Restorative Environments

One of the challenges of my viva was that I had presented cultural heritage as only a learning environment. Which was definitely not my intention. the places I have worked with especially, historic houses and palaces with gardens and parks, and countryside estate have long been recognised as places of spiritual recharging. I argued the case (obviously adequately as I passed) that I had not focussed only on learning, but perhaps some references to papers like this one will restore any intended imbalance.

“This one” is Packer, J. & Bond, N.. 2010. Museums as Restorative Environments. Curator 54: 421 – 436.and it starts of with a doozy of a quote that might be all I need: “Mental fatigue, caused by the stresses and strains of everyday life, is a common complaint in today’s society, and the need to escape from the personal and interpersonal demands of life is one of the major reasons that people have for engaging in tourism and leisure experiences”

The paper goes on to explain that al lot of the theory of restorative environments is based on the work of Kaplan and his Attention Restoration Theory. “The capacity to continually focus attention on a particular activity can be reduced or lost through mental exhaustion.” Recovery from just mental exhaustion requires that your “attention is engaged involuntarily or effortlessly,” which (I think) Kaplan calls “fascination.” Fascination allows your directed attention be rested.

Well, I think cultural heritage is fascinating, and this theory echos the theory of Flow, which I write about in my thesis, so it seems we are on to a winner with this paper. But there are three other components of restorative environments: being away (from routine); extent (the environment need to have enough content to keep you occupied a while) and compatibility (of interest – being bored is not fascinating). These sorts of things point to the infinite horizons of a walk in the countryside as being restorative (if the countryside is compatible with your interests) but analysis of responses to museums, art museums, gardens and zoos shows that the countryside is not the only place you can recharge.

So this paper looks to see if there are factors that make one museum a better restorative environment than another. To do so they use a “satisfying experiences framework” which focuses on:

• “object experiences, which focus on something outside the visitor, such as seeing rare, valuable, or beautiful objects;
• cognitive experiences, which focus on the interpretive or intellectual aspects of the experience, such as gaining information or understanding;
• introspective experiences, which focus on private feelings and experiences, such as imagining, reflecting, reminiscing, and connecting; and
• social experiences, which focus on interactions with friends, family, other visitors, or museum staff.”

They measured this and four different sites in Australia: a museum; an aquarium; a garden; and, an art gallery. Immediately they spotted that visitors to each find different experiences the most satisfying. The object experience of the fish in the aquarium was by far the most satisfying experience in any place, the cognitive experience of the museum was the most satisfying part of that visit (hmmmm). The social experience most satisfying in the gardens and, tough the art gallery was the most balanced between the four experiences, the social experience mattered to only 10.7% of visitors and the introspective experience mattered most to 29%. But it “was found that local visitors placed more importance on social and introspective experiences, and tourists placed more importance on cognitive and object experiences.” Tourists of course “are more likely to be looking for a learning and discovery experience—they want to discover new things and often try to ‘‘see as much as they can.’’ These experiences may be incompatible with a restorative experience.”

The study concludes “Not only were national parks and beaches considered more restorative than urban environments, but among the research sites, those that were focused on natural heritage (especially the botanic garden) were considered more restorative, both in attributes and benefits, than those focused on cultural heritage (the museum and art gallery).” But for frequent visitors (rather than first time visitors) museums can “offer an alternative to natural settings as a restorative experience.”

And more importantly, if “greater attention were given to visitors’ comfort, first-time and infrequent visitors, who are less familiar with the site, may be more able to experience restorative benefits as a result of their visit.” The authors also suggest that museums should “explore ways in which introspective experiences
might be encouraged and supported” and this I feel supports what I concluded at Chawton – while we insist on authenticity in our storytelling, we are privileging cognitive experiences over introspective ones.

Design synthesis: working with volunteers

In a way, my project at Chawton was an example of Research though Design (RtD), so among the papers I have been pointed to for my corrections is another example, which is interesting for the historic house museums that I have spent a good part of my life working with. The paper is: CLAISSE, C. , DULAKE, N. & PETRELLI, D.. 2019. Research Through Design. Digital Heritage International Congress. Research Through Design.

