analyze applications providing online access to cultural heritage
reason about online access to cultural heritage
theorize the Web: e.g. limits of modeling, human-machine interaction

18. take home message
•
•
the online museum requires a hermeneutics of access
cultural heritage institutions need to find a balance between (1) the provision and
support of information and (2) the provision and support of interpretation

19. Thank you for your attention
http://agora.cs.vu.nl