ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

In this paper, we examine how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. More specifically, we explore the following aspects: (a) how social media sites can be integrated into the museum user experience (b) how user interactions within the social media, both within the context of the museum experience and outside it, can be exploited to enhance the quality of recommendations made to the users, (c) how trending topics from social media can be used to link museum exhibits with today’s topics of interest and (d) how multi-level related terms extraction from social media data can lead to proposals for reflections to users. The end goal is to provide increased stimuli for users to study exhibits deeper and reflect on them, as well as to trigger discussion between the users, thus maximizing the impact of a museum visit.

Citation: Vassilakis, C., Antoniou, A., Lepouras, G. et al. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2017) 7: 40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-017-0460-3

Museum exhibitions are designed to tell a story; this story is woven by curators and in its context a particular aspect of each exhibit, fitting to the message that the story is intended to convey, is highlighted. Adding new exhibits to the story requires curators to identify for each exhibit its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. The availability of rich semantic information for exhibits, allows for exploiting the wealth of meanings that museum exhibits express, enabling the automated or semi-automated generation of practically countless stories that can be told. Personalization algorithms can then be employed to choose from these stories the ones most suitable for each individual user, based on the semantics of the stories and information within the user profile. In this work we examine how opportunities arising from technological advances in the fields of IoT and semantics can be used to develop smart, self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. These notions are included in the design of a system named exhiSTORY, which also exploits previously ignored information and identifies previously unseen semantic links. We present the architecture of the system and discuss its application potential.

Citation: Costas Vassilakis, Vassilis Poulopoulos, Angeliki Antoniou, Manolis Wallace, George Lepouras, Martin Lopez Nores,
exhiSTORY: Smart exhibits that tell their own stories, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 81, 2018, Pages 542-556, ISSN 0167-739X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.10.038.

Social media usage is affecting peoples’ views through opinion sharing, a fact that has started to attract cultural institutions, as it is possible that this procedure can possibly be a part of a museum experience. As the main goal of a cultural institution is the maximization of senses stimulation, the device that is offered to the visitors’ hands everyday and every moment, becomes an important tool for the art spaces. In this notion we perform research on issues that can be of great importance for the museum’s online presence and attraction. We focus on establishing the personality of influencers related to culture, as well as the characteristics of qualitative discussions on the social media. Crosscult Project is an EU funded project, that aims to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise History, and sets that basis of our research as the experiments are conducted within its scope of. Through the experimental procedure, we collect information in order to define the character of the influencer and the substances of a “serious” conversation. “Serious” conversations are regarded the ones in which a cultural organization can participate actively and benefit from the participation. We present the results of our experimental evaluation and analyze how cultural institutions can benefit from the outcomes of our research.

Citation: Poulopoulos, V.; Vassilakis, C.; Antoniou, A.; Lepouras, G.; Theodoropoulos, A.; Wallace, M. The Personality of the Influencers, the Characteristics of Qualitative Discussions and Their Analysis for Recommendations to Cultural Institutions. Heritage 2018, 1, 239-253.