This paper explores to co-creation process that fed into an Interactive Tablaux project at Bishops House museum in Sheffield. The research was multiphase and involved volunteers at every stage. First of all, by the designer becoming a volunteer and working alongside them. Then but then gifting of a Creative Package to ten volunteers. The package featured six activities or “Design Probes” to encourage the volunteers’ input. The probes started of straightforward but got more creative in sequence. “For example, Best wishes (probe 1)
invited them to write about their experience at the House by sending us back a postcard; My dream exhibition (probe 3) featured a map and personalised sketchbook to share their favourite stories and museum
objects; Seed wish (probe 5) used the metaphor of growth to prompt their imagination about future scenarios for the museum.”

Although the output of the design was inspiring the researcher found it challenging to move to “the phase of ideation.” However the response to the first design probe moved the work on somewhat – the researcher synthesised a visual volunteer manifesto (which took the form of a sort of wordcloud) from the the volunteers responses. This shed light on the personal, emotional and social dimensions of volunteering, and proved to be a catalyst for discussion. The outputs of probe three became a three dimensional model, mapping the volunteers favourite spot and things in three dimensions. Such models are often made far later in the creative process, when a proposal for a final exhibition is being visualised.

The Creative Package was followed by a series of workshop with volunteers – the first one speculating on what a day in the life of previous inhabitants might have looked like – which produced as an output a number of imagined portmanteaux characters. Conversations were recorded, but not transcribed. Instead the researcher draw in response to the recoded conversation. “drawing made more sense than producing a written transcription as the sketches captured the complexity and non-linear aspects of participants’ conversation. Their unfinished quality presented the characters in a state of becoming, revealing the negotiations and compromises participants made during the co- creation workshop.”

From these drawings the researcher produced a storyboard consisting of three to five illustrated scenes for each character, which were used in the subsequent workshop, with a smaller group fo volunteers to refine the stories and check accuracy. This gave substance to the characters and defined their personality. Finally the personas were shared with the curator of social history to select appropriate objects from the collection to pair with each character.

Each stage of co-creation had a virtual output, the Design Synthesis which both recorded the output of the preceding stage and prompted the development of the subsequent one. The authors of the paper reflect on design synthesis as a tool for making sense of co-creation, bringing the richness together and nurturing collective creativity. They quote the volunteer organiser saying “What I found really interesting is how volunteers’ ideas were determining the format and outcome of the project. They [the volunteers] could really see the contributions they have made in the end result.” One of the volunteers said “It’s lovely the way you [the designer] have involved the volunteers, used our ideas and made us part of it.”

The challenges of evaluating in-visit digitally enabled heritage interpretation

I am reading a paper which will help me better present my Chawton study. The paper is brand new: Nikolakopoulou, V. & Koutsabasis, P.. 2019. Methods and Practices for Assessing the User Experience of Interactive Systems for Cultural Heritage. In: Pavlidis, G., ed. Applying Innovative Technologies in Heritage Science. IGI Global, and it is another literature review, but more a sort of meta study of evaluations, called by the authors a “fortiori.”

The methodology of this literature search is exemplary. The authors searched (via Google scholar, ACM digital library, IEEEXplore, Science direct, and Springer link) and found 350 papers, and and in a second search another 150 that looked as though they might be evaluation studies of digital in-visit heritage content. They screened out the majority, for not actually being accessible, or not actually being scientific (I think my thesis would have fallen at this hurdle), leaving just 73. These were screened a second time and a number of duplicate were found and then a number which did not actually write up the evaluation. Leaving just 29 to study in depth.

In summary these papers discussed applications to”explore a virtual or physical space or place” and/or “play a game”. The authors noted the the proportion of games had gone down since a previous survey, which likely corresponds with the time of my change of focus away from a ludic system to something more to do with narrative. They were still roughly 20% of the papers they looked at. Overall, the systems used a variety of digital technologies including 3d game engines, mobile devices, mobile AR, VR, the web, multi-touch displays, location based audio, and physical and kinaesthetic (responding to body movement) interfaces.

