Exploring experimental cultural heritage interfaces that use semantics

Europeana

I will start the exploration having two clear goals in mind; first, to find artworks and posters related to dutch typography, second, I am looking for Japanese art. I typed dutch typography, I got no results. Then, I typed "typography" and five options appeared; "typography crafts", "typography printing","typography", "typographic processes and techniques", "typography image making processes" .The first four gave no results. I clicked the last one, I got one result. I am wondering, is there any need to show all the different concepts related to typography if some of them have one result or no results? Why not show all the results together and make distinctions between concepts only if there are many results for each of them?


 The user has of course, the opportunity to type "typography" and then in case he doesn't select any of the appearing concepts but clicks on "search", all the results related to "typography" appear. Else, in case he selects a concept, only the results related to this concept appear. I would like to see next to each concept that it appears under my query  the number of artworks that belong to it. While clicking on each result and finding almost nothing (one or two results), I had every time to go back and type "typography" again. I would like to be able to right click on the button search and have the results of every different search in a different tab.

My second goal is to find some japanese artworks. Knowing that the search engine of europeana doesn't work like google, I type "japanese" and I wait. Several concepts, events and artefacts appear. Some ontologies are not clear; what is the difference between the two concepts Japanese and Japanese  Japan? It is seems that these ontologies make sense for a computer, but not for the user! There's an option next to the concepts related to Japanese to see all results. I click and all the concepts about japanese appear, while I was expecting pictures. A click on the first concept, "Japanese", that seems the most general. The rest have a descriptive term in grey font under the word "Japanese" but the first one has nothing. I assume that it has all the results realted to japanese. 55 results appear, the only problem is that pictures don't load (i tried it both with firefox 3.6 and google chrome).After trying out several concepts, I click on another concept, "japanese painting styles", some results appear, some never load.

Clicking on one result, I can see some details and an option " original page". Clicking on it I am transferred on a page  in dutch.

Overall, I think that this site, although it might be directly linked to cultural heritage, it cannot offer in the average user more information than google. We are all so used in writing queries to search engines like what-movie-should-I-see-today-that-the-weather-is-bad that we can not accept a search engine that will not allow us any freedom in how the query is formed. I mean, that having a search button in this case is frustrating, because the search engine in europeana is not like the search engines we know. So it would be much better in my opinion, to replace search engine with a tag cloud, where the user will be able to select some concepts that he likes, also according to the results that are available for each of them. This tag-cloud could be enriched by indicative images and could be mapped in space, according to the relationships between the ontologies (concepts that are close will be placed close, like art nouveau and Gustav Klimt). In any case, there should be some information about how many results are available for each ontology, otherwise the user looses his time with fruitless queries. Also, the information given for each painting should create immersion; or some narrative paragraph would be preferred from plain details.

CHIP

The first thing that the user is asked to do is to rate a number of paintings. That feature belongs to a tab called ART RECOMMENDER. In my opinion, that is frustrating, because the appreciation and the feelings that can emerge from the observation of a painting can not be measured or rated and that is why people don't usually rate or compare paintings.  In my opinion, a "like" button would be enough to convey if the user liked the painting or not.

Apart from rating paintings, the user can also include a painting in his customised tour. A customised personal tour can be created in the second tab, RIJKS TOURGUIDE, where there is also available a recommended tour with recommended artworks.The tour includes the map of the museum and the rooms in which some of the paintings the user has chosen are located.On the right, there is a list of the artworks that have been chosen by the user and with a click the user can see information for each of them.

I think that this element, the customised tour, is useful if the user has planned a visit to the museum or for expert users, e.g art historians, who might visit the museum often and want to get information from particular paintings. A functionality that is missing though, is a print out with all the paintings, the descriptions and the map needed for a visit to a museum, generated automatically from each customized tour.


I then entered my profile to see that all the topics and the paintings I have selected were there. When I clicked on one of the topics I liked, a window appeared showing some paintings that belonged to the topic. It was frustrating though, the fact that the topic I was looking was one of my chosen topics, yet the paintings  of this topic did not belong automatically to my tour and I had to add them manually.

I think in general, that the design is really poor and not immersive, but this is of course, because it is still in experimental phase.I think that the rating with the stars is redudant and useless, because the rating is difficult for the users and takes some time to think about it and second it fills the screen with stars next to each description.In my opinion, there should be in every case a "I like" button. Moreover, since it's all about visual art, there should be some visual description of the topics together with the text-based one. Finally, every time the user enters the site the same paintings appear for rating. A personalised page, presenting paintings that are unknown  or unrated to the user each time he enters would be more fascinating and immersive.