There were a lot of studies that looked at usability of the technologies, but the paper points out only using “user satisfaction” as a metric, which is a dangerous trap to fall into. Only a few to a thorough investigation of the User Experience in that way that modern commercial companies test their websites. “A considerable number of systems are evaluated upon learning effects on users” this despite that fact that learning is often not the primary reason for days out (though it may be a validation for the museum), but again few do that in a properly scientific way. There is an interesting paper mentioned (Falvo, P. G. (2015, September). Exhibit design with multimedia and cognitive technologies impact assessment on Luca Giordano, Raphael and the Chapel of the Magi in Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence. In 2015 Digital Heritage (Vol. 2, pp. 525-532). IEEE.)) that I may want to take a look at.

The paper highlights the difference between empirical evaluations “in the lab” as it were and in the field. “Field evaluations are contextual, which enhanced the validity of the process and results.” But “recruiting visitors to experience or assess CH content on purpose changes their original purpose of visit, which is
something inherently connected with the visitor experience discussed in several museum and visitor studies […] which suggests a paradox to me, either test random users, and change their reason for visiting, and potentially their responses to the visit; or invite visitors especially for the test and thus make it more like a lab experiment. The reason for visiting a cultural heritage experience is actually part of the experience.

One issue they highlight is that despite being “peer-reviewed and published in important journals and
conferences, it was possible to identify several failures in the quality of reporting on empirical evaluations” in particular reporting on the number of users that participated in the evaluations. I expect that is because, due tho the limitations of evaluation in cultural heritage sites, the time taken to observe a visit, the number of participants is statistically small – small enough to put into question wether the studies are “empirical” at all I know that after a week on site I had less than ten samples. And so I tried very hard not to present what I learned as empirical evidence. Indeed maybe even too hard. That bit need sa re-write post viva.

The conclusion is a reiteration that digital interpretation evaluation should involve more cultural heritage professionals and field studies. It point out that there is more work in newer methodologies “like physical computing and tangible user interfaces” (objects that are the interfaceIt also highlights ongoing issues of a lack of systematic approaches to evaluation, organised “in distinct identifiable catagories” which I imagine would make doing meta-studies like this more meaningful. Also, “Aspects of cultural value, awareness, and presence could only be recognized in very few empirical evaluations. Evaluation studies that consider more qualitative dimensions and more related to general purposes of CH like learning effectiveness have been increased, and they are usually accompanied by comparative evaluations. Comparative evaluations represent a small number compared to the overall number of studies reviewed.”

Personalisation redux

My external examiner at my viva was Daniella Petrelli, an academic in the field of HCI (Human Computer Interfaces) who I had referenced a few time in my thesis particularly after discovering she was behind a platform to help curators to write the sort of content I had created for Chawton. I found that work too late, after completing the Chawton experiment. Among the “modest” changes that Daniella recommended in my viva is a considerable amount of further reading, including this paper, which to my shame I had not discovered in my literature search, and which would have saved me doing a whole lot of reading and improved my PhD! (Which is of course what a viva is for 🙂)

The paper (ARDISSONO, L., KUFIK, T. & PETRELLI, D.. 2012. Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead. User Modeling and UserAdapted Interaction 73 – 99.) Is an incredible useful survey and summary of personalisation techniques employed in cultural heritage up to 2012. I am pretty sure it came out of somebody else’s own PhD literature search. It is very biased of course towards computer enabled personalisation (because it comes out of that discipline) but it looks at 37 separate projects and charts a history of personalisation since the early 90’s. ” when some of the adaptive hypermedia systems looked at museum content (AlFresco (Stock et al., 1993), ILEX (Oberlander et al., 1998)) and tourism (AVANTI (Fink et al., 1998)) as possible application domains” (p7) These early experiments included “a human-machine dialogue on Italian art and combined natural language processing with a hypermedia system connected to a videodisc”, and “automatically generated hypertext pages with text and images taken from material harvested from existing catalogues and transcriptions of conversations with the curator”.

The authors chart the development of web–based interfaces that don’t rely on kiosks or laserdiscs, though WAP (Wireless Application Protocol – which delivered a very basic web service to “dumb” mobile phones) to multi-platform technologies that worked on computers and Personal Digital Assistants. They note two parallel streams of research – “Hypermedia and Virtual Reality threads” adapting the content to the user, and presenting overlays on maps etc. The appearance of PDA’s so personalisation becoming more content aware, with plug in GPS units, but the difficulty of tracking people indoors led to experiments in motion sensing, Petrelli herself was involved in Hyperaudio, wherein “standing for a long time in front of an exhibit indicated interest while leaving before the audio presentation was over was considered as displaying the opposite attitude” (I might need to dig that 2005 paper out, and 1999 paper on HIPS).

There is also an excellent section on the methodologies used for representing information, modelling the user, and matching users and content. When it talks about information for example, it suggests different Hypermedia methodologies, including:

• “A simple list of objects representing the exhibition as “visit paths” (Kubadji (Bohnert et al., 2008));
• Text descriptions and “bag of words” representations of the exhibits on display9 (Kubadji and PIL);
• “Bag of concepts” representations generated by natural language processing techniques to support a concept-based item classification (CHAT (de Gemmis et al., 2008)); and
• Collection-specific ontologies for the multi-classification of artworks, such as location and culture, and multi-faceted search (Delphi toolkit (Schmitz and Black, 2008))”

The paper also articulates the challenges to heritage institutions wanting to personalise their user experience, including a plethora of technologies and not standards yet reaching critical mass. Tracking users outside (before and after) their heritage experience is another challenge – membership organisations like the National Trust have a distinct advantage in this regard, but have spend most of the decade since this paper was written getting there. Of course heritage visits are made as part fo a group, more than by individuals, and personalisation by definition is about individuals – yet in most of the projects in this survey, the social aspect was not considered. The paper also acknowledges that most of these projects have involved screen based hypermedia while augmented reality and and physical interaction technologies have developed alongside.

Evaluation is a challenge too. In a section on evaluation which I only wish I had read before my project, the paper foreshadows the all the difficulties I encountered. But also says “a good personalization should go unnoticed by the user who becomes aware of it only when something goes wrong.” (p 25) It is reassuring too that the paper concludes “the real issue is to support realistic scenarios – real visitors and users, as individuals and groups in daily interactions with cultural heritage. It is time to collaborate more closely with cultural heritage researchers and institutions” (p27) which is (kind of) what I did. I had better quote that in my corrections and make it look as though I was inspired by this paper all along 🙂.

Back, for a while at least

Woah! It’s been over a year since I last post anything on here. I return because later today is my viva voce, wherein I “defend my thesis.” Yes, that’s why I have been silent on here, I have been hammering my thesis into a shape that I am not ashamed of, reading it, proofing it, getting others to read it and proof it (and yet, yes, there are still typos) and submitting.

For the last couple of weeks, in preparation for tomorrow, I have been re-reading the thesis, meeting (virtually) with my supervisor and recruiting an old friend and academic Jane Malcolm-Davies to read it and to give me a practice viva, last week. Reading it is hard though – after a year of writing and re-writing, the words flow through me like a purge barely touching the sides. And all I take note of are the things I might have done better. The practice viva was a very useful experience though, and so I thought I might give myself another “practice” by writing this post.

What brought me back to the blog was recognising a sentence that had survived from one of my earliest posts, though eight years of other work and re-writes and edits. This blog was a useful way of processing my reading and other research as I was going it. It wasn’t what I needed though when I was rewriting the words that might have started on this site. And as this is the last chance to read my own thesis for the viva, I thought I might process it with a blog post in a similar way, hopefully anticipating some of the questions

Who is my audience?

One question Jane asked me about the thesis was “who are you writing this for?” And it’s a good question. It gave me pause to think. But I think the answer is I writ it for myself, and for people like me, heritage professionals who want to explore what digital interventions might be like, and who don’t want to be reliant on digital suppliers to tell heritage organisations what they need.