E-Culture demo


While searching for "dutch typography", I noticed that europeana and E-Culture demo worked in the same way, as they are both powered by the same semantic search web-server. I searched for "art nouveau", and I saw that almost the same results appear in both sites. Clicking on the thumbnails of the artworks, more details are shown in the same way as in europeana.


So,  the problems that I mentioned before for europeana are all applicable in this case. I would only like to point out that the list of concepts related to the keyword which I entered should change. The user is often mislead to click on one of the concepts -because they appear right after he types the keyword - and he often ends up to an empty page. So the user should be encouraged to click on the search button and if there are many results which belong to different concepts, that can be obvious after clicking the search button. 


Also the name of the concepts related with each keyword are sometimes frustrating and they are often repeated. Typing Rembrandt, I found two concepts named "Rembrandt" in the  category "other"and one in the category "concept". Moreover, I think that the results should be presented in a more inviting way, for example like the one we suggested in "the tree of art".

Information structure analysis on cultural heritage sites

the Rijksmuseum collection


This link leads to a webpage with the title "Explore1000 major exhibits", that is part of the website of the Rijksmuseum Collection. Very soon after landing on the webpage, I found out that there is a lot of information and a lot of links to explore as well as a variety of templates and structures in which this information is presented. The main site has a central part of links, accompanied by pictures, an attractive banner and a set of boxes on the right, dedicated to the products and current exhibitions of the museum.The consistency between the webpages of the same site is "preserved" by a left vertical bar, the menu of each webpage. This bar remains in every webpage, yet it changes colors; "search" and "research" have a light blue bar -instead of khaki - and that gives me the impression that I am behind the curtains of the museum, backstage, together with the re-searchers. A set of three thin vertical stripes from paintings, is also a feature that keeps the consistency but it is forgotten in some of the webpages. 
From the central part of links of the site, I click on the Masterpieces. Then I click on Johannes Vermeer, and tadan.... a room of the museum, ready for me to explore! But no, I'm not impressed. First,  you can not zoom in close to the paintings, as you could do in real life, you can see them all from a distance and from an angle, like if you were in the middle of the museum (i have to admit that from this position you can see pretty well the rug though). Second, the room itself, is of little interest, when you are not there, to make your own path and explore in your own way; the space, the paintings and their relationship with the space and their other paintings.


europeana


At a first glance, it doesn't look like a cultural heritage site ; a big "e"  in bright colors on the left, an interactive banner in the center and some tabs that hopefully will be more informative about europeana. Clicking in the first "My europeana", you see two options: login or register. No explanation or reasons to do so are provided. Clicking in the second tab "About us", I finally found out that europeana is a digital library. Clicking on the third tab, "communities" and then on art nouveau community,  some flickr and facebook groups appear! It is obvious that it is a brand new site under development, without much content. And I still didn't get the concept of it. Then I decide to go back to the banner, where I click on Art Nouveau,  hoping to see some paintings, or even better, a documentary, or some other interactive material. And the result is rewarding! the huge "e" shrinks and moves to the upper left corner, and there is a nice organized in categories exhibition of art nouveau and a link that leads to  europeana library.


Louvre


In order to be able to compare and make connections between the information available in all three sites, I clicked directly on "Collection". The site features on the top a number of tabs and on the left, a vertical bar with the target groups according to the age or profession: teachers,  professionals, families, under 30's etc. The collection is organized in Curatorial Departments. I click on Prints and Drawings: lots of text in small font, some not so impressive pictures. And then I feel lost, until I notice the left bar, where it is written in even smaller font that I am in the introduction. So I move on to the next section, called "selected works".I am also not impressed. Very very small pictures of the artworks, accompanied by a huge text in small usual font and white background. Nothing artistic or cultural about it. I guess if I was a historian of art, I would be really interested in details and the history around it, but as a average user, I am interested in the experience of the museum; in the narration of the story behind the text, in the beauty of the painting itself and in the "museum" experience.




My questions about art can not be answered from any of those sites, but maybe from the combination of them.
How has the color pallette of the paintings been influenced by eras, geographical locations, painters and art movements?
How has the subject of the paintings been influenced by beliefs, religion, geographical locations,eras?
Symbols; pigeons, olives, flowers, forests, fountains. What do they mean? In which paintings are found? How they became symbols?