When I started this, eight years ago, I came into it with a truly open mind. My question really was “what can I and my fellow heritage professionals learn from games about storytelling in space?” I had no agenda, no thesis I wanted to test and, importantly no real experience in computer games. I guess I saw computer games as competition for my sector. Not financially speaking really (we are no completion for that global behemoth of games production); but for share of mind or… actually share of mind. I often tell the anecdote of a colleague who came to me saying that a game had made him cry the night before. At the time our organisation were trying to improve “emotional impact”, and as someone who had spurned computer games in my teens because they didn’t engage my emotions. I was intrigued, at the time my organisation was very interested it what we called emotional impact. If computer games could make my friend and colleague cry, perhaps we could learn something from them about storytelling.

So I didn’t apply for the PhD with any sort of hypothesis in mind. This was possibly a mistake, but I genuinely wanted to work out how games (and I should say “open world games”) that let the player wonder around an environment, manipulated emotion.

How did my research change?

When I started out, if I had any defined ambition at all, it might have been to create an application that tuned a heritage visit into some sort of investigative game. And I think I was definitely imagining the mobile device as the conduit of communication between place and person. Two bits of my research changed that ambition, neither of which fit into the main narrative of the thesis but were I feel worthy of including in an appendix, if only to explain why that wasn’t a route I was following.

What was a surprise to me, was during the “reading” of the three games I played, the realisation of just how poor heritage storytelling is. Note I say storytelling here specifically. It can be argued that “heritage interpretation” isn’t “storytelling,” but such an argument is broadly incompatible with a desire to engage visitors emotionally. This became research in practice with two aims: the first to see if heritage interpretation narratives could be broken down into natoms (narrative atoms), stored and reassembled to satisfy visitor’s needs; and secondly to explore how they might be put together in an emotionally engaging way.

What would I have done differently?

With the benefit of hindsight, of course I would have concentrated on this narrative conundrum from the beginning, but even arriving at the conundrum was, for me, a damascene revelation. As a professional interpreter who has been confidently telling stories in the sector for decades, realising that I might have been telling the “wrong” stories.

But practical things I would have done differently – it was only in the latter stages that I realised what useful tool Robin Laws’s story beats and transition analysis was. I wish I had found it earlier and used it to analyse at least parts of the three computer games I read.

Speaking of things I wish I had found earlier. When I was scouting around in the early stages for a “narrative database” I could easily use, the meSch project, which is written specifically for curators and heritage professionals, was only just starting. In the end I used Scalar which is written for academics, but not for the heritage environment. But had meSch been around it would have been a perfect platform to experiment with

One other thing that might fit as an answer to this question is, had I switched to my current supervision team earlier in my research I could easily have been persuaded to drop the narrative track entirely and focus instead on music and sound – where there is simply not enough research on its use in the heritage environment.

Challenges

Focussing on the academic challenges, the subject of cultural heritage interpretation overlaps so many academic disciplines that even producing a literature review was really hard. And then, pushing the work forward, I felt all the time I was falling between two stools – science and humanities. For example, exploring affect outside of the psychology, and databases outside of computing, but at the same time wanting to write something that could be understood, and taken forward, by both museum professionals and data engineers.

Where do I take this?

In the conclusion I detail a number of potential paths for further research. The one that I am most interested in professionally if further understanding, and potentially measuring, numen. I think this concept is closer to what museums and heritage sites really mean, when they talk about emotional engagement. But defining in properly and working out ways to measure it, will take a lot of work.

I am also excited by meSch – a tool written for professionals just like me. And I would love to take it for a spin on a future project, creating adaptive, personalised stories for visitors. But not just “visitors.”

I say that because my research was based very much around making the experience of people in places better, talking about responsive environments better meeting visitors’ needs. I deliberately eschewed virtual experiences, except when I first prototyped an adaptive story for the then closed Clandon Park. But in the last few months visiting places physically has been restricted. And its made me realise that the paradigm shift in story telling that I have advised for responsive environments might just as easily be applied to virtual visits. Despite being only a prototype, the Clandon experience was more satisfying for me as a creator, for reasons I explain in chapter 4. Perhaps there is be a chance, a need even, to create new personalised adaptive event numerous stories on-line.

Well that’s all the time I have. My via starts in 30 seconds

wish me luck

Mobile devices in heritage, why not?

Ages ago I surveyed people about mobile gaming and heritage. The results were not encouraging for my thesis, because interest in mobile gaming seemed low. Just under 200 people completed the survey, and most of them had at least heard of Minecraft (just 5% had not). But when asked about the most popular location-based game at the time, Ingress, the vast majority, 178 people (81.3%) hadn’t even heard of it.

Since then of course Pokemon Go happened. It’s by the same company as Ingress, and build on their limited success with that game by adding a globally recognised brand. So I wanted to see how much it had increased awareness of location based mobile gaming. I opened a second, shorter internet survey. Initially the results looked good. Awareness of Pokemon Go pretty much matched Minecraft. Just 2.5% of respondents were unaware of it. compared with 2.4% who were unaware of Minecraft.

There is some evidence that people are more aware of location based games in general. Only 64.6% of respondents were unaware of Ingress. In the both surveys I also asked about Zombies Run!, a mobile game which while not strictly location based, does involve taking your mobile device outside to track you as you move. In the earlier survey, 63.6% were unaware of it. By the second survey that proportion had reduced to 45.1%. So, though I had discounted further developing a location based game for cultural interpretation after the first survey, growing interest in location based games may make it a more fruitful avenue to explore in the future.

There is a another barrier to consider however. I have mentioned a perceived reluctance to use apps and the internet on mobile devices in previous posts. But I haven’t found much research on why people don’t seem to like using their phones. This second survey offered an ideal opportunity to actually ask that question.

Well, not just that question. I asked a few more. I started off asking which ways of learning about the site they used. I offered a list:

• Just looking at stuff
• Reading labels panels or gallery fact-sheets
• Reading a guidebook
• Talking to a guide, docent or interpreter
• Talking with the people who came with you
• Joining a tour (led by a guide)
• Using an audio-guide or multimedia guide
• Using an app on a mobile device
• Using the internet on a mobile device

People could choose as many as they wanted. What I particularly wanted to know was which ones they did not pick. So in order of preference, it turns out that the most popular interpretive media are

1. Reading labels, panels or gallery fact-sheets (16% did NOT tick this)
2. Just looking at stuff (28%)
3. Talking with the people who came with you (47%)
4. Joining a tour (led by a guide) (61%)
5. Using an audio-guide or multimedia guide (62%) and Reading a guidebook (62%)
6. Talking to a guide, docent or interpreter (64%)
7. Using the internet on a mobile device (74%)
8. Using an app on a mobile device (78%)

It’s worth pointing out that some people use mobile devices for apps but not the internet, and vice versa, but still, only 11% use mobile devices for either one or both. That said, 11% is about twice as many as as we have observed in the National Trust, and about twice as many as has been identified in other data. This might be a systemic bias of collecting data in an online survey. I would like to try and ask a similar question on site. Partly because it’s thrown up some interesting results – I imagined that talking to guides, docent or interpreters might be more popular than taking a guided tour, but actually it turns out that taking a tour it more popular than conversation.

The sample for these questions is only 85, so its not particularly robust. But actually this question was a preamble to supplementary questions asking for qualitative rather that quantitative data. Respondents who said they did not use mobile devices were asked simply “What are the reasons why you prefer not to use an app on your mobile device?” and/or “What are the reasons why you prefer not to use the internet on your mobile device when visiting heritage sites?” each with a free text field. Some replies were just one simple short statement. Others gave multiple reasons. Analyzing all the responses, I first defined twelve categories of statement. Each reply scored one in each category to which it referred. In order the twelve categories are:

1. Presence – for example “Want to be present in the place.” or “Detracts from looking at the exhibits and the moment” (33)
2. Data/signal/battery limits – for example “Not always got data/coverage.” (32)
3. One-use apps – for example “I have limited memory on my phone, and don’t want to install apps that I’ll only use temporarily” (10)
4. Pre/post-reading – for example “I do normally read and research about the subject beforehand at home (computer, books…), so I don´t need to use such apps.” (6)
5. Tech lack – for example “I don’t have that sort of phone” (6)
6. Tech break – for example “I regard tech’ as a work tool so don’t engage with it for fun.” (5)
7. Analogue experience preference – for example “I prefer my interaction with heritage to be unmediated by tech!” (5)
8. Competence – for example “Do not know how to” (4)
9. Social preference – for example “I generally visit with my family so want to explore with them and feel that using an app could be an experience that potentially minimises our interaction.” (4)
10. Conversation preference – for example “I like to talk to real people and enjoy their enthusiasm” (4)
11. Focus – for example “Too many other distractions with an open internet.” (1)
12. Hassle – the simple statement “Too much hassle” (1)

So, regular readers will guess I might be expecting the presence category to be the overwhelming reason why people didn’t use mobile on site. As so it proves to be, but only just. I wasn’t expecting data/signal/battery limits to be an almost as big (and given the limited sample size – possibly bigger) objection to using mobile devices. The reluctance to download apps with limited or one-time use has been documented elsewhere, but given that 74% of my sample said they didn’t use the internet on their mobile devices when on site, a web-based on-site solution still doesn’t look like an attractive investment proposition. Web-based pre- and post- reading however seems like a reasonably strong impulse among an minority of visitors. As long as web content is made responsive, and easy to look at on small screen, it may help migrate users to on-site use as data/signal/battery issues are resolved (though I note that the latest generation of phones at the end of 2018 seem to have short battery life than their predecessors).

Please take this very short survey

The problem with doing a PhD part-time is that trends change more quickly than my research. It doesn’t mean that my research has been overtaken, but questions I asked three or four years ago might have very different answers.

To that end I have a very short survey I’d like to you do two things with. First of all, answer it yourselves, and secondly, share the link with as many people (over 16) as you can.

https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/24912

It really won’t take even five minutes to completeime. **Edit 22 Sept: so far the average to complete the survey is three minutes, fifty seconds.** Thank you in advance for your participation.

Writing participant information for Ethics approval

Today I’m trying to finish all the documentation I need to Ethics Committee approval for the Chawton Untours. Right now, I’m looking in particular at the information sheet I’ll give participants before they agree to be part of the experiment. Looking at and writing all this over and over again mains me sort of “sense-blind”, and so though I think this is all written in plain English and is understandable to the man on the street, I’m not sure. So I thought I’d share it here. If there’s anything you think doesn’t make sense, drop me a line in the comments, please:

Participant Information Sheet

Study title: Responsive Heritage Narratives

 

[There’s a bunch of reference number stuff which I won’t bother blog readers with]

Your participant number: _______

Please read this information carefully before deciding to take part in this research. If you are happy to participate you will be asked to sign a consent form.

What is the research about?

For my PhD I’m researching how museums and heritage sites might be able to give every visitor an experience better tailored towards their needs, rather than the “one-size-fits-all” experience offered by guidebooks and exhibitions and even the current generation of interactive guides and apps.

Why have I been chosen?

As a visitor to Chawton you represent the sort of person that might visit any museum, historic house or other heritage site. This research does not involve people under sixteen.

What will happen to me if I take part?

You will participate in an “Untour”. You are free to wander around the house as you might when visiting any historic site. The difference is that you/your group) will be followed by an “Unguide” who, in each location where you pause, will trigger some storytelling. The Unguide may show you something to read, read something out to you, or remotely activate lights, sounds that will help tell the story of the place. The Unguide is not a tour guide, and will not tell you where to go next or what to look at. You are in control. You may ask the Unguide questions, but the Unguide may not be able to answer all of them. The Untour should take no longer than 40 minutes.

The Unguide will keep a note of your interests and behaviours throughout the Untour and you may be filmed. Any video will be confidential, anonymously analysed and deleted. At the end of the Untour you will also be asked to complete a confidential, anonymous survey.

Are there any benefits in my taking part?

I hope you will learn something about the house and library here at Chawton. The experiment will tell you a story about the place which, though composed of historical facts, will be unique: tailored to your interests, and not quite the same as any other group’s.

Are there any risks involved?

There are no risks beyond those of an everyday visit to a historic house.

Will my participation be confidential?

Your Untour will necessarily take place when Chawton is open to the public, and other people, not least other participants taking their own Untours, will be able to see that you are participating. But we don’t need your name, address or other identifying information (except on the consent form). You will have a participant number, which we will use to anonymously link the Unguide’s notes, your questionnaire responses and any video evidence. All data will be kept confidentially on secure servers university servers, and deleted when the research is completed.

What happens if I change my mind?

You can end the Untour at any point. If, after the event, you decide you do not wish the evidence gathered during your Untour to be used in the analysis you can contact me (by email: [address]) quoting your participant number. I will delete/destroy any associated notes, forms, or recordings and inform you when I have done so.

What happens if something goes wrong?

In the unlikely case of concern or complaint, you should contact the Chair of the Faculty Ethics Committee [contact details]

Where can I get more information?

If you want to know more you can contact me direct at [email], or if you would like to read more about the background to my research, visit my blog http://www.memetechnology.org

 

 

 

Mind Control and responsive narrative

Among the mince pies and over-cooked turkey over Christmas, I managed to find a little time to read an interesting paper. #Scanners: Exploring the Control of Adaptive Films using Brain-Computer Interaction shows once again, that the cool people are all at the University of Nottingham. What these particular four cool guys did was put a mini cinema in an old caravan. But this particular cinema wasn’t showing an ordinary film. Rather, the “film was created with four parallel channels of footage, where blinking and levels of attention and meditation, as recorded by a commercially available EEG device, affected which footage participants saw.”

Building on research in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) the team worked with an artist to create a filmed narrative that “ran for 16 minutes, progressing through 18 scenes. However, each scene was filmed as four distinct layers, two showing different views of the central protagonist’s external Reality and the other two showing different views of their internal dream-world.” Which layers each viewer saw was selected by the EEG device, for rather by the viewers’ blinks and states of “attention” or “meditation” as recorded by the device. The authors admit to some skepticism from the research community about the accuracy of the device in question, but that was not what as being tested here. Rather, they were interested in the viewers’ awareness of the ability to control the narrative, and their reaction to that awareness.

I was interested in the paper for two reasons. First of all, their conclusions touch upon an observation I made very early in in my own research, looking at Ghosts in the Garden, I got a small number (therefore not a very robust sample) of users of that interactive narrative to fill out a short questionnaire, and I was surprised by the number of respondents who were not aware that they could control (were controlling) the story through the choices they made. The #Scanners team noticed a similar variation in awareness, but more than that, they found that “while the BCI based adaptation made the experience more immersive for many viewers, thinking about control often brought them out of the experience.”

They conclude that “a traditional belief in HCI is that Direct Manipulation (being able to control exactly what you want to control) sits at the top of both these dimensions. We examined, however, how users deviate from line, and enjoyed the experience more by either not knowing exactly how it worked, or by giving up control and becoming re-immersed in the experience. […] these deviations from the line between knowledge and conscious control over interaction are most interesting design opportunities to explore within future BCI adaptive multimedia experiences.”

With which, I think I agree.

The other reason the paper interests me is that they described their research as “Performance-Led Research in the Wild” and pointed me towards another paper to read.

Ethics approval – a word to the wise

I’m doing my ERGO application today. That’s the University’s Ethics risk and approval system, and they’ve worked hard to make it as simple as possible, but it does take time. And so its time to pass on a useful tip to those starting out on their PhD studies. This is the third approval I will have got (and I’m pretty sure to get it, its low risk ethics-wise), during my time here. I made the mistake of applying for each bit of research that I wanted to do separately, with a relatively short expiry time. Once for some on-line data collection, the results of which which will feature in my thesis. Once for some recorded oral interviews which didn’t really get anywhere, and which probably won’t feature in the end.

But what I should have done is apply for the whole of my research, at the beginning, and set the expiry date for when I expected to finish my PhD. I didn’t realize that I time that I could do so, but as I go through the risk assessment for the third time, I realise that I’m ticking pretty much the same boxes each time. I guess I might have thought, back then, that the nature of my research could drastically change, based on what I had learned in the early years, but it hasn’t. And even if it had, I bet its easier to update the one approval that to do (as I have) three.

Update: Though, when I get to the question “Does the research involve working with: […] Class 3B or 4 lasers?” I’m disappointed that, apart from the “Yes” and “No” options, there isn’t also “I wish!”